Quotes from Harold Rosenberg

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

They had enough. They wanted to enjoy their life.

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

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.

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.

Action Painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The individual' is an idea like other ideas.