We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.
AD REINHARDTMaking it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective.
More Ad Reinhardt Quotes
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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.
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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.
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An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.
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Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.
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Art is not the spiritual side of business.
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The more an artist works the more there is to do.
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As for a picture, if it isn’t worth a thousand words, the hell with it.
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I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.
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I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality.
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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
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So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
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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.
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Making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive – non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective.
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Art is art. Everything else is everything else.
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The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.
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It 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.
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The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.
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I 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.
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There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.
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Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
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Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.
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That’s an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.
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