Time & Perspective Quote by Ad Reinhardt

Reinhardt lets the institutional banalities do the dirty work: the curriculum is a revolving door, and what returns is telling. He’d been teaching art history with an eye widened beyond Europe - Chinese, Japanese, Indian traditions that often privilege brush discipline, tonal restraint, and metaphysical space over Western figure-worship. Then the department snaps back to “painting classes,” and with them the nude, that old academy fetish: the human body as proof of seriousness, the rite of passage that keeps art safely legible to gatekeepers. The still life, quieter and less heroic, doesn’t make the cut. Taste isn’t neutral here; it’s a proxy for power.

The line “the nudes came back” reads like a sigh and a jab. It suggests regression disguised as tradition, a pedagogy that can’t stop rehearsing its own origin story. Reinhardt’s deadpan escalation - “So now our department is the worst department” - is not just crankiness. It’s a diagnosis of how institutions hollow out ideals: you can teach global visual intelligence all day, but the machine wants what it can standardize, grade, and display.

Then he lands the punch: “partly because it has the worst facilities.” The anticlimax is the point. High-minded arguments about culture collapse into plumbing, light, space, and budgets. Modernism’s spiritual aspirations meet the fluorescent-lit studio. Reinhardt, who pursued an austere purity in his own work, exposes the irony that “serious art” is often determined less by vision than by the sad logistics of a department trying to look legitimate while materially falling apart.