Marcel Duchamp quotes
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“I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.”
-- Marcel DuchampSource : "Marcel Duchamp: a riotous A-Z of his secret life" by Thomas Girst, www.theguardian.com. April 07, 2014.
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“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 DuchampSource : Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp (1997). “The complete works of Marcel Duchamp”, Delano Greenridge Editions
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“Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
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“Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“Not all artists are Chess players, but all Chess players are artists”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“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 DuchampSource : Dalia Judovitz, Marcel Duchamp (2010). “Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company”, p.56, U of Minnesota Press
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“It is the spectators who make the pictures.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“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 -
“I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.”
-- Marcel DuchampSource : "Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp".
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“It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.”
-- Marcel DuchampSource : Wilfried Dörstel, Marcel Duchamp (1989). “Augenpunkt, Lichtquelle und Scheidewand: die symbolische Form im Werk Marcel Duchamps : unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Witzzeichnungen von 1907 bis 1910 und der Radierungen von 1967/68”
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“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 -
“I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.”
-- Marcel DuchampSource : Marcel Duchamp, Michel Sanouillet, Paul Matisse, Anne Sanouillet, Paul B. Franklin (2008). “Duchamp du signe, suivi de Notes”
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“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 -
“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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“I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.”
-- Marcel DuchampSource : Marcel Duchamp (1994). “Duchamp: Passim : a Marcel Duchamp Anthology”, Craftsman House
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“Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“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 -
“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 -
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“Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“I wanted to kill art for myself… …a new thought for that object.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
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“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 -
“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 -
“I consider painting as a means of expression, not as a goal.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
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“In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“The most interesting thing about artists is how they live”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“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 -
“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 -
“All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
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“Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“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 -
“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 DuchampSource : Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp (1989). “Marcel Duchamp, the box in a valise: De ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy : inventory of an edition”, Rizzoli Intl Pubns
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“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 -
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“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 -
“Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“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 -
“The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
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“Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“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 -
“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 -
“Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
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“An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
“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 -
“Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.”
-- Marcel Duchamp -
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