The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.
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.
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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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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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 artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.
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We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.
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Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
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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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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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I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality.
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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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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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So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
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The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
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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.
AD REINHARDT






