Salvador Dalí, Lobster Telephone (1936)
“Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations for Dalí.” So reads a description of this classic Surrealist object on the website of Tate, the museum network in England that owns one of several versions of Lobster Telephone. As Dalí himself wrote about the subject, more than a little strangely: “I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone; I do not understand why champagne is always chilled and why on the other hand telephones, which are habitually so frightfully warm and disagreeably sticky to the touch, are not also put in silver buckets with crushed ice around them.”