52 Quotes by Peter Schjeldahl

The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person – every person who is not clinically depressed!

Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.

The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist’s relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is a whole other subject. Beauty is an event. Beauty is something that happens. There is no such thing as a beautiful object or a beautiful woman.

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 and place. It’s to protect a soul. But to protect your soul, you have to have one to start with.

My problem with political art is not that it’s bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.

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 would you ever want to change it?

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 and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.

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, in that I don’t doubt my sanity; or, even if I do, I don’t have to be reassured.

Rembrandt was way ahead of his time. It’s as if he was painting an amateur theatrical, or a professional theatrical, in his studio. It’s a kind of performance.