Marcel Duchamp Quotes about Art

Anything is art if an artist says it is.

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

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.

Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.

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.

The only thing that is not art is inattention

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

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'?

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

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

I wanted to kill art for myself.. ..a new thought for that object.