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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

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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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It's my duty to sell the ideas. But there's always a question when it comes to beauty.
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Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.
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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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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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Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.
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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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The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed!
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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