Duchamp: “I don’t believe in positions.”
Interviewer: “But what do you believe in?”
Duchamp: “Nothing, of course! The word ‘belief’ is another error. It’s like the word ‘judgment’, they’re both horrid ideas.”
Interviewer: “Nevertheless, you believe in yourself?”
Duchamp: “No. I don’t believe in the word ‘being’. The idea of being is a human invention. It’s an essential concept, which doesn’t exist at all in reality, and which I don’t believe in.”

What happens when art becomes an expression of the mind rather than the eye or hand? Are skill and taste redundant if a clever idea is taken to its extreme? These are the experiments which provocateur, rhetorician and artist Marcel Duchamp initiated with his first “readymade”, “Bicycle Wheel”, in 1913 and its successor “Fountain” in 1917. The results remain contested today.