An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.
Marcel DuchampRead
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?
Interpretation
What this quote means
Art is often idolized, yet it is a constructed concept that lacks inherent truth.
Marcel Duchamp's quote challenges the traditional perception of art by suggesting that it is not an objective truth but rather a subjective experience shaped by societal reverence. He questions why art is held in such high esteem, proposing that it functions like a 'drug,' creating habits and dependencies without a basis in absolute reality.
Themes
ArtTruthReverenceSubjectiveDrug
In practice
Example use cases
In a talk about the value of creativity in education, I used this quote to highlight how we perceive and construct the meaning of art.
More from Marcel Duchamp
All quotes →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.
Marcel DuchampRead
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.
Marcel DuchampRead
I never finished the 'Large Glass' because, after working on it for eight years, I probably got interested in something else; also, I was tired. It may be that, subconsciously, I never intended to finish it because the word 'finish' implies an acceptance of traditional methods and all the paraphernalia that accompany them.
Marcel DuchampRead
It's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.
Marcel DuchampRead
I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.
Marcel DuchampRead
Similar quotes
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
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No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
Drawing takes time. A line has time in it
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It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.
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I'll give up this sort of touring madness certainly, but music-everything is based on music. No, I'll never stop my music.
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Art is doing. Art deals directly with life.
Ruth AsawaRead