"Art is Art. Everything else is everything else"
About this Quote
A tautology that lands like a slammed door: Reinhardt’s "Art is Art. Everything else is everything else" is less a definition than a refusal. It’s the kind of phrase that sounds empty until you notice what it’s pushing out of the room - commerce, entertainment, moral instruction, design utility, political messaging, even biography. Reinhardt isn’t trying to elevate art by comparison; he’s trying to quarantine it.
The line comes from a mid-century moment when American painting was becoming both a national brand and a market frenzy. Abstract Expressionism had turned the artist into a mythic figure, and museums, magazines, and collectors were eager to translate canvases into lifestyle and ideology. Reinhardt, moving toward his severe “black paintings,” answered with an almost monastic insistence on art’s autonomy: no narrative, no symbolism, no “aboutness” that could be conveniently repackaged.
The subtext is combative. By declaring everything else as merely “everything else,” he flattens the entire surrounding culture into undifferentiated noise. It’s a dare to critics and viewers: stop asking what it means, what it’s for, what it says about society, what it reveals about the artist. Those questions might be legitimate for politics or advertising, but for Reinhardt they’re category errors.
The genius of the phrasing is how it mimics logic while performing attitude. It offers the clarity of a boundary, but also the cold pleasure of exclusion - an artist drawing a line in the sand and then pretending the sand is the point.
The line comes from a mid-century moment when American painting was becoming both a national brand and a market frenzy. Abstract Expressionism had turned the artist into a mythic figure, and museums, magazines, and collectors were eager to translate canvases into lifestyle and ideology. Reinhardt, moving toward his severe “black paintings,” answered with an almost monastic insistence on art’s autonomy: no narrative, no symbolism, no “aboutness” that could be conveniently repackaged.
The subtext is combative. By declaring everything else as merely “everything else,” he flattens the entire surrounding culture into undifferentiated noise. It’s a dare to critics and viewers: stop asking what it means, what it’s for, what it says about society, what it reveals about the artist. Those questions might be legitimate for politics or advertising, but for Reinhardt they’re category errors.
The genius of the phrasing is how it mimics logic while performing attitude. It offers the clarity of a boundary, but also the cold pleasure of exclusion - an artist drawing a line in the sand and then pretending the sand is the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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