Duchamp’s readymade brings into view an overlooked implication of the formalist orientation toward pure form: the possibility, henceforth, of apprehending all objects, including the objects of mass production, as pure form. This happened around the same time that the Futurists were proposing that the acme of modern beauty is the machine. For the Futurists this mostly meant the displacement of traditional subject matter by depictions of force and speed. Duchamp took the decisive step of replacing depiction by appropriation. In so doing, he forced upon “fine” art a confrontation with its own redundancy as source of formal invention. The readymade proves to have the same formal capability as anything labored over in an art studio. The nominative authority of the artist displayed by the readymade is in itself of trivial importance. A greater significance of the readymade is its revelation of the unintended consequences of the modernist fixation on form.