Peter Schjeldahl Quotes
Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.
Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.
What I want to know from students, and I ask them right away, is, 'What do you want? I don't care what it is. I want to help you get it.
You could say that clinical depression is an incapacity to aesthetic response. It's like there's a constant agreement within ourselves, a kind of mutual understanding between ourselves and the world.
I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.
I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I'd be of no use. I like to say I'm a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.
Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque "Wilbur," thereby becoming "Orville" in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of conventional representation.
I'm absolutely convinced that people cannot look and read at the same time. Not any more than you can kneel and jump at the same time. It's a completely different physiological setting.
Comic books, graphic novels, involve constant toggling and it's hard work. You get tired reading comic books, but you never get tired looking at pictures or reading words.
All artists and creative people are basically unhappy people. If you were happy, that would mean you were content with the world as it was and why would you ever want to change it?
Artists are sometimes in a position to tell the truth, but they're positioned as a Cassandra. They're gifted with impeccable prophecy and the assurance of never being listened to.
For Rembrandt, reality is role-playing.... Everyone is portrayed in relation to a social hierarchy.
Rembrandt was way ahead of his time. It's as if he was painting an amateur theatrical, or a professional theatrical, in his studio. It's a kind of performance.
I have a total responsibility to the reader. The reader has to trust me and never feel betrayed.
Minimalism itself had a very strong iconoclast impulse. You think of the sixties as loose and liberated, but in art it was actually quite the contrary.
The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed!
Everybody's got plants, but most are just growing weeds. The cultivated have greater gardens, finer and gaudier gardens.
A lot of writers and artists are like chefs who eat their own cooking in the kitchen and then deliver an empty plate with assurances that it's great.
My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.
There's art that I would readily buy if I could afford it, and enjoy, but would never write about because it doesn't seem significant.
It's my duty to sell the ideas. But there's always a question when it comes to beauty.
I have painted enough to have a lot of respect for mediocre painters. It's really hard.
There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers.
Artists are expected to talk about their work but writers aren't expected to talk about their writing.
There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.
A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.
It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.
Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it.
Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.
I do have pleasure when I'm writing. I mean, I'm aware of pleasure. And sometimes I make myself laugh, with a joke or something; or I feel gleeful.
With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.
