black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Ad Reinhardt

The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea… The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
AD REINHARDT

Art Business Idea Selling Spectacle Themselves Ugliest
As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.
AD REINHARDT

Artist Color Eliminate Interesting Much Pretty Symbolic
As for a picture, if it isn’t worth a thousand words, the hell with it.
AD REINHARDT

Design Feeling Hell Picture Software Thousand Word
Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are.
AD REINHARDT

Art Artist Connected Country Exhibition Museum Outside Painting School
So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
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Department Everything Facility Now Worst
We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.
AD REINHARDT

Artist Ask Call Name Nobody Ourselves
The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.
AD REINHARDT

Art Country Department Happened Job Reflect University
The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
AD REINHARDT

Art Artist Businessman Painting Uglier
Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.
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Anything Artist Good Idea Need Thinking
Making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective.
AD REINHARDT

Abstract Empire Happen Purer Say Speaking Way What
The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more
AD REINHARDT

Abstract Art Fifty Nothing Present Year
The more an artist works the more there is to do.
AD REINHARDT

Artist Interesting More Work
I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.
AD REINHARDT

Academic Desire Marketplace Opposite Tried Try Wish
If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you’d want to suggest someplace, but there’s no place. I wouldn’t know where to send a student to study.
AD REINHARDT

Painting Someplace Student Study Suggest Want
I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes.
AD REINHARDT

Art Chinese Class Especially History Painting People Person
I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality.
AD REINHARDT

Black Conventionality Emphasize Idea Intellectuality Want

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

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Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

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