Duchamp Quotes

I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

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.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

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.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Destruction is also creation.

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.

I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.

If a shadow is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four-dimensional Universe.

Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.

Do unto others as they wish, but with imagination.

Not everyone is an artist but everyone is a fucking critic.

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.

There is no solution because there is no problem.

The most interesting thing about artists is how they live

Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.

I know great art when someone doesn’t wash their hands after making it. And not only did Duchamp not wash his hands, but he didn’t even flush!

In one sense, (Duchamp's) “The Large Glass” is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.

All in all, 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.

My idea was to chose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see

Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.

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. (On giving up art to play chess)

While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

Among our articles of lazy hardware, I recommend the faucet that stops dripping when no one is listening to it.

I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately (forms of) expression... for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my (art) against such contamination.

Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum. The second person to install a urinal wasn't an artist, he was a plumber.

Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage.

Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity; to all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing

there's no solution, because there's no problem

The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art.

Marcel Duchamp said, “I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.

Duchamp had taken art to its logical conclusion. Every act of perception is art. So everything that perceives is an artist.

André Breton was a lover of love in a world who believes in prostitution.

Traditionally, artists suffered for their art, now it's the audience.

The avant-garde genealogy could be tracked through stories of bad-boy white artists who “got away with it,” beginning with Duchamp signing a urinal and calling it art. It’s about defying standards and initiating a precedent that ultimately liberates art from itself. The artist liberates the art object from the rules of mastery, then from content, then frees the art object from what Martin Heidegger calls its very thingliness, until it becomes enfolded into life itself. Stripped of the artwork, all we are left with is the artist’s activities. The problem is that history has to recognize the artist’s transgressions as “art,” which is then dependent on the artist’s access to power. A female artist rarely “gets away with it.” A black artist rarely “gets away with it.

You get my idea. Nothing of "artistic" literature about it, just straight medicine, a universal panacea, a fetish in a sense: if you have a toothache go to your dentist and ask him if he is Dada.

It is Duchamp who is to blame for the whole “is it art?” debate, which of course is exactly what he intended. As far as he was concerned, the role in society of an artist was akin to that of a philosopher; it didn’t even matter if he or she could paint or draw. An artist’s job was not to give aesthetic pleasure—designers could do that; it was to step back from the world and attempt to make sense or comment on it through the presentation of ideas that had no functional purpose other than themselves.

Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.

D'ailleurs c'est toujours les autres qui meurent.

Art should grasp the mind the way the vagina grasps the penis-Marcel Duchamp

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting-Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp said, “I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.” This is actually a pretty good method for studying—if you try to devour the history of your discipline all at once, you’ll choke.

Duchamp thought it was for artists to decide what was and what was not a work of art. His position was that if an artist said something was a work of art, having influenced its context and meaning, then it was a work of art.

Oh, I’m a breather, I’m a respirateur, isn’t that enough?” He asked, “Why do people have to work? Why do people think they have to work?” He

Someday my prince will come,” she lamented softly, “too fast.

Two people could like each other, respect each other, trust each other, and love each other. But it was only when they needed each other that the relationship could truly work.

is not really a system of painting but a method of internal investigation. It is not the philosophy of painting but painting as philosophy.

It occurred to me all of a sudden, said Amalfitano, it’s a Duchamp idea, leaving a geometry book hanging exposed to the elements to see if it learns something about real life.

Thanks to Marcel Duchamp, men get to appropriate modern art with decorative urine every time they pee.

Yes, and Duchamp too, when he was asked what he thought about God, said, 'Let's not talk about that. That's man's stupidest idea.' — Nikša Gligo (1972)

To Marcel Duchamp’s blithe “There is no solution, because there is no problem,” the Japanese visual artist Shigeko Kubota replied, “There is no problem, because there is no solution.

Today copies of Duchamp's masterpiece are presented in some of the most important museums in the world (...). (The copies are displayed in the museums' galleries, not in the lavatories)

I don't want to be pinned down to any position. My position is the lack of a position, but of course you can't even talk about it; the minute you talk you spoil the whole game-Marcel Duchamp

Another said Ping Xi "marked the end of the sacred in art. Here is a spoiled brat taking the piss out of the establishment. Some are hailing him as the next Marcel Duchamp. But is he worth the stink?

