My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics. Peter Schjeldahl More Quotes by Peter Schjeldahl More Quotes From Peter Schjeldahl 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 add 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 discipline children art 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 vices artist students The problem of making artists talk about their work is that when they're making their work the left-brain is shut off. So if you talk to an artist about it, you're talking to someone who wasn't there. It's hopeless. Peter Schjeldahl artist brain talking 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 being-alone creativity real 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. Peter Schjeldahl eye beautiful art To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal. Peter Schjeldahl artist Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other. Peter Schjeldahl 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 understanding agreement world 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 memories art 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 eye photography art 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. Peter Schjeldahl covering writing art Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys. Peter Schjeldahl matisse hate joy Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind. Peter Schjeldahl mind joy animal 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 artist I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything. Peter Schjeldahl conscious mean thinking A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing. Peter Schjeldahl dancing teaching trying 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 needs 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 funny-things world years I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance. Peter Schjeldahl mask distance critics
