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Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Harold Rosenberg

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Harold Rosenberg
Age: 72 †
Born: 1906
Born: February 2
Died: 1978
Died: July 11
Art Critic
Art Historian
Journalist
Philosopher
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Writer
New York City
New York
Art
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Subversion
Today
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Conservatives

More quotes by Harold Rosenberg

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Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.
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Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.
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Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.
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In the United States, revolts tends to be directed against specific situations, rarely against the social structure as a whole.
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Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.
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Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.
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Loiter in the neighborhood of a problem. After a while a solution strolls by.
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The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.
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No dealer, curator, buyer or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry.
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Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.
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An artist is a person who has invented an artist.
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The big moment came when it was decided to paint...Just To Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral.
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No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.
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Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other.
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In reality, however, an artist is a product of art
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American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.
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How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.
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Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.
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Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.
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Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani , is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.
Harold Rosenberg