Marcel duchamp quotes

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

The most interesting thing about artists is how they live

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.

It is the spectators who make the pictures.

Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.

It's the viewer that makes the work.

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.

The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

There is no solution, for there is no problem.

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

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.

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)

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

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of posterity.

Humor is the only reason to live.

I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do.

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

Chess is a sport. A violent sport.

Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.

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.

I was interested in ideas, not merely visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.

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.

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

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.

The curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without realising it at the time.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The life of a chess master is much more difficult than that of an artist - much more depressing. An artist knows that someday there'll be recognition and monetary reward, but for the chess master there is little public recognition and absolutely no hope of supporting himself by his endeavors. If Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him - as if anyone could - but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted.

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 this 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.

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

In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote in advance of the broken arm .

I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist.

The only thing that is not art is inattention

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

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

Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.

Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.

Anything is art if an artist says it is.

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.

Destruction is also creation.

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

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.

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

While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I wanted to kill art for myself.. ..a new thought for that object.

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.

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.

I was poking fun at myself most of all.

This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life.

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

Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.

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

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.

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?

Society takes what it wants. The artist himself does not count, because there is no actual existence for the work of art. The work of art is always based on the two poles of the onlooker and the maker, and the spark that comes from the bipolar action gives birth to something - like electricity. But the onlooker has the last word, and it is always posterity that makes the masterpiece. The artist should not concern himself with this, because it has nothing to do with him.

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