“We do not have a record of any games played by Duchamp during these early years in New York, but, in Rongwrong, a magazine he edited that came out in only a single issue, he published the transcription of a game played between his friends Henri-Pierre Roché and Francis Picabia. The stakes were high: if Roché won, Picabia would have to stop publishing 391, a journal that had come out in four prior issues; if Picabia won, Roché would have to cease the publication of The Blindman, a review that had appeared only twice. After thirty-four moves in an unorthodox but interesting game, Roché resigned, and Blindman ceased publication.”

(Francis M. Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, p. 10.)

“The designer is therefore the artist of today, not because he is a genius but because he works in such a way as to re-establish contact between art and the public, because he has the humility and ability to respond to whatever demand is made of him by the society in which he lives, because he knows his job, and the ways and means of solving each problem of design. And finally because he responds to the human needs of his time, and helps people to solve certain problems without stylistic preconceptions or false notions of artistic dignity derived from the schism of the arts.”

(Bruno Munari, Design as Art, trans. Patrick Creagh, p. 32.)

cf. Apollinaire on Duchamp:

“Just as a work by Cimabue was paraded through the streets, our century has seen Blériot’s airplane, bearing the weight of humanity, of thousands of years of endeavour, and of necessary art triumphantly paraded through Paris to the Arts-et-Métiers museum. It will perhaps fall to an artist as free of aesthetic considerations and as concerned with energy as Marcel Duchamp to reconcile Art and the People.”

(The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Read, p. 75.)

“I must add one more word on what it is to consume because the Western industrial world is famous for its ‘consumer goods’ and they are not at all what I mean. Again, the difference is in the form of the exchange, a thing we can feel most concretely in the form of the goods themselves. I remember the time I went to my first rare-book fair and saw how the first editions of Thoreau and Whitman and Crane had been carefully packaged in heat-shrunk plastic with the price tags on the inside. Somehow the simple addition of air-tight plastic bags had transformed the books from vehicles of liveliness into commodities, like bread made with chemicals to keep it from perishing. In commodity exchange it’s as if the buyer and the seller where both in plastic bags; there’s none of the contact of a gift exchange. There is neither motion nor emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn’t consume anything or involve one person with another. Consumer goods are consumed by their owners, not by their exchange.

The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire. He is a stranger seduced into feeding on the drippings of someone else’s capital without benefit of its inner nourishment, and he is hungry at the end of the meal, depressed and weary as we all feel when lust has dragged us from the house and led us to nothing.”

(Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, pp. 11–12. Cf. Duchamp’s eau et gaz.)

“In his designs for bookbindings and jackets, Duchamp often made user of the continuity between front and back: in the chess book L’Opposition et les cases conjuguées sont reconciliées, 1932; in the designs for Hebdomeros and Ubu, executed by Mary Reynolds, 1935; in the cover made for Anthologie de l’humour noir, 1940; in First Papers of Surrealism, 1942; in VVV Almanac for 1943; in Le Surréalisme en 1947; in Jaquette, the rejected jacket design for Rudi Blesh’s Modern Art USA; and in his own exhibition catalogues for Pasadena, 1963 (Bib. 70), and Cordier & Ekstrom, 1965 (Bib. 72). In 1922, Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy planned an endless book: ‘a round book i.e. without beginning or end . .  with the back made of rings around which the pages turn’ (Bib. 24, no. 66). This idea took shape as Some French Moderns Says McBride (Bib. 6)”

(Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Portable Museum, note 22, p. 162.)