Harold Rosenberg Quotes

Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are.

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

The whole thrust of modern art, as far as I understand it, is expanding the role of the artist as a kind of esthetician, someone who actually spends his time, is trained in a way to deal with qualities.

We have this idea of artists being on the fringe and being debauched and strange. I don't think that people who commit themselves to classical arts should be exempt from that.

In Japan, I am famous in certain special circles - mainly as someone who is trying to break down and enlighten the conventions of Japanese art.

The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky - these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.

Art is not a democracy, in fact art is the enemy of democracy

I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.

In the court of the movie Owner, none criticized, none doubted. And none dared speak of art. In the Owner's mind art was a synonym for bankruptcy. The movie Owners are the only troupe in the history of entertainment that has never been seduced by the adventure of the entertainment world.

When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.

In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

I'm a text artist. It's an unsung art form because it's so ahead of its time.

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

All art is based on non-conformity.

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.

When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.