Harold Rosenberg Quotes
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No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.
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The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.
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Greatness in art is always a by-product.
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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.
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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.
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American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.
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At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
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The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.
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Not only the artist but everyone 'becomes someone else' in becoming someone. One is thought about, thus invented. Or as Steinberg put it with memorable succinctness in his Cogito drawings, 'I think, therefore Descartes is.' One creates not oneself but another. Being is in the act.
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The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.
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They had enough. They wanted to enjoy their life.
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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.
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The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history.
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The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.
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In the United States, revolts tends to be directed against specific situations, rarely against the social structure as a whole.
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Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.
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Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.
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Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other.
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Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.
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Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.
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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.
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What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?
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It is not logical for art to be logical. Art goes against the grain of the times as readily as it goes with it and at the very same moment. Instead of seeking the nearest exit, art responds to a new situation by uncovering a labyrinth of problems.
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Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani, is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.