The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 87

Bicycle Wheel is Duchamp's first Readymade, a class of artworks that raised fundamental questions about artmaking and, in fact, about art's very definition. This example is actually an "assisted Readymade": a common object (a bicycle wheel) slightly altered, in this case by being mounted upside-down on another common object (a kitchen stool). Duchamp was not the first to kidnap everyday stuff for art; the Cubists had done so in collages, which, however, required aesthetic judgment in the shaping and placing of materials. The Readymade, on the other hand, implied that the production of art need be no more than a matter of selection—of choosing a preexisting object. In radically subverting earlier assumptions about what the artmaking process entailed, this idea had enormous influence on later artists, particularly after the broader dissemination of Duchamp's thought in the 1950s and 1960s.

The components of Bicycle Wheel, being mass-produced, are anonymous, identical or similar to countless others. In addition, the fact that this version of the piece is not the original seems inconsequential, at least in terms of visual experience. (Having lost the original Bicycle Wheel, Duchamp simply remade it almost four decades later.) Duchamp claimed to like the work's appearance, "to feel that the wheel turning was very soothing." Even now, Bicycle Wheel retains an absurdist visual surprise. Its greatest power, however, is as a conceptual proposition.

Anne D'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1973, p. 270

The original Bicycle Wheel was left behind in Paris when Duchamp sailed to New York in 1915. He made a replica for his New York studio around 1916, which later also disappeared.

Duchamp described this work in an interview with Pierre Cabanne:

"...when I put a bicycle wheel on a stool the fork down, there was no idea of a 'readymade,' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything."

And he remarked to Arturo Schwarz:

"To see that wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace."

Three Generations of Twentieth-Century Art: The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1972, p. 48

The Bicycle Wheel was the first of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades and is probably the best known. Although, a year or two earlier, Cubist collage had introduced commonplace materials into art, the Readymades constituted a radical attempt to create anti-art. By the simple act of mounting a wheel on a stool, Duchamp reduced the heroic art-making process to one of mere selection: any mass-produced artifact can become art, in the spectator's view, if it has been chosen and isolated within an art context. "Anything is art if an artist says it is" has become one of the key tenets of twentieth-century art. Duchamp provided generations of artists with the license to choose anything at all—form, subject matter, materials—as art or for art, and the implications of this concept are still being pursued today.

The Bicycle Wheel has also been cited as the first kinetic sculpture. Undoubtedly, such works as Jean Tinguely's irrational assemblages of machine parts are the outcome of its pointless spinning.

Actually, this is an "assisted Readymade," since the wheel has been mounted on another object and therefore "transformed" to a minimal extent, as well as being further denatured by having been turned upside down. It was selected not because of its beauty (though it may seem beautiful today), but because of its total lack of uniqueness. In fact, when the 1913 original was lost, Duchamp in 1916 simply replaced it by another, which in turn was lost. This, the third version, was made in 1951 for the Sidney Janis Gallery's exhibition "Climax in 20th Century Art, 1913." Mr. Janis found the wheel and fork in Paris and brought them back to New York, where the stool was bought and the piece reconstructed by Duchamp. (The signature was added later, in 1959.) Since then, two other versions have been made, for exhibitions in Stockholm, 1961, and London, 1963; and in 1964 the Galleria Schwarz in Milan produced, under the artist's supervision, a multiple in an edition of eight signed and numbered copies.

Lucy Lippard