“It’s absolutely irrelevant what galleries and critics and people who buy your paintings think. They just don’t have any possible idea of what happens to you and they’re really not that interested. As a matter of fact, they hate the idea that anything really happens to you.
They want you to be a genius and that’s it. You have to be wonderful — that’s all there is to it. Then, anything that you happen to do gets to be part of the wonderful thing that you are. But what is a great deal of importance to you is what do you do when you paint. How does it change you? What does it make you of you? Because you are certainly not the person who should be painting a painting. None of you are. None of us are. We cannot live without our place in things and the place in which we live does not make room for painting. We are doing something contrary to our place and time and as long as we remain what we are, all we can do is indicate our opinion. In other words, art becomes our opinion about ourselves, our times, and our place; and of course that is not really painting.”
Milton Resnick