Peter Schjeldahl Quotes about Art

My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.

My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.

Art, Political, Problem

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

Beautiful, Art, Eye

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

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

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

"Looking Back" by Peter Schjeldahl, www.newyorker.com. March 21, 2005.

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

"Seeing and Reading" by Peter Schjeldahl, www.newyorker.com. July 26, 2004.

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

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

Art, Writing, Covering

Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

Source: www.guernicamag.com