Harold Rosenberg
Harold Rosenberg
Harold Rosenbergwas an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. Rosenberg is best known for his art criticism. Beginning in the early 1960s he became art Critic for the New Yorker magazine...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth2 February 1906
CountryUnited States of America
mean artist opposites
The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of objects, the artist today perfects the means suited to his particular work.
art museums ongoing
The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.
art past purpose
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.
artist biographies painting
A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.
art tradition paradox
Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.
addiction revolution permanence
Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.
art practice silence
One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.
creating self engaged
Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.
change stars past
America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.
determination degrees critics
No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.
practice conservative individual
The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.
america stories metamorphosis
The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.
struggle self numbers
Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).
depressing art games
Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.