QUOTES by Marcel Duchamp
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Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Gravity is not controlled physically in us by one of the 5 ordinary senses. We always reduce a gravity experience to an autocognizance, real or imagined, registered inside us in the region of the stomach.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
You have to approach something with indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I am afraid to end up being in need to sell canvases - in other words, to be a society painter.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
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.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I wanted to use my possibility to be an individual, and I suppose I have, no?
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Artists of all times are like the gamblers of Monte Carlo, and this blind lottery allows some to succeed and ruins others. In my opinion, neither the winners nor the losers are worth worrying about.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
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.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
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.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
The great problem was the selection of the readymade. I needed to choose an object without it impressing me: that is to say, without it providing any sort of aesthetic delectation. Moreover, I needed to reduce my own personal taste to absolute zero.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I would have to think about it for two or three months before I decided to do something which would have meaning. And it would have to be more than just an impression or pleasure. I would need an objective, a meaning. That is the only thing that could help me.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
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.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
It is curious to note how fragile the memory is, even for the important times in one's life. This is, moreover, what explains the fortunate fantasy of history.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
My Ready-Mades have nothing to do with the 'objet trouve' because the so-called 'found object' is completely directed by personal taste. Personal taste decides that this is a beautiful object and is unique.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
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
Man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-made things, like even his own mother and father.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Distortion came first from the fauves, who, in turn, were under the strong influence of primitive art.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I never finished the 'Large Glass' because, after working on it for eight years, I probably got interested in something else; also, I was tired. It may be that, subconsciously, I never intended to finish it because the word 'finish' implies an acceptance of traditional methods and all the paraphernalia that accompany them.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been commercialized to such a degree that art and everything related to it has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I'm not sure.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
What would I do with money? I have enough for my needs. I don't want any more. If I had a lot, I would have to care for it, worry about it.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn't want to go to the office every morning.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I really had no program or any established plan. I didn't even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It's the imagining of the movement or of the gesture that makes the beauty in this case.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp
I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.
Quote by -Marcel Duchamp