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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.
Peter Schjeldahl
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Peter Schjeldahl
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 20
Art Critic
Journalist
Poet
Fargo
North Dakota
Art
Always
Assess
Discuss
Insane
Criticism
Possibility
Beauty
Difficult
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
Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.
Peter Schjeldahl
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
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
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
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
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
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
Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.
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
Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.
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
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
Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it.
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
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
Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.
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
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
Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.
Peter Schjeldahl
