Ordered and Controlled
Abstract paint areas are real areas--lofty, alive, emotionally ordered and intellectually controlled. ... Maybe you think things are o.k. and that you're "doing all right." But someday the monotonous and ugly spaces you live and work in will be organized (by your children) as intelligently and as beautifully as the spaces have been in some paintings. A painting of quality is a challenge to disorder and insensitivity everywhere.
Ad Reinhardt, "How to Look at Space," Editorial cartoon, PM, April 28, 1946.
The Hardest Thing in the World
An honest picture has to be aware of itself, and the hardest thing in the world is to make an honest picture.
Spencer Finch quoted in Meghan Dailey’s article on the artist in Art+Auction, Sept. 2009, page 52.
The Knife Edge of Nonsense
...We are constantly worried that we are being played for fools [by abstract works of art]. What makes the anxiety even worse is the fact that this is an art that, by its very nature, willfully and knowingly flirts with absurdity and emptiness, dancing on the knife edge of nonsense and beckoning us to come along.
Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing, 2006, page 42.