Top 100 Quotes About Marcel Duchamp
#1. Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one - quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today.
Roger Scruton
#2. Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp
Andrew O'Hagan
#3. Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum.
The second person to install a urinal wasn't an artist, he was a plumber.
Seth Godin
#4. And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to a movement for each person and open for everybody.
Willem De Kooning
#5. The second time I was there I met Marcel Duchamp, and we immediately fell for each other. Which doesn't mean a thing because I think anybody who met Marcel fell for him.
Beatrice Wood
#7. Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.
Jerry Saltz
#8. Marcel Duchamp said, "I don't believe in art. I believe in artists." This is actually a pretty good method for studying - if you try to devour the history of your discipline all at once, you'll choke.
Austin Kleon
#10. Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally.
Marcel Duchamp
#11. Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about.
Marcel Duchamp
#12. In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.
Marcel Duchamp
#13. Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.
Marcel Duchamp
#15. Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.
Marcel Duchamp
#16. I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist.
Marcel Duchamp
#17. I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do ...
Marcel Duchamp
#18. I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.
Marcel Duchamp
#19. You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)
Marcel Duchamp
#20. When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.
Marcel Duchamp
#21. The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp
#22. It is a matter of great indifference to me what criticism is printed in the papers and the magazines. I am simply working out my own ideas in my own way.
Marcel Duchamp
#23. If a shadow is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four-dimensional Universe.
Marcel Duchamp
#24. I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.
Marcel Duchamp
#25. A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves. It's a drawing; it's a mechanical reality.
Marcel Duchamp
#26. Words are the tools of 'to be' - of expression. They are completely built on the fact that you 'are,' and in order to express it, you have built a little alphabet, and you make your words from it.
Marcel Duchamp
#27. Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.
Marcel Duchamp
#28. From a purely ethnological point of view, I was not a period-born Dada.
Marcel Duchamp
#31. If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.
Marcel Duchamp
#32. I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered.
Marcel Duchamp
#33. Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.
Marcel Duchamp
#34. I like living, breathing better than working ... my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.
Marcel Duchamp
#35. Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.
Marcel Duchamp
#36. To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.
Marcel Duchamp
#37. Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?
Marcel Duchamp
#38. The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.
Marcel Duchamp
#39. I'm nothing else but an artist, I'm sure, and delighted to be.
Marcel Duchamp
#40. Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.
Marcel Duchamp
#41. All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much.
Marcel Duchamp
#42. Duchamp had taken art to its logical conclusion.
Every act of perception is art.
So everything that perceives is an artist.
Chris F. Westbury
#43. Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.
Marcel Duchamp
#44. I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me.'
Marcel Duchamp
#45. The 'Glass' is not my autobiography, nor is it self-expression. Far from it.
Marcel Duchamp
#46. I wanted to kill art for myself ... ... a new thought for that object.
Marcel Duchamp
#47. When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.
Marcel Duchamp
#48. I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.
Marcel Duchamp
#49. My position is the lack of a position, but, of course, you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk, you spoil the whole game.
Marcel Duchamp
#50. In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society
Marcel Duchamp
#51. I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Marcel Duchamp
#52. In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn.
Marcel Duchamp
#53. This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life.
Marcel Duchamp
#54. I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say.
Marcel Duchamp
#55. I am against the word 'anti' because it's a little bit like 'atheist,' as compared to 'believer.' And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is.
Marcel Duchamp
#56. There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.
Marcel Duchamp
#57. In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.
Marcel Duchamp
#58. Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.
Marcel Duchamp
#60. I shy away from the word 'creation.' In the ordinary, social meaning of the word - well, it's very nice, but fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other.
Marcel Duchamp
#61. It's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.
Marcel Duchamp
#62. Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.
Marcel Duchamp
#63. What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.
Marcel Duchamp
#65. Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.
Marcel Duchamp
#66. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.
Marcel Duchamp
#68. 'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.
Marcel Duchamp
#69. I really had no program or any established plan. I didn't even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not.
Marcel Duchamp
#71. Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.
Marcel Duchamp
#72. You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.
Marcel Duchamp
#73. My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the 'objet trouve' because the so-called 'found object' is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique.
Marcel Duchamp
#74. I am afraid to end up being in need to sell canvases - in other words, to be a society painter.
Marcel Duchamp
#75. When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much.
Marcel Duchamp
#76. The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.
Marcel Duchamp
#77. All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.
Marcel Duchamp
#78. I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.
Marcel Duchamp
#79. Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.
Marcel Duchamp
#80. Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage.
Marcel Duchamp
#82. In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote in advance of the broken arm .
Marcel Duchamp
#83. The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.
Marcel Duchamp
#84. Words such as truth, art, veracity, or anything are stupid in themselves.
Marcel Duchamp
#85. I consider painting as a means of expression, not as a goal.
Marcel Duchamp
#86. All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.
Marcel Duchamp
#87. I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.
Marcel Duchamp
#88. The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.
Marcel Duchamp
#89. The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it.
Marcel Duchamp
#90. Humor and laughter - not necessarily derogatory derision - are my pet tools. This may come from my general philosophy of never taking the world too seriously - for fear of dying of boredom.
Marcel Duchamp
#91. The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero.
Marcel Duchamp
#92. I'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work.
Marcel Duchamp
#93. I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.
Marcel Duchamp
#94. Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.
Marcel Duchamp
#95. Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.
Marcel Duchamp
#96. The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.
Marcel Duchamp
#97. I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished.
Marcel Duchamp
#98. I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don't do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years.
Marcel Duchamp
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