Marcel Duchamp Quotes - Page 3

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.

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.

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

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

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

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)

I was poking fun at myself most of all.

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

Chess is a sport. A violent sport.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.