Art Critics Quotes

I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art. ~ Jerry Saltz

If I were silent and invisible, I'd fear nobody. And if I were tasteless too, not even the cannibals or modern art critics would touch me. ~ Jarod Kintz

It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. ~ G.H. Hardy

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising. ~ Pauline Kael

Critics are the products of their own times and biases and what they have to say about works of art is as transient and insubstantial as fashion. ~ Robert Genn

The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life. ~ Charles Saatchi

There's no such thing as great art or poor art. Art is subjective expression. As such, it can be judged only as popular or unpopular. What is banned in Boston may one day receive a million-dollar bid at Christie's. Art has, therefore, no use for critics but frequently finds itself amused by commentators. ~ Ron Brackin

I retain, but suspend, my personal taste to deal with the panoply of the art I see. I have a trick for doing justice to an uncongenial work: "What would I like about this if I liked it?" I may come around; I may not. Failing that, I wonder, What must the people who like this be like? Anthropology. ~ Peter Schjeldahl

Judging art is like caging a bird. Instead of seeing it soar, you can only watch it flutter. ~ Ron Brackin

There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

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. ~ Ruth Reichl

All art critics are useless or harmful. ~ Umberto Boccioni

For every good art critic there may be ten great artists. ~ Clement Greenberg

I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together. ~ John Olsen

Aren't maids the ultimate art critics? ~ John Waters

It cannot be too plainly stated that it is quite unimportant whether photography produces 'art' or not. Its own basic laws, not the opinions of art critics, will provide the only valid measure of its future worth. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it. ~ Samuel Butler

I'm a light eater. As soon as it's light, I start to eat. ~ Art Donovan

All the arts, music, the visual arts, acting and dancing arts, cooking arts, and I believe sports, will save the human race because they can leap over barriers, religions, leap over barriers of race, politics. ~ Pete Seeger

The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically. ~ Hector Tobar

I've never been so conflicted in my life. My body is screaming yes, but my heart is crying no. My fingers itch to touch him and my lips part to meet him but my mind won't shut up long enough to let me give in. ~ Ellie Messe

The art of existence is to live your own myth.
To understand your own myth.
To expand your own myth. ~ Talismanist Giebra

Style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and a meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist andthe broad outlook of a group are visible, ... communicating and fixing certain values of religious, social, and moral life through the emotional suggestiveness of forms. It is, besides, a common ground against which innovations and individuality of particular works may be measured. ~ Meyer Schapiro

It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate towards complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and now. This sensory metaphor - this stands for that - is one of the most important transformations of nature wrought by cooking. And so a piece of crisped pig skin becomes a densely allusive poem of flavors: coffee and chocolate, smoke and Scotch and overripe fruit and, too, the sweet-salty-woodsy taste of maple syrup on bacon I loved as a child. As with so many other things, we humans seem to like our food overdetermined. ~ Michael Pollan

It is a truism that when one is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The glory of art is that it can show this proverbial hammer how everything looks to a screwdriver--and to a plowshare, and to an earthenware pot. If reality is the sum of our perceptions, to acquire more varying points of view is to acquire, literally, more reality. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art. ~ Peter Greenaway

Whatever I may be, I want to be elsewhere than on paper. My art and my industry have been employed in making myself good for something; my studies, in teaching me to do, not to write. I have put all my efforts into forming my life. That is my trade and my work. ~ Michel De Montaigne

I always try to have a book on hand, traveling is an excellent way of providing perspective, and studying Art History has made going to art museums way more fun than you can imagine. ~ Gideon Glick

Above all, the listener should be able to understand the poem or the song, not be forced to unravel a complicated, self-indulgent puzzle. Offer your art up to the whole world, not just an elite few. ~ Lucinda Williams

Mastering the art of good casework is a little like staring into the shuttering eyes of a rabid canine and saying "nice doggie" until you find a shotgun. ~ Marc Parent

You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them. ~ Seamus Heaney

I'm giving into my tendency to want to blur and blend the lines between art and life, and privacy and sharing. ~ Lia Ices

One finds life through conquering the fear of death within one's mind. Empty the mind of all forms of attachment, make a go-for-broke charge and conquer the opponent with one decisive slash. ~ Takenaka Shigekata

In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we were asked to endure ... ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Life as it should be: all friends, all art, all music, all love, all the time. ~ Amanda Palmer

To keep art stimulating, it's important to open it up to new horizons, which includes showing it in unexpected contexts. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers - still at the Picasso stage - are not admitted. ~ Jean Cocteau

Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. ~ Childe Hassam

What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be a vehicle for self-conscious evangelism. Christians ought not to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. The Christian is the really free man. He is free to have imagination. ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

