“DUCHAMP”

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.

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

What am I? Do I know? I am a man: quite simply, a 'breather.'

Chance is the only way to avoid the control of the rational.

Anything systematized becomes sterile very soon. There is nothing that has eternal value.

Everything man has handled has the fatal tendency to secrete meaning.

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?

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.

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.

I like living, breathing better than working... Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It's a kind of constant euphoria.

There’s an element in the slowness of the execution that adds to the possibility of producing something that will be durable in its expression, that will be considered important five centuries later.

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

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.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

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.

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

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

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.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

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.

Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.

Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.

Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.

The great artist of tomorrow will go underground.

The artist performs only one part of the creative process. The onlooker completes it, and it is the onlooker who has the last word.

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

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.

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.

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

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. [caption id="attachment_242" align="aligncenter" width="736"] Duchamp, Marcel[/caption]

There is no solution because there is no problem.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists. 

The poor Mona Lisa is gone, because no matter how wonderful her smile may be, it’s been looked at so much that the smile has disappeared. I believe that when a million people look at a painting, they change the thing by looking alone.

My idea was to choose 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.

Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase.

Marcel, no more painting; go get a job.

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.