Around April 2025, I was hunting around for a model to print. We were looking for more ways to engage humanities disciplines in our campus maker space, and one idea was pretty straightforward: print a series that celebrated the history of art and design. If you hang out in the online 3D printing community, you quickly notice it is filled with objects like the Eiffel Tower, Venus of Willendorf, and artist Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog. But you'll also discover that some important works are not well-represented in the 3D printing canon.
For our purposes, I was hunting around for a model of Fountain, a scandalous piece by French-American artist Marcel Duchamp, created in 1917. This infamous spoof of a sculpture is arguably the most influential work of art of the 20th Century, and our art-history series felt incomplete without it. But the pickings were slim; I found only a couple of models representing Fountain, and I wasn't particularly impressed with their quality. So I decided to model it myself.
Little did I realize the rabbit hole I was about to fall into.
Fountain is a Readymade, a particular sculptural expression developed and explored by Duchamp in the period surrounding World War I, and he created several. So when I finished the model for Fountain, I thought an interesting next project might be another Readymade. I figured his first one, Bicycle Wheel, created in 1913, might be an interesting challenge to stretch my model-making capabilities within the realm of 3D printing. Printable spokes? How in the heck could I model that?
 Fountain by R. Mutt, 1917, Alfred Stieglitz, |  Bicycle Wheel, 1964 Galerie Schwarz edition of lost 1913 original, |
So without quite realizing it at the time, I had begun work on a full-blown conceptual art series. Nine months on, this work is now a newborn. It is called Prêt à Faire.
Coinciding with the first major North American retrospective of Duchamp's work in 50 years, my goal is to exhibit Prêt à Faire in my hometown of Philadelphia, which is also home to one of the world's most acclaimed collections of Duchamp's work.
The models in Prêt à Faire are 3D-printable expressions of the complete set of Readymades. At the time of their creation, Duchamp's Readymades disrupted the relationships then current among the artist, the artwork, the museum, and the spectator.
A century later, the proliferation of 3D printing technology, combined with a robust online culture of sharing and remix, has both accelerated and expanded upon that disruption.
Duchamp may have been among the first creators of what new media artist Jon Ippolito calls distributed culture. 3D printing is certainly among its most current manifestations. One attribute Ippolito ascribes to distributed culture is that it frees the making, publishing, and canonization of artwork from the restrictive, monopolizing mediation of a high-culture artworld. It democratizes. Whereas Duchamp’s Readymades democratized art, demonstrating that it isn't so much about the artist's hand as it is the artist's mind, 3D printing aims to democratize the act of making. The creation of Prêt à Faire brings these democratizing impulses full circle.
With the Readymade strategy, the idea becomes the art, and the art object is no longer a precious relic meant only to be seen, never touched. Duchamp was indifferent to what he called “retinal” art. So he wanted the spectator to engage haptically with the work: spin, pick up, turn over, listen to, and encounter tiny details that can only be appreciated through close inspection. As a kinetic sculpture, the Bicycle Wheel invites you to turn it. The title of With Hidden Noise makes no sense until you turn it over in your hands. The lightweight-looking “sugar cubes” in Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Selavy? are not understood until you pick up the cage and discover the unbearable weight of marble: a haptic, non-visual pun.
But just try to get away with any of that in a museum! The Readymades found in museums worldwide are behind glass, guarded, or otherwise untouchable. Print out one of the Prêt à Faire models, and you can interact with the work in the manner in which Duchamp intended. Go ahead and spin the wheel!
Far from being mimetic reproductions of Duchamp's intellectual property, this series is best understood as transformative work, just as Duchamp's positioning of his appropriated Readymades transformed their original meanings. These works position themselves in relation to Duchamp's iconography alongside other artists who have toyed with it throughout contemporary art history: Sturtevant, Sherrie Levine, Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Mike Bidlo, Kathleen Gilje, John Baldessari, Peter Saul, Pablo Echaurren, Carlo Maria Mariani, Ai Weiwei, Ray Beldner, Richard Pettibone, Pamela Joseph, Jonathan Santlofer, Ethan Minsker, Joseph Kosuth, and others.
