Harold Rosenberg Quotes

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

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

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it.

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.

Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which... can be dispensed with.

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

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

Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.

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

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.

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.

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

A painter with prestige among painters is bound to be discovered sooner or later.

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.

No dealer, curator, buyer or critic, or any existing combination of these, can be depended on to produce a reputation that is more than a momentary flurry.

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

The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.

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

Greatness in art is always a by-product.

Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other.

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

The struggle to make an absolute statement in an individually conceived vocabulary accounts for the profound tensions inherent in the best modern work.

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

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

The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.

Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.

In the United States, revolts tends to be directed against specific situations, rarely against the social structure as a whole.

Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.

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

cease to regard the canvas as a surface on which to paint a picture, but instead as a surface on which to record an event