Marcel Duchamp
Father of conceptual art
Most quoted
"Art is the only form of activity in which man as man shows himself to be a true individual. Only in art is he capable of going beyond the animal state, because art is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by time and space."
— from Session on the Creative Act, 1957
"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."
— from The Creative Act, 1957
"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."
— from Speech, 1957
All quotes by Marcel Duchamp (321)
I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
Art is a habit-forming drug. You cannot stop it without a shock to the system.
I am interested in ideas, not merely in art.
The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.
I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.
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.
I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art and much more, all the difficulty of algebra and none of its certainty.
In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but when one is playing one cannot see them.
The great artist of tomorrow will go underground.
I wanted to kill art for myself.
All painting, to the extent that it is pure, contains a quality of being seen that is not the case for the fields of scent or sound.
I believe that true play always has a sacred quality to it.
The spectator makes the picture.
Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.
I have forced myself to contradict myself.
Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to cast the 'shadow' from a four-dimensional object onto three-dimensional space.
I was interested in the idea that one could avoid a subject and still say something.
The readymade frees the artist from the demands of craftsmanship.
Painting is washing a floor. Don't you see? One does it as a chore.
I like to play chess, but I don't like to win.
Contemporaries of Marcel Duchamp
Other Visual Artss born within 50 years of Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968).