Peter Schjeldahl Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  46 Copy quote

• 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, Talking, Brain

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Art, Political, Problem

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Animal, Joy, Mind

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• 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

  Passion, Independent, Artist

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Being Alone, Creativity

  9 Copy quote

• A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Teaching, Dancing, Trying

  12 Copy quote

• Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Hate, Joy, Matisse

  Peter Schjeldahl (2008). “Let's see: writings on art from the New Yorker”

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  7 Copy quote

• To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Artist

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Vices, Students

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Agreement, Understanding, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I'd be of no use. I like to say I'm a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Rivers, Needs, Use

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• You don't need everybody to agree with you, but you do need a few people. And by this point I have a fairly high degree of confidence in my judgment, in that I don't doubt my sanity; or, even if I do, I don't have to be reassured.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  People, Doubt, Degrees

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Mean, Thinking, Conscious

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Your medium has to be alive to you, no matter what you do.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Alive, Matter, No Matter What

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Artists are expected to talk about their work but writers aren't expected to talk about their writing.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Writing, Artist, Expected

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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