Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
AD REINHARDTArt is too serious to be taken seriously.
AD REINHARDTMaking it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective.
AD REINHARDTArt is art. Everything else is everything else.
AD REINHARDTThere is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.
AD REINHARDTIf 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 REINHARDTThe 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 REINHARDTThe 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 REINHARDTArt is not the spiritual side of business.
AD REINHARDTWe all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.
AD REINHARDTNow 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 REINHARDTI like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.
AD REINHARDTAn artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.
AD REINHARDTI 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 REINHARDTThe artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.
AD REINHARDTIt is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that ‘first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.
AD REINHARDTOnly a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.
AD REINHARDT