For Marcel Duchamp the question of art and life, as well as any other question capable of dividing us at the present moment, does not arise.
—André Breton, in Littérature, 1922
He approaches life as he does the chessboard: the gambits fascinate him without leading him to imagining that there is a meaning behind it all which might make it necessary for him to believe in something… . Duchamp’s attitude is that life is a melancholy joke, an indecipherable nonsense, not worth the trouble of investigating.
—Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 1964
What accounts for the immense intellectual prestige which the mystique of Marcel Duchamp has enjoyed in this country—if only in certain circles, to be sure—for more decades than most of us can now remember? I speak at the outset of the artist’s mystique, rather than of his art, for it is not so much Duchamp’s art as the penumbra of ideas and mystifications associated with it that has cast a spell over the minds of so many otherwise intelligent people, both in the art world and beyond it. As an artist, after all, Duchamp produced one of the smallest oeuvresin the modernist canon. He was always a lazy revolutionary. His insouciance was often a mask of indolence, his indolence a reflection of the accidie or ennui he perfected as a way of life and somehow managed to endow with an aura of sanctity. That it was a sanctity of
