Marcel Duchamp Quotes - Page 2

The most interesting thing about artists is how they live

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.

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

There is no solution, for there is no problem.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

It is the spectators who make the pictures.

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

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.

Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.

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

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.

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

Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.

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.

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

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

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

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.