Pero miniaturizar es también ocultar. Duchamp, por ejemplo, se sintió también atraído siempre por lo extremadamente pequeño, es decir, por todo lo que exigiera ser descifrado: emblemas, manuscritos, anagramas. Para él, miniaturizar significaba también hacer inservible: «Lo que está reducido se halla en cierto modo liberado de su significado. Su pequeñez es, al mismo tiempo, un toto y un fragmento [...]»

Reversibility: seeing through opaqueness, not-seeing through transparency. The wooden door and the glass door: two opposite facets of the same idea. This opposition is resolved in an identity: in both cases we look at ourselves looking. Hinge procedure. The question “What do we see?” confronts us with ourselves.

Dali’s Reclining Woman Wearing a Chemise looks like a dead slaughtered doll, and I can see preying eagles, broken arrows, and jazz musicians in Jackson Pollock, and because I believe that Man Ray and Duchamp were lovers.

The hemming and hawing is courtesy of Mrs. Duchamps, head of nursing, a small, snippy woman who always seems to know best. She's French: she should have stayed in France. Arrogant and unsympathetic, but she does have a cute French accent.

I glanced over at Teddy's Amoco, and I seen something that made my blood run cold. All six gas pumps was off their hooks. Teddy Duchamp's been dead since 1968, God love him, but his boy locked those pumps up every night just like Teddy himself used to do.

For a moment it seemed that her impeccably impractical education—in which she'd learned about Middle English and Duchamp's urinal and sub-Saharan droughts but had never been taught how to apply for a credit card or answer an office phone—wasn't useless after all.

The object [Duchamp's Fountain] was rejected , giving Duchamp the opportunity of issuing a statement, which he published in a review, The Blind Man. In his statement he emphasized that the act of choice was sufficient to justify it as a creative art. Placing it in such a way that its normal use was disguised caused a new reality for the object to be invented. To the criticism that it was rude he replied, logically enough,"How could this object be acceptable when displayed in a plumber's shop window and yet be immoral anywhere else?

Kunst ist Scheisse (Art is shit) was, fittingly, the motto of the Dada movement. Duchamp’s urinal was the fitting symbol. Everything is waste to be flushed away. On this hypothesis, then, postmodernism is a generalization on Dada’s nihilism. Not only is art shit, everything is.

He gives her his Art History lecture. ‘Then you get Mo-net and Ma-net, that’s a little tricky, Mo-net was the one did all the water lilies and shit, his colors were blues and greens, Ma-net was the one did Bareass on the Grass and shit, his colors were browns and greens. Then you get Bonnard, he did all the interiors and shit, amazing light, and then you get Van Guk, he’s the one with the ear and shit, and Say-zanne, he’s the one with the apples and shit, you get Kandinsky, a bad mother, all them pick-up-sticks pictures, you get my man Mondrian, he’s the one with the rectangles and shit, his colors were red yellow and blue, you get Moholy-Nagy, he did all the plastic thingummies and shit, you get Mar-cel Du-champ, he’s the devil in human form….’ She’s asleep.

What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap

They're such supreme egos. It's disgusting. I've never seen anything worse than an artist as a mind. It is very low, uninteresting as far as the relationship of men is concerned.

An ordinary object can be elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.

I don't believe in art. I believe in the artist.

Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are.

Instead I waited, which is what the Nude Descending a Staircase does, contrary to one's expectation and which is exactly why it has always provoked such a peculiar critical response.

The end of this history saw the banality of art merge with the banality of the real world - Duchamp's act, with its automatic transference of the object, being the inaugural (and ironic) gesture in this process. The transference of all reality into aesthetics, which has become one of the dimensions of generalized exchange... All this under the banner of a simultaneous liberation of art and the real world. This 'liberation' has in fact consisted in indexing the two to each other - a chiasmus lethal to both. The transference of art, become a useless function, into a reality that is now integral, since it has absorbed everything that denied, exceeded or transfigured it. The impossible exchange of this Integral Reality for anything else whatever. Given this, it can only exchange itself for itself or, in other words, repeat itself ad infinitum. What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The 'creative' act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation - the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea of art remains intact.

Duchamp,' I said, 'thought that after the original excitement of discovery, psychedelic mushrooms and similar kinds of plants would be used sparingly like liqueurs.' 'At last I understand the meaning of Lowry's Under the Volcano,' Foucault declared. 'The Consul's mescal served as a drug that filtered his perception in a manner similar to a hallucinogen. The only thing I can compare this experience to in my life is sex with a stranger. Contact with a strange body affords an experience of Truth similar to what I am experiencing now.

