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I Think There Is A Great Deal To The Idea Of Not Doing A Thing, But That When You Do A Thing, You Don't Do It In Five Minutes Or In Five Hours, But In Five Years.

-Marcel Duchamp

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I Think There Is

Marcel Duchamp

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I Think There Is A Great Deal To The Idea Of Not Doing A Thing, But That When You Do A Thing, You Don't Do It In Five Minutes Or In Five Hours, But In Five Years.

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More From 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. 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.

The Most Interesting Thing About Artists Is How They Live

Most Interesting

It's True, Of Course, Humor Is Very Important In My Life, As You Know. That's The Only Reason For Living, In Fact.

I Consider Painting As A Means Of Expression, Not As A Goal.

In The Last Analysis, The Artist May Shout From All The Rooftops That He Is A Genius; He Will Have To Wait For The Verdict Of Posterity.

My Idea Was To Chose 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

Society Takes What It Wants. The Artist Himself Does Not Count, Because There Is No Actual Existence For The Work Of Art. The Work Of Art Is Always Based On The Two Poles Of The Onlooker And The Maker, And The Spark That Comes From The Bipolar Action Gives Birth To Something - Like Electricity. But The Onlooker Has The Last Word, And It Is Always Posterity That Makes The Masterpiece. The Artist Should Not Concern Himself With This, Because It Has Nothing To Do With Him.

I Was Interested In Ideas, Not Merely Visual Products. I Wanted To Put Painting Once Again At The Service Of The Mind.

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.

The Curious Thing About That Moustache And Goatee Is That When You Look At The Mona Lisa It Becomes A Man. It Is Not A Woman Disguised As A Man; It Is A Real Man, And That Was My Discovery, Without Realising It At The Time.

Can One Make Works Which Are Not Works Of 'art'?

I Was Poking Fun At Myself Most Of All.

The Chess Pieces Are The Block Alphabet Which Shapes Thoughts; And These Thoughts, Although Making A Visual Design On The Chessboard, Express Their Beauty Abstractly, Like A Poem

While All Artists Are Not Chess Players, All Chess Players Are Artists.

I Am Interested In Ideas, Not Merely In Visual Products.

Aesthetic Delectation Is The Danger To Be Avoided.

I Believe That The Artist Doesn't Know What He Does. I Attach Even More Importance To The Spectator Than To The Artist.

Since The Tubes Of Paint Used By The Artist Are Manufactured And Ready Made Products We Must Conclude That All The Paintings In The World Are 'readymades Aided' And Also Works Of Assemblage.

Since A Three-dimensional Object Casts A Two-dimensional Shadow, We Should Be Able To Imagine The Unknown Four-dimensional Object Whose Shadow We Are. I For My Part Am Fascinated By The Search For A One-dimensional Object That Casts No Shadow At All.

I Thought To Discourage Aesthetics... I Threw The Bottlerack And The Urinal In Their Faces And Now They Admire Them For Their Aesthetic Beauty.

It's Not What You See That Is Art. Art Is The Gap.

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.

Chess Can Be Described As The Movement Of Pieces Eating One Another.

In My Day Artists Wanted To Be Outcasts, Pariahs. Now They Are All Integrated Into Society

Artmaking Is Making The Invisible, Visible.

I'm Not At All Sure That The Concept Of The Readymade Isn't The Most Important Single Idea To Come Out Of My Work.

Since I Found That One Could Make A Case Shadow From A Three-dimensional Thing, Any Object Whatsoever - Just As The Projecting Of The Sun On The Earth Makes Two Dimensions - I Thought That By Simple Intellectual Analogy, The Fourth Dimension Could Project An Object Of Three Dimensions, Or, To Put It Another Way, Any Three-dimensional Object, Which We See Dispassionately, Is A Projection Of Something Four-dimensional, Something We Are Not Familiar With.

It's The Viewer That Makes The Work.

Art Has The Lovely Habit Of Ruining All Artistic Theories.

Do Unto Others As They Wish, But With Imagination.

There Is No Solution, For There Is No Problem.

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.

I've Decided That Art Is A Habit-forming Drug. That's All It Is, For The Artist, For The Collector, For Anybody Connected With It.

Art Is Like A Shipwreck; It's Every Man For Himself.

Living Is More A Question Of What One Spends Than What One Makes.

Art Has Absolutely No Existence As Veracity, As Truth.

No, The Thing To Do Is Try To Make A Painting That Will Be Alive In Your Own Lifetime.

The Life Of An Artist Is Like The Life Of A Monk, A Lewd Monk If You Like, Very Rabelaisian. It Is An Ordination.

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.

The Artist Performs Only One Part Of The Creative Process. The Onlooker Completes It, And It Is The Onlooker Who Has The Last Word.

Unless A Picture Shocks, It Is Nothing.

Chess Is A Sport. A Violent Sport.

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.

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.

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 Decisions In The Artistic Execution Of The Work Rest With Pure Intuition And Cannot Be Translated Into A Self-analysis.

I Wanted To Kill Art For Myself.. ..a New Thought For That Object.

I Feel Shame, Not For The Wrong Things I Have Done, But For The Right Things That I Have Failed To Do.

Humor Is The Only Reason To Live.

I Don't Believe In Art. I Believe In Artists.

In New York In 1915 I Bought At A Hardware Store A Snow Shovel On Which I Wrote In Advance Of The Broken Arm .

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.

I Think There Is A Great Deal To The Idea Of Not Doing A Thing, But That When You Do A Thing, You Don't Do It In Five Minutes Or In Five Hours, But In Five Years.

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.

I Believe That A Picture, A Work Of Art, Lives And Dies Just As We Do.

Among Our Articles Of Lazy Hardware, I Recommend The Faucet That Stops Dripping When No One Is Listening To It.

Chess Players Are Madmen Of A Certain Quality, The Way The Artist Is Supposed To Be, And Isn't, In General.

Possible Reality [is Obtained] By Slightly Bending Physical And Chemical Laws.

Anything Is Art If An Artist Says It Is.

You Know Exactly What I Think Of Photography. I Would Like To See It Make People Despise Painting Until Something Else Will Make Photography Unbearable. (in A Letter To Alfred Stieglitz)

An Abstract Painting Need In 50 Years By No Means Look "abstract" Any Longer.

The Only Thing That Is Not Art Is Inattention

Destruction Is Also Creation.

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 Life Of A Chess Master Is Much More Difficult Than That Of An Artist - Much More Depressing. An Artist Knows That Someday There'll Be Recognition And Monetary Reward, But For The Chess Master There Is Little Public Recognition And Absolutely No Hope Of Supporting Himself By His Endeavors. If Bobby Fischer Came To Me For Advice, I Certainly Would Not Discourage Him - As If Anyone Could - But I Would Try To Make It Positively Clear That He Will Never Have Any Money From Chess, Live A Monk-like Existence And Know More Rejection Than Any Artist Ever Has, Struggling To Be Known And Accepted.

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.

It Is The Spectators Who Make The Pictures.

My Art Would Be That Of Living: Each Moment, Each Breath Is A Work Inscribed Nowhere.

In The Creative Act, The Artist Goes From Intention To Realization Through A Chain Of Totally Subjective Reactions.

This Concern Which Interests Us More Than Anything Else: The Blurring Of The Distinction Between Art And Life.

Art Is Not About Itself But The Attention We Bring To It.

I Have Forced Myself To Contradict Myself In Order To Avoid Conforming To My Own Taste.

The Word 'art' Interests Me Very Much. If It Comes From Sanskrit, As I've Heard, It Signifies 'making.

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.

Three Or Four Drops Of Height Have Nothing To Do With Savageness.

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