Marcel Duchamp Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Marcel Duchamp

  Artist, Creative, Lasts

  73 Copy quote

• Anything is art if an artist says it is.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Artist, Ifs

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

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Gaps, Art Is

  Wilfried Dörstel, Marcel Duchamp (1989). “Augenpunkt, Lichtquelle und Scheidewand: die symbolische Form im Werk Marcel Duchamps : unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Witzzeichnungen von 1907 bis 1910 und der Radierungen von 1967/68”

  65 Copy quote

• Artmaking is making the invisible, visible.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Invisible, Visible

  60 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Creativity, Creative

  Dalia Judovitz, Marcel Duchamp (2010). “Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company”, p.56, U of Minnesota Press

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• Destruction is also creation.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Creation, Destruction

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• It's the viewer that makes the work.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Viewers

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• Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Lovely, Habit

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

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Believe, Belief

  "Marcel Duchamp: a riotous A-Z of his secret life" by Thomas Girst, www.theguardian.com. April 07, 2014.

  81 Copy quote

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

  Marcel Duchamp

  Creativity, Ideas, Imagination

  Marcel Duchamp (1994). “Duchamp: Passim : a Marcel Duchamp Anthology”, Craftsman House

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

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Order, Ontology

  Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp (1997). “The complete works of Marcel Duchamp”, Delano Greenridge Editions

  57 Copy quote

• Humor is the only reason to live.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Reason, Reason To Live

  39 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Use, Language, Damn

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• The only thing that is not art is inattention

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Inattention, Art Is

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• I thought to discourage aesthetics... I threw the bottlerack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Beauty, Faces, Admire

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• Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Attention, Art Is

  39 Copy quote

• 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.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Needs, Definitions

  49 Copy quote

• Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Shock

  Marcel Duchamp, Michel Sanouillet, Paul Matisse, Anne Sanouillet, Paul B. Franklin (2008). “Duchamp du signe, suivi de Notes”

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• 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.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Care, Want

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• Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Men, Shipwreck

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• I consider painting as a means of expression, not as a goal.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Mean, Expression, Goal

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• 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. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All this decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Artist, Self, Space

  ART-news, 56. no. 4, 1957.

  21 Copy quote

• Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Existence, Veracity

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• I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Believe, Artist, Doe

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• 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.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Beautiful, Art, Oasis

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