Peter Schjeldahl Quotes

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.

Beauty is a willing loss of mental control, surrendered to organic process that is momentarily under the direction of an exterior object. The object is not thought and felt about, exactly. It seems to use my capacities to think and feel itself.

Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child.

Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.

With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.

Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.

I'm absolutely convinced that people cannot look and read at the same time. Not any more than you can kneel and jump at the same time. It's a completely different physiological setting.

Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it.

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.

Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it's seen from only one side.

There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.

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.

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.

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.

An artist, in my experience, is a man or woman of unusual talent and peculiar, highly individual sensibility, with an independent and probably contrary mind, driven by mysterious passions for which another word is neurosis. In getting from point A to point B, the neurotic goes via point Q. It's in that roundabout that people are either completely crippled and hopeless in life, or highly creative.

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.

I retain, but suspend, my personal taste to deal with the panoply of the art I see. I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work: "What would I like about this if I liked it?" I may come around; I may not. Failing that, I wonder, What must the people who like this be like? Anthropology.

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.

The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.

I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.

Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.

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.

Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.

It's my duty to sell the ideas. But there's always a question when it comes to beauty.

Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.

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.

It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.