"It’s very difficult to choose an object, because, at the end of fifteen days, you begin to like it or hate it... The choice of the readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste." Marcel Duchamp, in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett. New York: Da Capo Press, 1987, p. 48. Whereas the disavowal of all accepted modes and conventions was a primary goal of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and other artists of the Dada group during the teens and early 1920s, they also had a fascination with the most ordinary objects, particularly those that were utilitarian and mass-produced. Man Ray’s Gift, 1921 (seen here in a later version made by the artist in around 1958), is an ordinary flatiron of the period, but the tacks glued onto it (the artist’s name and a jesting title are also inscribed) absolutely contradict the iron’s function and thus its identity. By this transformative gesture the artist makes the object into a poetic statement. This metamorphosis—from reality to fiction, from concrete subject into an artificial system of meanings—is a central principle of the still life genre.