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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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Peter Schjeldahl
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 20
Art Critic
Journalist
Poet
Fargo
North Dakota
Constant
Within
Clinical
Understanding
Incapacity
Kind
Aesthetic
Like
Agreement
World
Mutual
Depression
Response

More quotes by 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.
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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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Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.
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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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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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Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it.
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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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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.
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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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Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.
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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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My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.
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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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Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.
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I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.
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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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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?
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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.
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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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To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.
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