Michael Kimmelman > Quotes

“Under ordinary circumstances, bad art naturally gets sorted out and disappears. That is how history works when it is left alone to do its job. The paradox of the culture wars is that they have made celebrities out of some artists who would otherwise vanish. Censorship has become a growth industry. This may be the best argument, in the end, for unfettered freedom of expression.”
― Michael Kimmelman

“Art provides us with clues about how to live our lives more fully...about how creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make daily living a masterpiece.”
― Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

“[Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008] helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.”
― Michael Kimmelman

“Novelty in creative endeavors usually arises from routine -- you have to be familiar with something before you know what is novel.”
― Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

“The ecstasy of creation is when, as an artist, you are one with and totally absorbed in the act. It is the same experience whether it is the act of painting, making music, or writing. The experience really obliterates all other considerations at that moment. The act of re-creating the visual experience o the models in front of me is absolutely absorbing, leaving no room for extraneous thoughts, sexual or otherwise. My routine is my way of controlling hysteria.”
― Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

“Their uselessness becomes their asset: they turn into totems and fragments of the lost worlds they came from.”
― Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

“Children dawdle to look at what adults hurry past. They take time because they have time. They see the world through fresh eyes. Maybe this is why artists who push us to look more carefully at simple things may also strike a slightly melancholic note. They remind us of a childlike condition of wonderment that we abandoned once we became adults and that we need art to highlight occasionally, if only to recall for us what we have given up.”
― Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

“...[the conception of] art as potentially something other than an object made for a pedestal or a wall and passively contemplated. It might be a collective enterprise, a happening. Everyone, and anyone, might participate in making a work of art.”
― Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

“All these wild things go on in the world,' says Pearlstein. 'What happens in the studio, I can control. I can do something constructive in the world. That's a lesson I learned in the army: in war, everything is destruction, so anything else we may do can be a gesture of opposition.”
― Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

“Art on one level already may be a state of mind. Of course it is first of all a physical object with which we interact in the moment. But after we have seen a work, what do we take away except a memory of it? And memory is thought, a mental seed planted by the artist, which is reproduced in as many different variations as the number of people in whom the memory exists. What makes art good is partly its power to proliferate as a variable memory, an intangible concept, filtered through individual consciousness.”
― Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa

“Collecting is a way to bring order to the world, which is what museums, our public collectors, do.”
― Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa