Top 1200 Art Critic Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn't get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn't art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn't art.

My father was an engineer, .. But I found out that the film critics for the Stanford Daily got free passes for all the films. So I became first an assistant critic and then the main film critic. Those free passes changed my life.

Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Performers put their heart and soul into their art, and can be subject to highly personal attacks and criticism. The tone and language of reviews, or commentary on social media, can be bruising and severe. Everyone is a critic. All of this adds to the stress and anxiety suffered by people in the performing arts.

I don't think the role of the critic has changed very much. In the most positive sense, the music critic is one who helps the public navigate what's out there, especially in bringing attention to things they otherwise wouldn't hear about, or to provide a new window into something familiar.

There is no way that my mother hasn't influenced my career. She's my first critic. She's my best critic. She has the best instincts from writing to style to editing, to the visual elements of my career.

I intensely dislike the word 'critic,' because it puts you in an antagonistic position to artists. I've learned everything that I know about art from artists... I see myself as an advocate and an activist and a writer.

No publisher should ever express an opinion on the value of what he publishes. That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide. I can quite understand how any ordinary critic would be strongly prejudiced against a work that was accompanied by a premature and unnecessary panegyric from the publisher. A publisher is simply a useful middle-man. It is not for him to anticipate the verdict of criticism.

The critic is genius at one remove; he is not unlike an actor on the stage, and incarnates in his mind, as the actor embodies in his person, another's work; only thus does he understand art, realize it, know it; and having arrived at this, his task is done.

The critic is beneath the maker, but is his needed friend. The critic is not a base caviler, but the younger brother of genius. Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty. And of making others appreciate it.

I've never been competitive with other actors. I've been competitive with myself and I'm my own worst critic, a terrible critic I am, and unless I get something right, I feel very unhappy.

To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

I think that when a film does its job, it poses questions rather than gives answers. It should act as a frustrating counselor who, at your bidding for advice, says, 'What do you think?' I think that's some of what the culture critic Greg Tate meant by art leaving a 'metaphysical stain.'

I've been a critic of the antiglobalization movement, and they've been a critic of me, but the one thing I respect about the movement is their authentic energy. These are not people who don't care about the world.

I suffer from low self-esteem. I had horrible self-esteem growing up. You really have to save yourself because the critic within you will eat you up. It's not the outside world - it's your interior life, that critic within you, that you have to silence.

One of the best and most challenging books about Orwell is by the socialist literary critic Raymond Williams. As a critic - and, in some ways, as a figure, at least within the academy - Williams was what England had in the generation after Orwell, and toward the end of his life, he became more critical of his predecessor.

What makes art Christian art? Is it simply Christian artists painting biblical subjects like Jeremiah? Or, by attaching a halo, does that suddenly make something Christian art? Must the artist’s subject be religious to be Christian? I don’t think so. There is a certain sense in which art is its own justification. If art is good art, if it is true art, if it is beautiful art, then it is bearing witness to the Author of the good, the true, and the beautiful

There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.

Graphic design is a popular art and a practical art, an applied art and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the art of visualizing ideas.

The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.

Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.

The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world.

It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.

Critics are biased, and so are readers. (Indeed, a critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.) But intelligent readers soon discover how to allow for the windage of their own and a critic's prejudices.

The idea of going to school to be an art critic is a very crazy idea. I educated myself in public, which is a very painful way to learn - by writing and then discovering that I don't know what the f**k I'm talking about. But you remember the lessons vividly.

At best, the relationship between drama critic and playwright is a pretty twiggy affair. When I'm asked whom I write for, after the obligatory, I write only for myself, I realize that I have an imaginary circle of peers - writers and respected or savvy theatre folk, some dramatic writers and some not, some living, some long gone. . . . Often a writer is aware as he works that a certain critic is going to hate this one. . . . You don't let what a critic might say worry you or alter your work; it might even add a spark to the gleeful process of creation.

A non-doer is very often a critic-that is, someone who sits back and watches doers, and then waxes philosophically about how the doers are doing. It's easy to be a critic, but being a doer requires effort, risk, and change.

There are good and bad critics like good or bad artists. A good critic says why they didn't like it. A bad critic gives it away that they don't like you as a person. I quite like that as well, because it means that I've won.

At the end of the day, it seems like there's a critic archetype for food movies, like with 'Ratatouille' or anything. You know, if you were doing a puppet show about chefs, one puppet would be the chef, one would be the critic.

Diebenkorn was a very good critic, a very tough critic, tough on himself, tough on others. He expected the finest.

Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."

When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.

I am an Episcopalian who takes the faith of my fathers seriously, and I would, I think, be disheartened if my own young children were to turn away from the church when they grow up. I am also a critic of Christianity, if by critic one means an observer who brings historical and literary judgment to bear on the texts and traditions of the church.

Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase.

People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.

The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

Any critic will tell you that there are a few dealers where you get a little bit scared to go into their gallery, and that's unfair to them, to yourself, to the reader, and to the artist. But I just want to look. When I'm done looking and writing, I love talking to art dealers. They are so alive and interesting and amazing - from Larry Gagosian all the way on down.

There have always been a lot of critics of competitive eating. You can be a critic of anything. It's easy to be a critic. You can say negative things about golf, the amount of water wasted on golf courses. Or NASCAR. There are wastes in everything.

I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.

Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

My job as art critic is to watch artists dance naked in public, and then I will, in turn, dance naked critically in public.

A critic may reject some miracle stories as legendary, and not others, with no inconsistency at all for the simple reason that even if one holds miracles to be possible, one need not hold legends to be impossible! There are other factors, literary and historiographical ones, that might lead a critic to conclude that even though miracles can happen, it does not appear that in this or that case they did.

To be a mere verbal critic is what no man of genius would be if he could; but to be a critic of true taste and feeling is what no man without genius could be if he would.

Aristotle was the first accurate critic and truest judge nay, the greatest philosopher the world ever had; for he noted the vices of all knowledges, in all creatures, and out of many men's perfections in a science he formed still one Art.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.

I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it's not possible to write criticism if you're making films.

We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself - he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.

Most artists, or at least most of the ones I know, deny having a philosophical outlook that they try to translate into their works. Some had thought of the work of Cezanne and others as being a 'painted epistemology.' But Cezanne himself denied this and Daniel-Henri Kahnwiler, the art critic and art dealer, insisted that none of the many painters he had known had a philosophical culture.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can say something about art - it's very restricted. When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not. Buying art is not understanding art.

Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?