Occupation: Art Critic Birth: March 20, 1942
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 wo….
Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast..
To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal..
There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera..
Everybody's got plants, but most are just growing weeds. The cultivated have greater gardens, finer and gaudier gardens..
Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa..
Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation..
Your medium has to be alive to you, no matter what you do..
Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque "Wilbur," thereby becoming "Orville" in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of co….
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 wa….
Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion..
It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing..
There's art that I would readily buy if I could afford it, and enjoy, but would never write about because it doesn't seem significant..
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 complet….
Artists are expected to talk about their work but writers aren't expected to talk about their writing..
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 contrar….
I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything..
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 mut….
The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera ha….
I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance..
I have painted enough to have a lot of respect for mediocre painters. It's really hard..