“My child could paint that!”

Here’s a nice response from Greenberg to this phrase:

“The onlooker who says that his child could paint a Newman may be right, but Newman would have to be there to tell the child exactly what to do. The exact choices of color, medium, size, shape, proportion… are what alone determines the quality of the result…”

Even more than the witty and reasonable comeback, what I enjoy here is the idea that Barnett Newman might have taken this passage as a literal art idea, and obtained a child servant who would have been ordered to carry out Newman’s commands: “Paint the whole canvas with this red… That’s it! Now put a very thin vertical stripe of this blue one inch from the left edge… Good!”