Peter Schjeldahl famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Black And White #Color #Temperature
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.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Real #Being Alone #Blessing
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.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Independent #Passion #Men
Why do you need street smarts? Shrewdness? Toughness? It's to protect something soft that is going to be in danger if it's exposed at the wrong time and place. It's to protect a soul. But to protect your soul, you have to have one to start with.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Smart #Soul #Shrewdness
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

#Desire #Care #Want
Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Artist #Vices #Students
Education is this funny thing. You deal for several years with organized information, and then you go out into the world and you never see any of that ever again. There's no more organized information.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Years #Funny Things #World
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.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Art #Children #Discipline
A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Teaching #Dancing #Trying
Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Animal #Joy #Mind
Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Hate #Joy #Matisse
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.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Photography #Art #Memories
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.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Photography #Art #Eye
With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Art #Criticism #Insane
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.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Agreement #Understanding #World
I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I'd be of no use. I like to say I'm a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Rivers #Needs #Use
Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Art #Strong #Light
I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Mean #Thinking #Conscious
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

#People #Doubt #Degrees
Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.
-- Peter Schjeldahl
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.
-- Peter Schjeldahl

#Strong #Art #Thinking

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