Harold Rosenberg (1906 – 1978)
American art critic, educator and historian.
The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.
Greatness in art is always a by-product.
Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.
As with other modern artists, his readings provided not an organized outlook but a kind of metaphysical hum that surrounded his mental operations.
Exhibitions of minority art are often intended to make the minority itself more aware of its collective experience. Reinforcing the common memory of miseries and triumphs will, it is expected, strengthen the unity of the group and its determination to achieve a better future. But emphasizing shared experience as opposed to the artist's consciousness of self (which includes his personal and unshared experience of masterpieces) brings to the fore the tension in the individual artist between being an artist and being a minority artist.
The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.
For the artist, fulfillment of self consists not in marching in the ranks of the liberators but in being entered in the roll of the Masters. The artist tends to find himself in the position of a deserter from his social group — or, at best, one who collaborates, with secret reservations.
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.