The artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.
AD REINHARDTThat’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.
More Ad Reinhardt Quotes
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So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
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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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As for a picture, if it isn’t worth a thousand words, the hell with it.
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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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My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.
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I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.
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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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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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Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.
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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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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 as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
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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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Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
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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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An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.
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Art is art. Everything else is everything else.
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The more an artist works the more there is to do.
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Art is not the spiritual side of business.
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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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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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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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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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Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.
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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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