Quotes from Harold Rosenberg

Intellectuals are a herd of independent minds

A writer who lives long enough becomes an academic subject and almost qualified to teach it himself. –

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

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

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.

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

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.

In reality, however, an artist is a product of art

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

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