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Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression. -- Marcel Duchamp
My position is the lack of a position, but, of course, you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk, you spoil the whole game. -- Marcel Duchamp
All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much. -- Marcel Duchamp
When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much. -- Marcel Duchamp
Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes. -- Marcel Duchamp
One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply take note that it's a bottle rack, or that it's a bottle rack that has changed its destination ... It's not the visual question of the readymade that counts; it's the fact that it exists, even. -- 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 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
Words such as truth, art, veracity, or anything are stupid in themselves. -- 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
What would I do with money? I have enough for my needs. I don't want any more. If I had a lot, I would have to care for it, worry about it. -- Marcel Duchamp
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. -- Marcel Duchamp
I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art. -- Marcel Duchamp
In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase. -- Marcel Duchamp
Can one make works which are not works of 'art'? -- Marcel Duchamp
I am afraid to end up being in need to sell canvases - in other words, to be a society painter. -- Marcel Duchamp
Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about. -- 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
There is no solution because there is no problem. -- Marcel Duchamp
Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself. -- Marcel Duchamp
I'm nothing else but an artist, I'm sure, and delighted to be. -- Marcel Duchamp
For me, the 'Three Stoppages' was a first gesture liberating me from the past. -- Marcel Duchamp
Artmaking is making the invisible, visible. -- Marcel Duchamp
When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in. -- 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
If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T. -- 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
Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure. -- Marcel Duchamp
Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art. -- Marcel Duchamp
It's the viewer that makes the work. -- Marcel Duchamp
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
I shy away from the word 'creation.' In the ordinary, social meaning of the word - well, it's very nice, but fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other. -- Marcel Duchamp
No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime. -- 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 Duchamp
In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting. -- Marcel Duchamp
I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished. -- 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
The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it. -- Marcel Duchamp
Tradition is the great misleader because it's too easy to follow what has already been done - even though you may think you're giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself. -- Marcel Duchamp
A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves. It's a drawing; it's a mechanical reality. -- Marcel Duchamp
It's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it. -- Marcel Duchamp
There's no solution, because there's no problem -- Marcel Duchamp
I am against the word 'anti' because it's a little bit like 'atheist,' as compared to 'believer.' And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is. -- Marcel Duchamp
Can works be made which are not 'of art'? -- Marcel Duchamp
Words are the tools of 'to be' - of expression. They are completely built on the fact that you 'are,' and in order to express it, you have built a little alphabet, and you make your words from it. -- Marcel Duchamp
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) -- 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. (On giving up art to play chess) -- Marcel Duchamp
The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch. -- Marcel Duchamp
Marcel, no more painting; go get a job. -- Marcel Duchamp
Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude. -- Marcel Duchamp
When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism. -- Marcel Duchamp
'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end. -- Marcel Duchamp
In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society -- 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
In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up - or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object. -- Marcel Duchamp
I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. -- Marcel Duchamp
Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered? -- Marcel Duchamp
Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. -- 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
Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it. -- Marcel Duchamp
It is a matter of great indifference to me what criticism is printed in the papers and the magazines. I am simply working out my own ideas in my own way. -- Marcel Duchamp
Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century. -- Marcel Duchamp
My stay in Munich was the scene of my complete liberation. -- Marcel Duchamp
Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it. -- Marcel Duchamp
Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness. -- Marcel Duchamp
Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another. -- 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
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
Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing. -- Marcel Duchamp
Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach. -- Marcel Duchamp
One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn't want to go to the office every morning. -- Marcel Duchamp
It is curious to note how fragile the memory is, even for the important times in one's life. This is, moreover, what explains the fortunate fantasy of history. -- Marcel Duchamp
Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding. -- Marcel Duchamp
I was poking fun at myself most of all. -- Marcel Duchamp
The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero. -- Marcel Duchamp
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 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage. -- Marcel Duchamp
Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me. -- 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
All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis. -- Marcel Duchamp
My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the 'objet trouve' because the so-called 'found object' is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique. -- Marcel Duchamp
Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws. -- Marcel Duchamp
Anything is art if an artist says it is. -- Marcel Duchamp
I really had no program or any established plan. I didn't even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not. -- Marcel Duchamp
Chess is a sport. A violent sport. -- Marcel Duchamp
Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy. -- Marcel Duchamp
In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. -- 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
Humor is the only reason to live. -- Marcel Duchamp
The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether. -- Marcel Duchamp
Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father. -- Marcel Duchamp
There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing. -- Marcel Duchamp
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. -- Marcel Duchamp
Humor and laughter - not necessarily derogatory derision - are my pet tools. This may come from my general philosophy of never taking the world too seriously - for fear of dying of boredom. -- Marcel Duchamp
The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word. -- Marcel Duchamp
I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses. -- Marcel Duchamp
I consider painting as a means of expression, not as a goal. -- 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
I don't believe in art. I believe in artists. -- Marcel Duchamp
There is no solution, for there is no problem. -- Marcel Duchamp
From a purely ethnological point of view, I was not a period-born Dada. -- Marcel Duchamp
I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind. -- Marcel Duchamp
I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do ... -- 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
Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase. -- Marcel Duchamp
Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally. -- Marcel Duchamp
I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say. -- Marcel Duchamp
This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life. -- Marcel Duchamp
In the midst of each epoch, I fully realize that a new epoch will dawn. -- Marcel Duchamp
I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you. -- Marcel Duchamp
I wanted to kill art for myself ... ... a new thought for that object. -- Marcel Duchamp
The 'Glass' is not my autobiography, nor is it self-expression. Far from it. -- Marcel Duchamp
I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me.' -- Marcel Duchamp
The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me. -- 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
I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered. -- Marcel Duchamp
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
It is the spectators who make the pictures. -- Marcel Duchamp
The most interesting thing about artists is how they live -- Marcel Duchamp
I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it. -- Marcel Duchamp
Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories. -- Marcel Duchamp
An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer. -- 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
There was an incident, in 1912, which 'gave me a turn,' so to speak: when I brought the 'Nude Descending a Staircase' to the Independants, and they asked me to withdraw it before the opening. -- Marcel Duchamp
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. -- Marcel Duchamp
I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products. -- Marcel Duchamp
Art is all a matter of personality. -- Marcel Duchamp
My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere. -- Marcel Duchamp
The only thing that is not art is inattention -- Marcel Duchamp
When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything. -- Marcel Duchamp
You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste. -- 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
What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.' -- Marcel Duchamp
I would have to think about it for two or three months before I decided to do something which would have meaning. And it would have to be more than just an impression or pleasure. I would need an objective, a meaning. That is the only thing that could help me. -- Marcel Duchamp
Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general. -- Marcel Duchamp
I was highly attracted to chess for forty or forty-five years; then, little by little, my enthusiasm lessened. -- Marcel Duchamp
If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions! -- Marcel Duchamp
Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination. -- Marcel Duchamp
In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It's the imagining of the movement or of the gesture that makes the beauty in this case. -- Marcel Duchamp
A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting. -- Marcel Duchamp
Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided. -- Marcel Duchamp
One must pass through the network of influence. One is obligated to be influenced, and one accepts this influence very naturally. From the start, one doesn't realize this. The first thing to know: one doesn't realize one is influenced. One thinks he is already liberated, and one is far from it! -- Marcel Duchamp
What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap. -- Marcel Duchamp
Destruction is also creation. -- Marcel Duchamp
There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary. -- Marcel Duchamp
I wanted to use my possibility to be an individual, and I suppose I have, no? -- Marcel Duchamp