Marcel Duchamp: Trending quotes

“I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.”

“Destruction is also creation.”

“There is no solution because there is no problem.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.”

“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.”

“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 tastes.”

“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.”

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.”

“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.”

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

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

“[ Impressionism was] the beginning of a cult devoted to the material on the canvas – the actual pigment..”