“By one means or another Duchamp affirms that the work is not a museum piece. It is not an object of adoration nor is it useful; it is an object to be invented and created. His interest – indeed, his admiration and nostalgia – for the religious painters of the Renaissance has the same origin. Duchamp is against the museum, not against the cathedral; against the ‘collection,’ not against an art that is founded on life. Once more Apollinaire has hit the mark: Duchamp’s purpose is to reconcile art and life, work and spectator. But the experience of other epochs cannot be repeated and Duchamp knows it. Art that is founded in life is socialized art, not social or socialist art; and still less is it an activity dedicated to the production of beautiful or purely decorative objects. Art founded in life means a poem by Mallarmé or a novel by Joyce; it is the most difficult art. An art that obliges the spectator or the reader to become himself an artist and a poet.”

(Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Donald Gardner, pp. 86–87)