Life & Wisdom Quote by Harold Rosenberg

Rosenberg’s line is a neat little grenade lobbed into the temple of cultural authority: critics don’t just judge artworks, they manufacture the very conditions under which art becomes “interesting.” The joke is sharpened by the mismatch between “dullness” (an objective-seeming quality) and “determination” (a willful, almost heroic stubbornness). He’s implying that fascination can be less a discovery than a decision, the critic as prospector panning even mud for gold because their role requires treasure to exist.

The subtext is professional self-critique with teeth. A critic’s livelihood depends on interpretive velocity: turning an inert object into an event, finding a pulse in a corpse. Calling it “determination” hints at a kind of institutional pressure and ego investment. If you’ve publicly taken something seriously, you’re incentivized to keep finding new depths, even if what you’re really uncovering is your own ingenuity. Rosenberg isn’t only mocking pretension; he’s pointing to how criticism can become a performance of intelligence, where the artwork is a prop.

Context matters: Rosenberg wrote in mid-century America, amid the rise of Abstract Expressionism and the expanding power of the critic to crown movements, grant coherence to messy scenes, and convert bafflement into prestige. In that ecosystem, boredom is not a stop sign; it’s raw material. The line lands because it flips a comforting assumption: that critics protect us from bad art. Rosenberg suggests they may also protect art from its own badness, and in doing so, protect themselves.