Occupation: Art Critic Birth: March 20, 1942
For Rembrandt, reality is role-playing.... Everyone is portrayed in relation to a social hierarchy..
A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing..
My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics..
I have a total responsibility to the reader. The reader has to trust me and never feel betrayed..
Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other..
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 ….
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 an….
Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys..
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 ab….
Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind..
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 ….
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..
Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience..
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,….
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..
An artist, in my experience, is a man or woman of unusual talent and peculiar, highly individual sensibility, with an independent and probably contra….
Beauty is a physiological reaction. Beauty is not an object..
With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane..
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 tha….
There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaith….
Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it..