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.

Anything is art if an artist says it is.

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

Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.

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

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.

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

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

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

The only thing that is not art is inattention

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

Chess is a sport. A violent sport.

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 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.

It is the spectators who make the pictures.

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.