Quotes from Ad Reinhardt

Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.

Fine art can only be defined as exclusive, negative, absolute and timeless. It is not practical, useful, related, applicable, or subservient to anything else.

It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.

An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.

Art is not the spiritual side of business.

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.

The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.

If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you'd want to suggest someplace, but there's no place. I wouldn't know where to send a student to study.

Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea... The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.