Some of these artists use Duchamp's iconography as subject…
 Ray Beldner, Peelavie, 2000 |  John Baldassari, Repository, 2002 |
 Saul Melman, Johnny on the Spot, 2003 |  Ai Weiwei, Letgo, 2015 |
… whereas other artists appear to copy Duchamp as object:
 Richard Pettibone, Duchamp Fontaine 1917, 1965 |  Sturtevant, Duchamp fountain, 1973 |
 Sherri Levine, Fountain (Buddha): 5, 1996 |  Mike Bidlo, Fractured Fountain (Not Duchamp Fountain 1917), 2015 |
We might classify the work we see in the latter camp as strict Appropriation Art, which gained popularity during the Postmodern period. So at first glance, the models of Prêt à Faire appear to be mimetic exercises in Post-Appropriation. After all, if so many other artists have already appropriated Duchamp—himself being an appropriationist—doesn't this work seem to be an appropriation of an appropriation of an appropriation?
Perhaps, but I'll argue that this read is superficial. This work may be better understood as an adaptation of style as a medium. The models treat the art of Duchamp much like a musical score, something which is to be performed and reinterpreted by any number of musicians. Far more than mere copies, these models of the Readymades are a study in how art is created, published, distributed, and canonized.
As these artists did, and as Duchamp did before them, I leave it to the spectator — who is now also the maker — of the objects to consider how these works change our perception of the originals. Prêt à faire, a riff on the French term prêt à porter (or ready-to-wear) from the fashion world, should provide a clue: it means ready-to-make.
Duchamp was a consummate conceptualist, and the creation of a Readymade operated not by a rigid recipe, but as a generalized conceptual act involving indifference to beauty, shifting focus from hand-made to mind-made, and disrupting art conventions. Nevertheless, a pattern evolved into something that we might call a set of rules:
Duchamp would freely break from this pattern by modifying an object or combining it with other objects, as seen in Bicycle Wheel, for example.
As with the Readymades, the "rules" for Prêt à Faire evolved as I began to understand this effort as more than just making a model. These emerged as follows:
Of course, there are occasions when I freely break from this pattern; Model of Marcel Duchamp's 50 cc of Paris Air, for example, is resin-printed and heavily post-processed.
Ultimately, Prêt à Faire is an expression of the new reality that 3D printing offers the sculptor. In the past, even when creating editions of work, the making of sculptural works was laboriously centralized in a studio, and supply was either necessarily or strategically limited. Today, those rules have changed: a sculptor can publish and distribute an artwork for anyone to make, much like a musician publishing and distributing a musical score for others to play. This is the key concept that differentiates Prêt à Faire from other appropriationist impulses.
How do I determine which models define Prêt à Faire? According to art historian Kristina Seekamp, there are 14 “core” Readymades. She notes: “Duchamp established these 14 Readymades as his most ‘important’ Readymades when he issued them in 'replicas in editions of eight' through Arturo Schwarz's Galleria Schwarz, Milan in 1964.”
Seekamp classifies 8 of these as "pure" Readymades (unaltered save for a signature and title) and the remaining 6 as “impure” (manipulated by the artist). I have italicized the “pure” Readymades in the chronology below. The links below will take you to each model as published here on Printables, or you can visit the collection here, and the works may also be viewed in a turntable format at p3d:
For my research, to reference editions of these works created over time, I developed a living database of every known version of each Readymade. If you know the location of an edition not on the list, I'd like to hear about it!
Prêt à Faire is a conceptual artwork created by the artist williamCromar and carries a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
You may use Prêt à Faire for any purpose compatible with this license: personal, educational, research, or non-commercial exhibition purposes. The license reserves commercial activity related to this work for the author alone.
When using Prêt à Faire, one should make a clear distinction between this artwork and that of Duchamp. For example, one should not mis-identify a print or model as Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel. Instead, one should identify it as Model of Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel by williamCromar.
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Images of original works NOT by me are NOT covered by my CC license, but are licensed as follows:
My use of these images for commentary, research, and the development of transformative work in this series adheres to common practice for Fair Use under U.S. copyright law.
Hero image: Model of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, printed by williamCromar at 50% scale, 2025
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