Quotes from Peter Schjeldahl

Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.

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.

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 completely different physiological setting.

Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.

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?

I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I'd be of no use. I like to say I'm a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.

Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it.

It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.

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

With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.

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 contrary.

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.

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

Artists are expected to talk about their work but writers aren't expected to talk about their writing.

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.

What I want to know from students, and I ask them right away, is, 'What do you want? I don't care what it is. I want to help you get it.

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

Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.