Marcel Duchamp famous quotes

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Believe #Belief

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.
-- Marcel Duchamp

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Order #Taste

Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Imagination #Wish

Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Attention #Art Is

Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Invisible

Not all artists are Chess players, but all Chess players are artists
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Artist #Player #Chess

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

#Art #Creativity #Creative

It is the spectators who make the pictures.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Spectators

Chess is a sport. A violent sport.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Sports #Chess #Violent

The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Block #Design #Alphabet

I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Ideas #Mind #Painting

It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Gaps #Art Is

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Use #Language #Damn Good

I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Done #Shame #Feels

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Shock

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. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Artist #Self #Space

Destruction is also creation.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Creation #Destruction

I was poking fun at myself most of all.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Fun #Artist

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

#Thinking #Years #Ideas

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Creativity #Ideas #Imagination

Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Swag #Pieces #Movement

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

#Art #Drug #Habit

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

#Art #Mind #May

Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Artist #Player #Quality

I wanted to kill art for myself… …a new thought for that object.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Wanted #New Thought

In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Artist #Outcast #Pariahs

My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Would Be #Moments

I have drawn people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Beautiful #Art #Oasis

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

#New York #Snow #Broken

I consider painting as a means of expression, not as a goal.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Mean #Expression #Goal

Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Danger #Aesthetic

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Creativity #Artist #Creative

I thought to discourage aesthetics... I threw the bottlerack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Beauty #Faces #Admire

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

#Believe #Artist #Doe

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

#Art #Needs #Definitions

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Reality #Law #Bending

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

#Art #Breathing #Euphoria

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

#Artist #Space #Labyrinth

My idea was to chose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Ideas #Indifference #Ugliness

The most interesting thing about artists is how they live
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Artist #Interesting #Most Interesting

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

#Two #Shadow #Three

The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Artist #Serenity #Monk

All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Self #Decision #Intuition

Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Lovely #Habit

It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Important #Facts #Reason

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

#Winning #Games #Atheism

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 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Artist #World #Painting

I don’t care about the word ‘art’ because it has been so discredited. So I want to get rid of it. There is an unnecessary adoration of ‘art’ today.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Today #Care

Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Three #Four #Height

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

#Men #Artist #Unique

The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Sanskrit #Interest

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Works Of Art

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

#Two #Shadow #Able

I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Beauty #Art #Chess

Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Lazy #Listening #Dripping

An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Mean #Years

No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Artist #Trying #Alive

Since I found that one could make a case shadow from a three-dimensional thing, any object whatsoever - just as the projecting of the sun on the earth makes two dimensions - I thought that by simple intellectual analogy, the fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, or, to put it another way, any three-dimensional object, which we see dispassionately, is a projection of something four-dimensional, something we are not familiar with.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Simple #Two #Intellectual

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.
-- Marcel Duchamp

#Art #Existence