Harold Rosenberg Quotes

Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.

The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.

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.

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.

Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which ... can be dispensed with.

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.

How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.

They had enough. They wanted to enjoy their life.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

Loiter in the neighborhood of a problem. After a while a solution strolls by.

The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work.

Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other.

Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

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.

Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work.

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.

Co-operating critics comb the studios like big-league scouts, prepared to spot the art of the future and to take lead in establishing reputations. Art historians stand by ready with cameras and notebooks to make sure every novel detail is safe for the record. The tradition of the new has reduced all other traditions to triviality ...

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).

Greatness in art is always a by-product.

The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.

In the United States, revolts tends to be directed against specific situations, rarely against the social structure as a whole.

The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.

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.

Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.

The struggle to make an absolute statement in an individually conceived vocabulary accounts for the profound tensions inherent in the best modern work.

Cease to regard the canvas as a surface on which to paint a picture, but instead as a surface on which to record an event

America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.

A painter with prestige among painters is bound to be discovered sooner or later.

The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.

The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.