Quotes about Marcel Duchamp

7 Sourced Quotes

His [Marcel Duchamp's] idea was that anything could be art by focusing the mind to think of it as art. My images are similar but at the time my work was first being shown, 1958-'59, I was unfamiliar with Duchamp and Dada. Everyone said my work was Dada, so I read on it, went to Philadelphia to see the Arensberg Duchamp collection, was delighted by it and later met him (Duchamp)... But it was all more a coincidence. Perhaps it's that certain ideas get into the air, ideas that come out of our living and out of the environment automatically

And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp — for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to — a movement for each person and open for everybody.

Willem de Kooning

He [Marcel Duchamp] entered this object [the 'Urinal' ready-made] into the museum and noticed that its transportation from one place to another made it into art. But he failed to draw the clear and simple conclusion that every man is an artist.

In one work Marcel Duchamp meets Tracey Emin in the desert, with three camp cowboys. In another he meets Elvis and the Spice Girls.

Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art... He declared that he wanted to kill art ('for myself') but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object".

.. one must agree with Rilke when he says that with 'nothing can one touch a work of art so little as with critical words..'. It was Marcel Duchamps who was critical, when he drew a moustache on the 'Mona Lisa'. And so was Mondrian when he dreamed of the dissolution of painting, sculpture, and architecture into a transcendent ensemble.

My conscious tradition is through Constantin Brâncuși, and Brâncuși just strikes me as an infinitely wiser and infinitely more talented, an infinitely stronger figure than Marcel Duchamp. I think I could have done my work if Duchamp had not lived. I could not have done my work if Brâncuși had not lived.