Art?

“Art is what an artist says it is.” Marcel Duchamp

This statement, found in Drucker (and in lots of places online) intrigued me, especially as Duchamp’s urinal is so often referred to on the ART317 forum, so I decided to investigate him just enough that I got an overall gist of his philosophies. The sites I used are http://www.toutfait.com and http://www.marcelduchamp.net. In the 30 minutes I allowed myself to search these two sites I found:

He was interested in concepts of chance and metaphor, projection and eroticism as metaphor.
“Ideas such as the infra-thin, ambivalence, ambiguity, and ephemerality”
Rejected “the high seriousness prevalent in artistic circles in his own time”
“Duchamp’s views on avoiding repetition and on the irrelevance of style or the visual”

..... I'm thinking that 30 minuted is no where near sufficient for getting any sort of gist about this man's philosophies, (perhaps this site would be more succinct - for another day and more time) but I like his Art definition.