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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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Peter Schjeldahl
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 20
Art Critic
Journalist
Poet
Fargo
North Dakota
Actually
Art
Everything
Writing
Covering
Ass
Interested
Learned
More quotes by Peter Schjeldahl
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
It's my duty to sell the ideas. But there's always a question when it comes to beauty.
Peter Schjeldahl
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
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
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
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
Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it.
Peter Schjeldahl
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
With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.
Peter Schjeldahl
Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.
Peter Schjeldahl
Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.
Peter Schjeldahl
Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.
Peter Schjeldahl
To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.
Peter Schjeldahl
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
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
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
My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.
Peter Schjeldahl
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
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
I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.
Peter Schjeldahl
