Marcel Duchamp Quotes

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

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

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.

Anything is art if an artist says it is.

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

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.

Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.

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

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.

Destruction is also creation.

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

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.

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

It's the viewer that makes the work.

Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.

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.

Humor is the only reason to live.

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

Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.

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

Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.

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

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

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.

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.

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.

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

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

The only thing that is not art is inattention

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

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

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

The most interesting thing about artists is how they live

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.