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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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Peter Schjeldahl
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 20
Art Critic
Journalist
Poet
Fargo
North Dakota
Significance
Whose
Beautiful
Someone
Work
Think
Thinking
Iconoclast
Tremendous

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed!
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It's my duty to sell the ideas. But there's always a question when it comes to beauty.
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Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.
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The artist is a strange being. I think it's safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.
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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.
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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.
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Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.
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Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.
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I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.
Peter Schjeldahl
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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.
Peter Schjeldahl
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Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.
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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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With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.
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.
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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?
Peter Schjeldahl
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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.
Peter Schjeldahl
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To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.
Peter Schjeldahl