I’m thinking now of Duchamp, his infamous “sculpture.” How by turning a urinal, an object of stable and permanent utility, upside down, he radicalized its reception. By further naming it Fountain, he divested the object of its intended identity, rendering it with an unrecognizable new form. I hate him for this. I hate how he proved that the entire existence of a thing could be changed simply by flipping it over, revealing a new angle to its name, an act completed by nothing else but gravity, the very force that traps us on this earth. Mostly, I hate him because he was right.

I’m thinking now of Duchamp, his infamous “sculpture.” How by turning a urinal, an object of stable and permanent utility, upside down, he radicalized its reception. By further naming it Fountain, he divested the object of its intended identity, rendering it with an unrecognizable new form. I hate him for this. I hate how he proved that the entire existence of a thing could be changed simply by flipping it over, revealing a new angle to its name, an act completed by nothing else but gravity, the very force that traps us on this earth. Mostly, I hate him because he was right.

Natasha took his arm, gushing to him that she was ready for outrage from PETA, a protest or two, an Op-Ed in the New York Times that would be publicity gold. Ping Xi nodded blankly. I called in sick the day of the opening. Natasha didn’t seem to care. She had Angelika fill in at the front desk. She was an anorexic Goth, a senior at NYU. The show was a “brutal success,” one critic called it. “Cruelly funny.” Another said Ping Xi “marked the end of the sacred in art. Here is a spoiled brat taking the piss out of the establishment. Some are hailing him as the next Marcel Duchamp. But is he worth the stink?

Humanism in Five Images 29. Humanist Politics: the voter knows best. 29.​© Sadik Gulec/Shutterstock.com. 30. Humanist Economics: the customer is always right. 30.​© CAMERIQUE/ClassicStock/Corbis. 31. Humanist Aesthetics: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. (Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain in a special exhibition of modern art at the National Gallery of Scotland.) 31.​© Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images. 32. Humanist Ethics: if it feels good – do it! 32.​© Molly Landreth/Getty Images. 33. Humanist Education: think for yourself! 33.​The Thinker, 1880–81 (bronze), Rodin, Auguste, Burrell Collection, Glasgow © Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums)/Bridgeman Images.

Humanism in Five Images 29. Humanist Politics: the voter knows best. 29. © Sadik Gulec/ Shutterstock.com. 30. Humanist Economics: the customer is always right. 30. © CAMERIQUE/ ClassicStock/ Corbis. 31. Humanist Aesthetics: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. (Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain in a special exhibition of modern art at the National Gallery of Scotland.) 31. © Jeff J Mitchell/ Getty Images. 32. Humanist Ethics: if it feels good–do it! 32. © Molly Landreth/ Getty Images. 33. Humanist Education: think for yourself! 33. The Thinker, 1880–81 (bronze), Rodin, Auguste, Burrell Collection, Glasgow © Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums)/ Bridgeman Images.

Duchamp protestaba por el hecho de que el medio —el lienzo, mármol, madera o piedra— hubiera, hasta ese momento, dictado al artista cómo él o ella tenían que operar en el proceso de hacer una obra de arte. El medio se encontraba en primer plano y la tarea del artista era proyectar en él sus ideas a través de la pintura, la escultura o el dibujo. Duchamp quería darle la vuelta a la situación. Consideraba que el medio era secundario: lo principal y más importante era la idea. Solo después de que un artista hubiera desarrollado un concepto podía estar en posición de elegir un medio, y este tenía que ser aquel en el que la idea se pudiera expresar de la mejor manera.

It is weird when one of those copies is put out on the display to observe people taking the thing so seriously. You see hordes of unsmiling art-worshippers craning their heads around the object, staring at it for ages, standing back, looking at it from all angles. It’s a urinal! It’s not even the original. The art is in the idea, not the object.

I think there is a great deal to the idea of not doing a thing, but that when you do a thing, you don’t do it in five minutes or in five hours, but in five years. I think there’s an element in the slowness of the execution that adds to the possibility of producing something that will be durable in its expression, that will be considered important five centuries later.

