Harold Rosenberg Quotes
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One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.
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In the United States, revolts tends to be directed against specific situations, rarely against the social structure as a whole.
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No dealer, curator, buyer or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry.
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Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.
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Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).
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The big moment came when it was decided to paint...Just To Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral.
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Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it.
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The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history.
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If being an anti-art artist is difficult, being an anti-art art historian is a hard position indeed. His doctrinal revolutionism brings forth nothing new in art but reenacts upheavals on the symbolic plane of language. It provides the consoling belief that overthrows are occurring as in the past, that barriers to creation are being surmounted, and that art is pursuing a radical purpose, even if it is only the purpose of doing away with itself.
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Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other.
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The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.
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Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani , is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.
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The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.
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A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.
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Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.
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For the artist, fulfillment of self consists not in marching in the ranks of the liberators but in being entered in the roll of the Masters. The artist tends to find himself in the position of a deserter from his social group or, at best, one who collaborates, with secret reservations.
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Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.
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The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.
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No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.
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American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.
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Greatness in art is always a by-product.
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Loiter in the neighborhood of a problem. After a while a solution strolls by.
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A painter with prestige among painters is bound to be discovered sooner or later.
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Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.
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Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.
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Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.
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An artist is a person who has invented an artist.
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Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work.
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The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.
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The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.
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