Top 159 Quotes & Sayings by Marcel Duchamp - Page 3

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

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 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.

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

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

The most interesting thing about artists is how they live

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'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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

I was poking fun at myself most of all.

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

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.

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.

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'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 is a sport. A violent sport.

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