Peter Schjeldahl Quotes
-
Artists are expected to talk about their work but writers aren't expected to talk about their writing.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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 people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child.
→ -
Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.
→ -
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.
→ -
I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.
→ -
Beauty is a physiological reaction. Beauty is not an object.
→ -
Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.
→ -
Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it.
→ -
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.
→ -
The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.
→ -
My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.
→ -
To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.
→ -
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.
→ -
A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.
→ -
Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.
→ -
Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.
→ -
There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.
→ -
Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.
→ -
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 possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.
→ -
Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.
→ -
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.
→ -
Education is this funny thing. You deal for several years with organized information, and then you go out into the world and you never see any of that ever again. There's no more organized information.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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?
→ -
Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.
→