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Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.

Peter Schjeldahl

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Peter Schjeldahl
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 20
Art Critic
Journalist
Poet
Fargo
North Dakota
Mind
Concept
Concepts
Joy
Animal
Beauty

More quotes by Peter Schjeldahl

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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.
Peter Schjeldahl
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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.
Peter Schjeldahl
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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.
Peter Schjeldahl
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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.
Peter Schjeldahl
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Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.
Peter Schjeldahl
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You don't need everybody to agree with you, but you do need a few people. And by this point I have a fairly high degree of confidence in my judgment, in that I don't doubt my sanity or, even if I do, I don't have to be reassured.
Peter Schjeldahl
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Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.
Peter Schjeldahl
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My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.
Peter Schjeldahl
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To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.
Peter Schjeldahl
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Everything I've learned about art was (a) because I was actually interested, or (b) I was actually interested in covering my ass because of what I was writing about.
Peter Schjeldahl
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It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.
Peter Schjeldahl
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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.
Peter Schjeldahl
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Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.
Peter Schjeldahl
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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.
Peter Schjeldahl
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Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.
Peter Schjeldahl
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It's my duty to sell the ideas. But there's always a question when it comes to beauty.
Peter Schjeldahl
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I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.
Peter Schjeldahl
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Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.
Peter Schjeldahl
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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.
Peter Schjeldahl
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Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it.
Peter Schjeldahl