QUOTES by Marcel Duchamp
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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.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
For me, the 'Three Stoppages' was a first gesture liberating me from the past.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up - or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone's error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral... our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Things were sort of Bohemian in Montmartre - one lived, one painted, one was a painter - all that doesn't mean anything, fundamentally.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I was highly attracted to chess for forty or forty-five years; then, little by little, my enthusiasm lessened.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
There was an incident, in 1912, which 'gave me a turn,' so to speak: when I brought the 'Nude Descending a Staircase' to the Independants, and they asked me to withdraw it before the opening.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.' Now everyone makes something, and those who make things on a canvas with a frame, they're called artists. Formerly, they were called craftsmen, a term I prefer. We're all craftsmen, in civilian or military or artistic life.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
When I put a bicycle wheel on a stool, the fork down, there was no idea of a 'ready-made' or anything else. It was just a distraction. I didn't have any special reason to do it, or any intention of showing it or describing anything.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
The 'Glass' is not my autobiography, nor is it self-expression. Far from it.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply take note that it's a bottle rack, or that it's a bottle rack that has changed its destination... It's not the visual question of the readymade that counts; it's the fact that it exists, even.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
My position is the lack of a position, but, of course, you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk, you spoil the whole game.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man - Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can't help it. Even if they don't believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
The last hundred years have been retinal; even the cubists were. The surrealists tried to free themselves, and earlier so had the dadaists, but unfortunately, these latter were nihilists and didn't produce enough to prove their point, which, by the way, they didn't have to prove - according to their theory.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I haven't been in the Louvre for twenty years. It doesn't interest me because I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre instead of others which weren't even considered.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
It's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
One must pass through the network of influence. One is obligated to be influenced, and one accepts this influence very naturally. From the start, one doesn't realize this. The first thing to know: one doesn't realize one is influenced. One thinks he is already liberated, and one is far from it!
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me.'
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I am against the word 'anti' because it's a little bit like 'atheist,' as compared to 'believer.' And an atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Tradition is the great misleader because it's too easy to follow what has already been done - even though you may think you're giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Humor and laughter - not necessarily derogatory derision - are my pet tools. This may come from my general philosophy of never taking the world too seriously - for fear of dying of boredom.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
It is a matter of great indifference to me what criticism is printed in the papers and the magazines. I am simply working out my own ideas in my own way.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp