Harold Rosenberg - Creation Quotes

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If being an anti-art artist is difficult, being an anti-art art historian is a hard position indeed. His doctrinal revolutionism brings forth nothing new in art but reenacts upheavals on the symbolic plane of language. It provides the consoling belief that overthrows are occurring as in the past, that barriers to creation are being surmounted, and that art is pursuing a radical purpose, even if it is only the purpose of doing away with itself.

Harold Rosenberg
Only through apprehending, by means of present-day creations, how art is created, can the creations of other periods be genuinely appreciated.

Harold Rosenberg
The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.

Harold Rosenberg
Action Painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic.

Harold Rosenberg
How much the work of an artist owes to an art movement to which he belongs can never be determined exactly, if only because the movement derives its character from the individual creations of its members.

Harold Rosenberg
As with other modern artists, his readings provided not an organized outlook but a kind of metaphysical hum that surrounded his mental operations. His thinking was truly systematic only when it dealt with achieving the reality of the art object as a "creation out of nothing," which was a common theme in New York art after the last war and the break with the European past.

Harold Rosenberg