Harold Rosenberg Quotes

The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.

American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.

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.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

The big moment came when it was decided to paint...Just To Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art

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.

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.

The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.

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.

Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

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.

Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work.

Loiter in the neighborhood of a problem. After a while a solution strolls by.

Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).

Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.

The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.