FV: Hasn't all art, in a way, submitted to words - reduced itself to the literary...admitted its failure through all the catalogues and criticism, monographs and manifestos — ML: Explanations? FV: Exactly. All the artistry, now, seems expended in the rhetoric and sophistry used to differentiate, to justify its own existence now that so little is left to do. And who's to say how much of it ever needed doing in the first place? [...] Nothing's been done here but the re-writing of rules, in denial that the game was already won, long ago, by the likes of Duchamp, Arp, or Malevich. I mean, what's more, or, what's less to be said than a single black square? ML: Well, a triangle has fewer sides, I suppose. FV: Then a circle, a line, a dot. The rest is academic; obvious variations on an unnecessary theme, until you're left with just an empty canvas - which I'm sure has been done, too. ML: Franz Kline, wasn't it? Or, Yves Klein - didn't he once exhibit a completely empty gallery? No canvases at all. FV: I guess, from there, to not exhibit anything - to do absolutely nothing at all - would be the next "conceptual" act; the ultimate multimedia performance, where all artforms converge in negation and silence. And someone's probably already put their signature to that, as well. But even this should be too much, to involve an artist, a name. Surely nothing, done by no-one, is the greatest possible artistic achievement. Yet, that too has been done. Long, long ago. Before the very first artists ever walked the earth.

In the pub in Clerkenwell, it tickled Englishmen to ask, “Do you know the difference between Australia and yoghurt?” Or rather: Orstraylia and yogurt. They were hilarious, spluttering into their warm beer. There was another kind of man, whose methods were more refined. At parties, he would stand between Laura and the door asking, Which is your favorite Tarkovsky? Have you read Discipline and Punish? Whom do you rate more highly, Borges or Kundera? At confessional moments, angry names broke from him: Bellow, Roth. His brow might as well have been stamped “Frightened Early & Often.” Laura dressed him in a clean shirt rolled up at the elbows and placed him behind a desk in a room with no shadows. The luckless, passing one by one before him, wept hot, useless tears over their cancelled lives: they had mispronounced Coetzee or chosen Warhol over Duchamp.

I'm thinking now of Duchamp, his infamous "sculpture." How by turning a urinal, an object of stable and permanent utility, upside down, he radicalized its reception. By further naming it Fountain, he divested the object of its intended identity, rendering it with an unrecognizable new form. I hate him for this. I hate how he proved that the entire existence of a thing could be changed simply by flipping it over, revealing a new angle to its name, an act completed by nothing else but gravity, the very force that traps us on this earth. Mostly, I hate him because he was right. Because that's what was happening to Lan. The cancer had refigured not only her features, but the trajectory of her being. Lan, turned over, would be dust the way even the word dying is nothing like the word dead. Before Lan's illness, I found this act of malleability to be beautiful, that an object once upturned, becomes even more than its once-singular self. This agency for evolution, which once made me proud ... now betrays me.

This fetishistic transmutation separates Warhol from Duchamp and all his predecessors. For Duchamp, Dada, the Surrealists and all who worked to deconstruct representation and smash the work of art are still part of an avant-garde, and belong, in one way or another, to the critical utopia. For us moderns, at any rate, art has ceased to be an illusion; it has become an idea. It is no longer idolatric now, but critical and utopian, even when -- particularly when -- it demystifies its object or when, with Duchamp, it aestheticizes at a stroke, with its bottle-rack, the whole field of daily reality. This is still true of a whole segment of Pop Art, with its lyrical vision of popcorn or comic strips. Banality here becomes the criterion of aesthetic salvation, the means of exalting the creative subjectivity of the artist. Obliterating the object the better to mark out the ideal space of art and the ideal position of the subject. But Warhol belongs to no avant-garde and to no utopia. And if he settles utopia's hash, he does so because, instead of projecting it elsewhere, he takes up residence directly at its heart, that is, at the heart of nowhere. He is himself this no place: this is how he traverses the space of the avant-garde and, at a stroke, completes the cycle of the aesthetic. This is how he at last liberates us from art and its critical utopia.

