Top 53 Art Critic Quotes
#1. Cortissoz was art critic of the New York Herald Tribune.
Abraham Lincoln
#3. Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.
Paul Cezanne
#4. A certain man placed a fountain by the wayside, and he hung up a cup near to it by a little chain. He was told some time after that a great art-critic had found much fault with its design. 'But,' said he, 'do many thirsty persons drink at it?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#5. An art critic is someone who appreciates art, except for any particular piece of art.
Robert Breault
#6. The first assumption of an art critic is that the artist meant to paint something else.
Robert Breault
#7. For a moment he felt like devoting the next ten years to working his way to a position as art critic on purpose to review Bertrand's work unfavorably.
Kingsley Amis
#9. Uh, hey, I got a idea. Instead of us hanging around playing art critic 'til I get pinched by the man, how's about we move away from this eerie-ass piece of work, and get on with our increasingly eerie-ass day. How's that?
Joss Whedon
#10. An art critic is someone who hopes to see his ideas translated to canvas without having to learn how to paint.
Robert Breault
#11. 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.
Paul Gauguin
#12. I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.
Jerry Saltz
#13. I don't have the education of an art historian. I've certainly read about art and look at art and have educated myself to some extent. But I'm not a skilled or thorough art historian and I wouldn't call myself an art critic.
Lynne Tillman
#14. 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?
Edgar Degas
#15. It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.
Peter Schjeldahl
#16. Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art.
David Toop
#17. In moments of prayer, people tend to pose as a critic and point out percieved flaws in God's art.
Steve Maraboli
#18. The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.
Clive James
#19. Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.
Chuck Jones
#20. 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.
Lucy R. Lippard
#21. 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.'
Aunjanue Ellis
#22. One way to cope with the provocations of novel art is to rest firm and maintain solid standards ... set by the critic's long-practiced taste and by his conviction that only those innovations will be significant which promote the established direction of advanced art.
Leo Steinberg
#23. The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.
Steven Pressfield
#24. The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
G.K. Chesterton
#25. The critic interested in a novel manifestation holds his criteria and taste in reserve. Since they were formed upon yesterday's art, he does not assume that they are ready-made for today.
Leo Steinberg
#26. Don't be a critic. The critic is to art what the limp penis is to sex.
Steve Maraboli
#27. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.
Ansel Adams
#29. I love commercial music! I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business. But without any thought, I just enjoy it. It's folk music. That's what I'm doing, folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it ... and making it into a phoney art form. I'm just doing the music I enjoy.
John Lennon
#30. A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.
Oscar Wilde
#31. I am not a food critic. Or a chef. Or even a professional writer. What I am schooled in the art of, however, is enjoying myself.
Jewel Staite
#32. Wait a second, is a snooty book critic actually admitting to judging books by their covers?
Larry Correia
#33. 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.
Hortense Calisher
#34. A critic should always strive to recapture the sense of wonder and surprise with which he first beheld a now-familiar work of art.
Terry Teachout
#35. Art critics are like every other critic.
Marc Jacobs
#36. If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.
Oscar Wilde
#37. 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.
Ben Jonson
#38. The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
Walter Benjamin
#39. By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).
Brenda Ueland
#40. In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.
Katherine Anne Porter
#41. 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.
George Bernard Shaw
#42. Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
Ambrose Bierce
#43. Anything can be art: painting stairs, raising a child, or organising a trip to the end of the world. It's the way you live that makes you either an artist, or an art connoisseur, or an unsatisfied critic.
Mykyta Isagulov
#44. Don't ask me my opinions on art, because I don't have any. Aesthetic concerns have played a relatively minor role in my life, and I have to smile when a critic talks, for example, of my "palette". I find it impossible to spend hours in galleries analyzing and gesticulating.
Luis Bunuel
#45. The cruelest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn't
Yahtzee Croshaw
#46. I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.
Harvey Pekar
#47. 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.
Lionel Trilling
#48. I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.
Tom Stoppard
#49. 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.
George Edward Woodberry
#50. A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.
Paul Gauguin
#51. The cynical, caustic, acid-tongued New York drama critic Addison De Witt introduces his protege/date of the moment, a bimbo date and so-called actress named Miss Casswell (Marilyn Monroe) in another very famous line: "Miss Casswell is an actress, a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art."
George Sanders
#52. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Oscar Wilde
#53. 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?
Adam Gopnik
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