Art Is Too Serious To Be Taken

The One Object Of Fifty Years Of Abstract Art Is To Present Art-as-art And As Nothing Else, To Make It Into The One Thing It Is Only, Separating And Defining It More And More, Making It Purer And Emptier, More Absolute And More Exclusive - Non-objective, Non-representational, Non-figurative, Non-imagist, Non-expressionist, Non-subjective. The Only And One Way To Say What Abstract Art Or Art-as-art Is, Is To Say What It Is Not.

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 Want To Emphasize The Idea Of Black As Intellectuality And Conventionality.

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.

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.