Time & Perspective Quote by Chuck Close

Close is calling out a quiet scam in the way culture gets packaged: the language of institutional appreciation can be so bloodless it flattens everything it touches. When a “lousy” painting and a “great” painting receive the same polite paragraph, greatness becomes a credentialing exercise, not an experience. The museum label, the textbook caption, the survey lecture all start to sound like each other because they’re designed to be safe - descriptive, neutral, defensible. That safety is the problem. It trains viewers to outsource their eyes.

The intent here isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-vague. Close, an artist obsessed with perception, process, and the mechanics of seeing, is pointing at a gap between what art does and what art discourse often performs. Art history education can privilege categories (movement, date, influence, patronage) over the thing that actually convinces you: the decision-making on the canvas, the risk, the invention, the strange inevitability of form. Without a vocabulary for those stakes, “greatness” becomes a rumor passed down by authority.

There’s subtext, too, about gatekeeping. If the descriptions are interchangeable, then the difference between bad and good rests on who gets to declare it. Close is nudging us toward a more accountable criticism - one that names the specific formal moves, the perceptual surprise, the emotional voltage, the technical audacity. Not “important” or “iconic,” but why your attention keeps getting pulled back in.