French - Artist | July 28, 1887 - October 2, 1968
The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it.
Marcel Duchamp
CuriousMeMagicWayTryNever
Humor and laughter - not necessarily derogatory derision - are my pet tools. This may come from my general philosophy of never taking the world too seriously - for fear of dying of boredom.
FearHumorPetLaughterWorldTools
Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.
ThinkingUnderstandingPhilosophyWay
One does not contemplate it like a picture. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply take note that it's a bottle rack, or that it's a bottle rack that has changed its destination... It's not the visual question of the readymade that counts; it's the fact that it exists, even.
DestinationPictureQuestionTake
Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.
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Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?
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I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.
I AmIdeasProductsVisualAm
A game of chess is a visual and plastic thing, and if it isn't geometric in the static sense of the word, it is mechanical, since it moves. It's a drawing; it's a mechanical reality.
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'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.
ArtPaintingThoughtEndAlienWay
When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much.
BetterTalkingToo MuchNeverSee
There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.
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When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.
PaintingYouAlwaysAbstractEven
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