Harold Rosenberg Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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).

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it.

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.

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

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.

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.

American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

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

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

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.

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

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

The internationalization of art becomes a factor contributing to the estrangement of art from the artist. The sum of works of all times and places stands against him as an entity with objectives and values of its own. In turn, since becoming aware of the organized body of artworks as the obstacle to his own aesthetic self-affirmation, the artist is pushed toward anti-intellectualism and willful dismissal of the art of the past.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.