metastases has become talk of a few months left. When I saw her in A&E, despite obvious suspicions, I didn’t say the word ‘cancer’ – I was taught that if you say the word even in passing, that’s all a patient remembers. Doesn’t matter what else you do, utter the C-word just once and you’ve basically walked into the cubicle and said nothing but ‘cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer’ for half an hour. And not that you’d ever want a patient to have cancer of course, I really really didn’t want her to. Friendly, funny, chatty – despite the litres of fluid in her abdomen splinting her breathing – we were like two long-lost pals finding themselves next to each other at a bus stop and catching up on all our years apart. Her son has a place at med school, her daughter is at the same school my sister went to, she recognized my socks were Duchamp. I stuck in a Bonanno catheter to take off the fluid and admitted her to the ward for the day team to investigate. And now she’s telling me what they found. She bursts into tears, and out come all the ‘will never’s, the crushing realization that ‘forever’ is just a word on the front of Valentine’s cards. Her son will qualify from medical school – she won’t be there. Her daughter will get married – she won’t be able to help with the table plan or throw confetti. She’ll never meet her grandchildren. Her husband will never get over it. ‘He doesn’t even know how to work the thermostat!’ She laughs, so I laugh. I really don’t know what to say. I want to lie and tell her everything’s going to be fine, but we both know that it won’t. I hug her. I’ve never hugged a patient before – in fact, I think I’ve only hugged a grand total of five people, and one of my parents isn’t on that list – but I don’t know what else to do. We talk about boring practical things, rational concerns, irrational concerns, and I can see from her eyes it’s helping her. It suddenly strikes me that I’m almost certainly the first person she’s opened up to about all this, the only one she’s been totally honest with. It’s a strange privilege, an honour I didn’t ask for. The other thing I realize is that none of her many, many concerns are about herself; it’s all about the kids, her husband, her sister, her friends. Maybe that’s the definition of a good person.

Duchamp likened an artist to a lewd monk. The poet must be a pure defiler of words, creating & destroying their meanings to release hidden or taboo truths within.

By shifting from the air to the ground, I sought to destroy any notion of scale as in Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp's Elevage de Poussiere. It's a picture which fascinates me and which I kept in my mind throughout the time I was working out there [in Kuwait]. The constant shift between the infinitely big and the infinitely small may disorientate the spectator. But it is a good illustration of our relationship to the world: we have at our disposal modern techniques for seeing everything, apprehending everything, yet we see nothing.

All that exists, or remains, of Duchamp’s stay in Buenos Aires is a readymade. Though of course his whole life was a readymade, which was his way of appeasing fate and at the same time sending out signals of distress. As Calvin Tomkins writes: As a wedding present for his sister Suzanne and his close friend Jean Crotti, who were married in Paris on April 14, 1919, Duchamp instructed the couple by letter to hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could “go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.” Clearly, then, Duchamp wasn’t just playing chess in Buenos Aires. Tompkins continues: This Unhappy Readymade, as he called it, might strike some newlyweds as an oddly cheerless wedding gift, but Suzanne and Jean carried out Duchamp’s instructions in good spirit; they took a photograph of the open book dangling in midair (the only existing record of the work, which did not survive its exposure to the elements), and Suzanne later painted a picture of it called Le Readymade malheureux de Marcel. As Duchamp later told Cabanne, “It amused me to bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then the rain, the wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea.” I take it back: all Duchamp did while he was in Buenos Aires was play chess. Yvonne, who was with him, got sick of all his play-science and left for France. According to Tompkins: Duchamp told one interviewer in later years that he had liked disparaging “the seriousness of a book full of principles,” and suggested to another that, in its exposure to the weather, “the treatise seriously got the facts of life.

Uvijek postoji pozitivna strana. Primijetite kako je Hitlerov brk izgledao smiješno na Charlieju Chaplinu. A kako je Chaplinov brk izgledao odvratno na Hitleru. Jedna jedina stvar, ako joj promijenimo kontekst, može biti razlogom za radost ili za tragediju. Imao je pravo Duchamp s pisoarom: kontekst je ono što stvara umjetnost i dramu, sreću i nesreću.

What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap

Impressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists who had stunned the world between 1870 and 1960 by entirely redefining art. VAN GOGH… SEURAT… PICASSO… MUNCH… MATISSE… MAGRITTE… KLIMT… KANDINSKY… JOHNS… HOCKNEY… GAUGUIN… DUCHAMP… DEGAS… CHAGALL… CÉZANNE… CASSATT… BRAQUE… ARP… ALBERS…

Impressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists who had stunned the world between 1870 and 1960 by entirely redefining art. VAN GOGH… SEURAT… PICASSO… MUNCH… MATISSE… MAGRITTE… KLIMT… KANDINSKY… JOHNS… HOCKNEY… GAUGUIN… DUCHAMP… DEGAS… CHAGALL… CÉZANNE… CASSATT… BRAQUE… ARP… ALBERS… This section terminated at one last architectural rib, and Langdon moved past it, finding himself in the final section of the library. The volumes here appeared to be dedicated to the group of artists that Edmond, in Langdon’s presence, liked to call “the school of boring dead white guys”—essentially, anything predating the modernist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Edmond, it was here that Langdon felt most at home, surrounded by the Old Masters. VERMEER… VELÁZQUEZ… TITIAN… TINTORETTO… RUBENS… REMBRANDT… RAPHAEL… POUSSIN… MICHELANGELO… LIPPI… GOYA… GIOTTO… GHIRLANDAIO… EL GRECO… DÜRER… DA VINCI… COROT… CARAVAGGIO… BOTTICELLI… BOSCH… The last few feet of the final shelf were dominated by a large glass cabinet, sealed with a heavy lock. Langdon peered through the glass and saw an ancient-looking leather box inside—a protective casing for a massive antique book. The text on the outside of the box was barely legible, but Langdon could see enough to decrypt the title of the volume inside. My God, he thought, now realizing why this book had been locked away from the hands of visitors. It’s probably worth a fortune. Langdon knew there were precious few early editions of this legendary artist’s work in existence. I’m not surprised Edmond invested in this, he thought, recalling that Edmond had once referred to this British artist as “the only premodern with any imagination.” Langdon disagreed, but he could certainly understand Edmond’s special affection for this artist. They are both cut from the same cloth. Langdon crouched down and peered through the glass at the box’s gilded engraving: The Complete Works of William Blake. William Blake, Langdon mused. The Edmond Kirsch of the eighteen hundreds. Blake had been an idiosyncratic genius—a prolific luminary whose painting style was so progressive that some believed he had magically glimpsed the future in his dreams. His symbol-infused religious illustrations depicted angels, demons, Satan, God, mythical creatures, biblical themes, and a pantheon of deities from his own spiritual hallucinations

¡Sólo faltaba que pudiésemos llamar "obra de arte" al urinario de Duchamp y nos prohibieran en nombre del buen gusto dar el mismo calificativo encomiástico a una faena de Curro Romero!

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 art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Quem poderá nos salvar? Um ser da selva amazônica. Jovem atleta dedicado à intensa atividade esportiva, sobretudo jiu-jítsu, Street-fighter e Mortal Kombat. Campeão de salto sobre girafa, pegar jacaré, achar agulha no palheiro. Bilionário, acostumado com privada acolchoada, carros importados, iates. Um ser que furou mais de mil poços em suas terras, metade jorra água e a outra metade jorra dinheiro. Não perde seu tempo conversando besteira, de 10 coisas que diz, 11 são sobre a nova reforma que fará na casa do cachorro. Um intelectual pós-moderno que foi expulso de Oxford e Harvard aos 12 anos, acostumado aos grandes centros urbanos contemporâneos como Nova Iorque, Feira de Santana, Petrolina e Luana Piovani. Seu sobrenome é um cruzamento de lorde inglês com banqueiro suíço. Diretas Já, estava lá, passeata de 68, estava lá, guerra de Canudos, guerra do Uruguai, independência do Brasil, lá estava ele. Um artista contemporâneo, multimídia, reciclador de vanguardas, um pós-duchamp-memorialista-parnaso-punk, habitue de vernissages em brechó, que já tentou de tudo: psicanálise, acupuntura, macrobiótica, drogas, dança, natação, ecologia, ioga, socialismo, candomblé, daime, boate gay, astrologia, surf, heavy metal. Já foi big brother, calouro, jurado, apresentador, modelo, atriz. Protagonizou todas as novelas, de todos os canais, inclusive as que não fez. Um super-herói que para reerguer o país vai comprar você e vender para você mesmo pelo preço que você pensa que vale.

Aware of the governor’s number-three offspring watching her manage the difficult task of conveying a bit of pastry into her biological mouth ~ her carved jade utensil with its long hook made it possible, but the point was to eat as gracefully as one would sans facial design ~ Inez grew irritated. She sensed the entire table watching her.

The major sighed. “It’s a cultural thing, Madam. Something to do with the embattled mentality they developed in the first centuries here when conditions were so harsh and they had no other way than the exoskeletal-mutations route. The only ones who think of full connection as essential are the ones who’ve gone to university on Pleth and had the visible exoskeletal mutations removed and acquired internal reinforcements — which, as I understand it, serves as a sort of rite of passage to adulthood.