Time & Perspective Quote by Saul Steinberg

Steinberg frames the artist less as a lone genius than as a relay runner: the real work isn’t merely making objects, it’s training perception. Calling the artist an “educator” subtly demotes novelty as a personal achievement and recasts it as a transmissible skill. The artist teaches other artists how to see, how to read images, how to notice what culture has trained them to ignore. That’s a notably Steinbergian move: his drawings are often about the act of drawing, about how a line can expose the rules of representation while still looking effortless.

The syntax does a lot of quiet persuasion. “Able to understand” sounds modest, almost bureaucratic, until it’s paired with “in the process of understanding perform unexpected… evolutions.” Surprise isn’t a lightning bolt; it’s a byproduct of comprehension pushed to its limits. Steinberg implies that the “best” artistic leaps don’t come from mysticism or chaos but from an intimate grasp of the visual language you’re about to bend. In other words: mastery is what makes rupture legible.

Context matters here. Steinberg, an immigrant shaped by European modernism and later a defining voice at The New Yorker, worked in a 20th-century art world obsessed with avant-garde breaks. He offers a cooler, more surgical account of progress: evolution, not revolution. The subtext is a critique of empty provocation. “Unexpected” only counts when someone has been taught what to expect - and why.