Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp
Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is an irony that destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative.
You can't copyright a urinal. But you could probably copyright a sculpture of a urinal. And like Duchamp's famous work, code is both, at the same time.
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.
There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I'll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.
Appropriation was the language of my generation in many ways. It came out of Duchamp, Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein.
We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.
I don't know if you've noticed it. But Duchamp was magnificent.
In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.
