52 Quotes by Peter Schjeldahl

People make the mistake of supposing that genius is complicated. It is the opposite. We regular folks are complicated — tied in knots of ambivalence and befogged with uncertainties. Genius has the economy of a machine with a minimum of moving parts. Everything about Picasso came to bear when he drew a line.

I retain, but suspend, my personal taste to deal with the panoply of the art I see. I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work: “What would I like about this if I liked it?” I may come around; I may not. Failing that, I wonder, What must the people who like this be like? Anthropology.

Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.

Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.

Comic books, graphic novels, involve constant toggling and it’s hard work. You get tired reading comic books, but you never get tired looking at pictures or reading words.

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.

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

Beauty is a physiological reaction. Beauty is not an object.

Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.