Marcel Duchamp Quotes

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.

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.

Destruction is also creation.

Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.

It's the viewer that makes the work.

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

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

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

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.

Humor is the only reason to live.

The only thing that is not art is inattention

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

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.

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

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.