Writing is not always a priority. . . .I only write those things that are necessary for me to write. I love to write, and when I'm not writing, I often feel as if I'm betraying my art, my gift, my calling, but that sensation is probably hubris or neurosis as much as anything else. The problem, and one of the joys of writing poetry, is that none of us can really count on entering the canon. The chances are that none of our work will survive long after we're gone. That's just the way it is. To feel otherwise is foolish. we write in competition with the dead for the attention of the unborn. We are writing poems that are trying to take the attention of people away from Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Baudelaire. Good luck to you! There's a built-in failure to writing poetry that I find comforting.
If you know you're doomed to failure, then you can work freely. People who think their work is going to last, or that it matters, well . . . I always try to disabuse my students of their desire to write for fame. I ask them, "Who here has read Shakespeare?" Everyone raises his or her hand. We agree that his work is immortal, then I remind them: "he's still dead. He's as dead as he'd have been if you hadn't read him; and you'll be dead too someday, no matter how well you write." To sacrifice your life for your art is an appalling notion. On the other hand, I have been called to be a poet, ad it's an unimaginably rich gift. Like every artist, I know that in order to be a moral, eff ~ Tony Leuzzi

She wanted children and considered having them a "privilege," but art also "was a privilege given to me and I had to pursue it. ~ Jan Greenberg

Watching and listening are a great art - watching and listening without any reaction, without any sense of the listener or the see-er. By watching and listening we learn infinitely more than from any book. Books are necessary, but watching and listening sharpen your senses. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Even though it inspires some of the world's greatest literature, music, and art, obsessive love is one of the most potent and compelling of tortures and one of the most difficult to overcome -- especially because it feels beyond conscious control. Tormented lovers try the patience even of those who truly love them, because they sufferers do not desire help extricating themselves though they claim to be seeking it; this is an illness from which no one wants to be cured. ~ Jeanne Safer

Can you name a single one of the great fundamental and original intellectual achievements which have raise man in the scale of civilization that may be credited to the Anglo-Saxon? The art of letters, of poetry, of music, of sculpture, of painting, of the drama, of architecture; the science of mathematics, of astronomy, of philosophy, of logic, of physics, of chemistry, the use of the metals and principles of mechanics, were all invented or discovered by darker and what we now call inferior races and nations. ~ James Weldon Johnson

Cease, stranger, cease those witching notes,
The art of syren choirs;
Hush the seductive voice that floats
Across the trembling wires.
Music's ethereal power was given
Not to dissolve our clay,
But draw Promethean beams from heaven
To purge the dross away. ~ John Henry Newman

Critics kind never mind! Critics flatter no matter! Critics blame all the same! Do your best damn the rest! ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Writing is also an art. ~ Marc Mullo

At such moments Gilberte's plaits used to brush my cheek. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their grain, at once natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their constructed tracery, a matchless work of art, in the composition of which had been used the very grass of Paradise. To a section of them, even infinitely minute, what celestial herbary would I not have given as a reliquary. But since I never hoped to obtain an actual fragment of those plaits, if at least I had been able to have their photograph, how far more precious than one of a sheet of flowers traced by Vinci's pencil! To acquire one of these, I stooped - with friends of the Swanns, and even with photographers - to servilities which did not procure for me what I wanted, but tied me for life to a number of extremely tiresome people. ~ Marcel Proust

These guys are just flying through the air and I'm capturing them in the split second and putting it into a work of art, via clay to the bronze. ~ Richard MacDonald

Today there survives more than 25,0000 partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament. These hand written manuscripts have allowed scholars and textual critics to go back and verify that the Bible we have in our possession today is the same Bible that the early church possessed 2,000 years ago. ~ Charlie Campbell

It baseball is an American institution and more lasting than some marriages, war, Supreme Court decisions and even major depressions ~ Art Rust, Jr.

The miracle is that a work of art should live in the person who reads it. ~ Henry Green

A photograph is the pause button on life. ~ Various

At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political. ~ Douglas Sirk

For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight. ~ Howard Pyle

I was much more interested in literature than I was in art. I just got into art by mistake. ~ Peggy Guggenheim

For though, in nature, depth and height
Are equally held infinite:
In poetry, the height we know;
'Tis only infinite below. ~ Jonathan Swift

Can we all pause a moment to appreciate the artistry of that sentence? "Sitting casually on the floor, a guard sat ... " That's freaking art right there! Someone nominate this thing for the Hugo Award already! ~ Jim C. Hines

I've perfected the art of the fake smile. It's not so difficult when you are completely numb. ~ Bethany Griffin