Harold Rosenberg

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

— Harold Rosenberg

Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one…

— Harold Rosenberg

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.

— Harold Rosenberg

Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it…

— Harold Rosenberg

The internationalization of art becomes a factor contributing to the estrangement of art from the artist. The sum of works of all…

— Harold Rosenberg

Both art and the artist lack identity and define themselves only through their encounter with each other.

— Harold Rosenberg

It is not logical for art to be logical. Art goes against the grain of the times as readily as it goes…

— Harold Rosenberg

The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.

— Harold Rosenberg

The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.

— Harold Rosenberg

Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani , is carried on not to perpetuate ancient…

— Harold Rosenberg

Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts…

— Harold Rosenberg

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.

— Harold Rosenberg

The skills of the modern artist are the opposite of those of the craftsman: instead of acquiring techniques for producing classes of…

— Harold Rosenberg

Co-operating critics comb the studios like big-league scouts, prepared to spot the art of the future and to take lead in establishing…

— Harold Rosenberg

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it...

— Harold Rosenberg

Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.

— Harold Rosenberg

The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in…

— Harold Rosenberg

Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which... can be dispensed with.

— Harold Rosenberg

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

— Harold Rosenberg

Art has arrived at the paradox that tradition itself requires the occurrence of radical attacks on tradition.

— Harold Rosenberg

If being an anti-art artist is difficult, being an anti-art art historian is a hard position indeed. His doctrinal revolutionism brings forth…

— Harold Rosenberg

Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work.

— Harold Rosenberg

The struggle to make an absolute statement in an individually conceived vocabulary accounts for the profound tensions inherent in the best modern…

— Harold Rosenberg

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad…

— Harold Rosenberg

Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.

— Harold Rosenberg