Marcel 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.Collection: Art
Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.Collection: Shock
Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.Collection: Art
I thought to discourage aesthetics... I threw the bottlerack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.Collection: Beauty
I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist.Collection: Believe
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 seeCollection: Ideas
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.Collection: Art
Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Artist
My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Winning
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.Collection: Artist
Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?Collection: Art
No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.Collection: Artist
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 poemCollection: Beauty
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)Collection: Photography
The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making.Collection: Art
I was poking fun at myself most of all.Collection: Fun
Chess is a sport. A violent sport.Collection: Sports
In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.Collection: Creativity
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.Collection: Real
All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.Collection: Self
Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Depressing
An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Simple
Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.Collection: Lazy
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Ideas
Chess players are madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be, and isn't, in general.Collection: Artist
I wanted to kill art for myself.. ..a new thought for that object.Collection: Art
In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote in advance of the broken arm .Collection: New York
Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.Collection: Three
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.Collection: Beautiful
While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Art
The most interesting thing about artists is how they liveCollection: Artist
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Artist
I consider painting as a means of expression, not as a goal.Collection: Mean
Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.Collection: Danger
I was interested in ideas, not merely visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.Collection: Ideas
I believe that a picture, a work of art, lives and dies just as we do.Collection: Art
In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into societyCollection: Artist
Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.Collection: Imagination
There is no solution, for there is no problem.Collection: Problem