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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

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Peter Schjeldahl
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 20
Art Critic
Journalist
Poet
Fargo
North Dakota
Strong
Moments
Art
Light
Shed
Change
Subject
Enough
Subjects
Always
Somebody
Moment

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.
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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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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.
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Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.
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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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Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.
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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Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.
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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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
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Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.
Peter Schjeldahl
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Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.
Peter Schjeldahl