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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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Peter Schjeldahl
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 20
Art Critic
Journalist
Poet
Fargo
North Dakota
Sometimes
Assurance
Never
Listened
Gifted
Artists
Position
Cassandra
Artist
Positioned
Tell
Impeccable
Truth
Prophecy

More quotes by 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.
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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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My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.
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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?
Peter Schjeldahl
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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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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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Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.
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Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.
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I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.
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To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.
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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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Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.
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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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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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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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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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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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