QuoteProject
A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.
Marcel Duchamp
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Art should provoke thought and evoke strong emotions.

Marcel Duchamp emphasizes the idea that true art must challenge viewers and stir a reaction. If a painting doesn't elicit strong feelings or provoke critical thinking, it fails to fulfill its purpose in stimulating dialogue and reflection about society and the human experience.

Themes

ArtShockProvocationEmotionExpression

In practice

Example use cases

In an art class, to inspire students, one might say, 'Remember, a painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.'

More from Marcel Duchamp

An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.
Marcel DuchampRead
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

The most important thing to realise is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn't matter where we were born or how we grew up.
Maeve BinchyRead
At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.
Wallace StevensRead
I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said something against his mother.
Jack KerouacRead
It wasn't long after I began writing Star Wars that I realized the story was more than a single film could hold. As the saga of the Skywalkers and Jedi Knights unfolded, I began to see it as a tale that could take at least nine films to tell - three trilogies - and I realized, in making my way through the back story and after story, that I was really setting out to make the middle story.
George LucasRead
Rob [Tapert], myself and Bruce Campbell sat in hundreds of drive-insnot hundreds, but tens of drive-ins, watching these movies and learning how they were made, and we started to make our own in Super 8. And that’s really how we got into horror films. After a while we learned to really like them, and the craft that went into them.
Sam RaimiRead
In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.
Salman RushdieRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.

Quote by Marcel Duchamp | QuoteProject