Quote

To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.

Peter Schjeldahl

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Peter Schjeldahl
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 20
Art Critic
Journalist
Poet
Fargo
North Dakota
Verbal
Entirely
Artists
Greatest
Almost
Artist

More quotes by Peter Schjeldahl

Image
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
Image
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
Image
I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.
Peter Schjeldahl
Image
Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.
Peter Schjeldahl
Image
My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.
Peter Schjeldahl
Image
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.
Peter Schjeldahl
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.
Peter Schjeldahl
Image
Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.
Peter Schjeldahl
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed!
Peter Schjeldahl
Image
Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it.
Peter Schjeldahl
Image
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
Image
The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist's relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is a whole other subject. Beauty is an event. Beauty is something that happens. There is no such thing as a beautiful object or a beautiful woman.
Peter Schjeldahl
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.
Peter Schjeldahl
Image
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