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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.

Peter Schjeldahl

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Peter Schjeldahl
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 20
Art Critic
Journalist
Poet
Fargo
North Dakota
Art
Events
Happens
Happen
Beholder
Beautiful
Beauty
Event
Whole
Eye
Object
Thing
Woman
Relation
Something
Experience
Subject
Artist
Subjects
Makes
Objects

More quotes by 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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It's my duty to sell the ideas. But there's always a question when it comes to beauty.
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Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.
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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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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.
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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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My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.
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Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.
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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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I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.
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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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Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.
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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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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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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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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
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To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.
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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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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