Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.
There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.
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.
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.
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.
Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.
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.
I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.
A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.
It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.
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.
There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers.
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.
For Rembrandt, reality is role-playing.... Everyone is portrayed in relation to a social hierarchy.
It's my duty to sell the ideas. But there's always a question when it comes to beauty.
I have a total responsibility to the reader. The reader has to trust me and never feel betrayed.
I have painted enough to have a lot of respect for mediocre painters. It's really hard.
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.
Comic books, graphic novels, involve constant toggling and it's hard work. You get tired reading comic books, but you never get tired looking at pictures or reading words.
All artists and creative people are basically unhappy people. If you were happy, that would mean you were content with the world as it was and why would you ever want to change it?
Everybody's got plants, but most are just growing weeds. The cultivated have greater gardens, finer and gaudier gardens.
The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed!
A lot of writers and artists are like chefs who eat their own cooking in the kitchen and then deliver an empty plate with assurances that it's great.
Beauty is a physiological reaction. Beauty is not an object.
Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.
