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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
Something
Experience
Subject
Artist
Subjects
Makes
Objects
Art
Events
Happens
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Beholder
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Beauty
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Thing
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More quotes by Peter Schjeldahl

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