Art & Creativity Quote by Ad Reinhardt

Reinhardt’s line lands like a dry obituary for an institution that once believed it was immortal. He’s not just gossiping about “Brooklyn” as a particular campus; he’s using it as a diagnostic slide under the microscope, a place where you can watch the whole ecosystem of American art education mutate in real time. The sly turn is in the double claim: “interesting” because it’s “the worst,” and “the worst” because it was once “the best.” That flip is classic Reinhardt: a cool, almost clinical phrasing that masks an artist’s disgust at how quickly prestige can curdle into complacency.

The subtext is structural, not personal. “What happened to university art departments everywhere” implies a predictable arc: visionary programs get institutionalized, then bureaucratized, then managed into dullness. What made a department “the best” (risk, strong personalities, a culture of argument) is exactly what universities learn to sand down for the sake of stability, budgets, and measurable outcomes. Reinhardt doesn’t need to name the culprits; the sentence performs them. “At one point” is doing heavy work, relegating excellence to a past tense the institution can commemorate but no longer reproduce.

Context matters: Reinhardt came up alongside Abstract Expressionism and spent his career policing the boundary between art and everything that wants to instrumentalize it - commerce, propaganda, easy taste, even pedagogy. Read this as a warning from inside the machine: the academy can nurture the avant-garde, then slowly turn it into a credential. Brooklyn is the cautionary tale because it’s not unique. It’s a template.