Lobster Telephone

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Lobster Telephone is a surrealist object, by Salvador Dalí in 1936. Dalí wrote of lobsters and telephones in his book The Secret Life, wherein he demanded to know why, when he asked for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, he was never presented with a telephone.

The piece is a bizarre hybrid of an ordinary telephone and a lobster (made of plaster). It is approximately 15 × 30 × 17 cm (6 × 12 × 6.6 inches) in size.

Dalí created this object with the specific intention of aligning the lobster's genitalia with the end of the phone into which one would speak. Thus, aligning a person's mouth with the lobster's genitalia.

Four copies of the object were made. One now appears at the Tate Modern in London; the second can be found at the German Telephone Museum in Frankfurt; the third belongs to the Edward James Foundation; and the fourth is at the National Gallery of Australia.