Top 100 Quotes About Art Criticism: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Art Criticism

#1. In the visual arts, for example, the semiological approach to graphics provides a rigorous analysis of the visual means used by the artist. It defines the basic properties and laws governing the arts and suggests objective criteria for art criticism.

Jacques Bertin

#2. Art criticism everywhere is now at a low ebb, intellectually corrupt, swamped in meaningless jargon, distorted by political correctitudes, anxiously addressed only to other critics and their ilk.

Brian Sewell

#3. I think what's happened in art criticism, or art thinking, in last 30 or 40 years is a confusion between the "what" - the subject - and the "how." Most attention goes to the "what," but it's the "how" that's the important part - how something is brought into being.

Joe Bradley

#4. In literary and art criticism there are two criteria, the political and the artistic.

Mao Zedong

#5. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

George Orwell

#6. Perhaps art criticism cannot be reformed in a logical sense because it was never well-formed in the first place. Art criticism has long been a mongrel among academic pursuits, borrowing whatever it needed from other fields ...

James Elkins

#7. I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute.

Helen Vendler

#8. Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.

Harold Rosenberg

#9. With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.

Peter Schjeldahl

#10. In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'

Oscar Wilde

#11. Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.

Robert McKee

#12. Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign

John Gardner

#13. All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

Leslie Fiedler

#14. Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Harry S. Truman

#15. The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.

Randall Jarrell

#16. 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

#17. By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).

Brenda Ueland

#18. It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.

Plutarch

#19. Music is art, and once you become an artist, you need to learn how to accept criticism.

Yanni

#20. The heart of [J.G.] Ballard's vision [is] the object at odds with its function and abandoned by its time.

Tacita Dean

#21. I don't want to sit there and be like, 'Oh, I don't care what the audience thinks.' It does matter to me. I just want them to think, to be honest.

Donald Glover

#22. He only moves toward the perfection of his art whose criticism surpasses his achievement.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#23. Art is the expression that the soul makes without having to explain itself, nor regard the criticism of others.

Reed Abbitt Moore

Reed Abbitt Moore

#24. I, it's just, listen, criticism? It's the most important art now, it's the one we need most now. Criticism is the art we need most today. But not, don't you see? not the "if I'd done it myself . . ." Yes, a, a disciplined nostalgia, disciplined recognitions

William Gaddis

#25. Norman Rockwell saved my life.

Jane Allen Petrick

#26. All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning
not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.

Michel Foucault

#27. Criticism is easy, art is difficult.

Philippe Nericault Destouches

#28. Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.

George Jean Nathan

#29. Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet's glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because

Virginia Heffernan

#30. Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember ...

Elif Shafak

#31. Most of the criticism of my work was pretty good, but occasionally it would not be. And I just sort of felt that they absolutely didn't get what I was doing. It was their limitations on what they thought art should be or what they thought my work should be in relation to earlier work or whatever.

Robert Barry

#32. 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

#33. The exercise of criticism always destroys for a time our sensibility to beauty by leading us to regard the work in relation to certain laws of construction. The eye turns from the charms of nature to fix itself upon the servile dexterity of art.

Sir Archibald Alison, 2nd Baronet

#34. The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it.

Tony Tulathimutte

#35. In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.

Albert Camus

#36. Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Benjamin Disraeli

#37. This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.

Kurt Schwitters

#38. The aim of language ... is to communicate ... to impart to others the results one has obtained ... As I talk, I reveal the situation ... I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#39. It is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#40. Psychotherapy is the art of finding the angel of hope in the midst of terror, despair and madness.

Cloe Madanes

#41. Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against markets, against consumers, against the dynamism of Western commercial society. The debate is not about art but about culture and economics.

Virginia Postrel

#42. It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

Chuck Palahniuk

#43. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

C.S. Lewis

#44. Criticism is like dissecting a dead frog," Caleb said when the book was published. "They're examining all the guts and shit and organs, when the thing that really matters, whatever it was that animated the body, has long since left. It does nothing for the art.

Kevin Wilson

#45. The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Camille Paglia

#46. We would go out and play these songs and people could interpret them however the hell they wanted.

Carrie Brownstein

#47. The practice of "reviewing" ... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.

Henry James

#48. Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.

Joyce Carol Oates

#49. The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#50. 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

#51. It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.

C.S. Lewis

#52. All great art is praise.

John Ruskin

#53. All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared
to learn to draw?

Banksy

#54. The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#55. A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.

Northrop Frye

#56. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.

Georgia O'Keeffe

#57. Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape.

Toni Morrison

#58. I don't care about my "impact" - I only care about the theater as an art form and criticism as an act of writing.

Neil Patrick Harris

#59. The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.

Robert Adams

#60. It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.

Igor Stravinsky

#61. Its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent

Mark O'Connell

#62. I just wanted to do something important.

Norman Rockwell

#63. Fear of failure and criticism can be crippling. Don't let others' negativity take away your joy.

Lee Hammond

#64. Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated
it is an art.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#65. Reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers ... annotations, arrows ... an oudine of its design ... very seriously mislead.

William H Gass

#66. We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.

Camille Paglia

#67. I don't know very many people in the art world, only socialise with the few I like, and have little time to gnaw my nails with anxiety about any criticism I hear about.

Charles Saatchi

#68. The attitude and reactions of artists toward their art children reveal an attitude similar to that which mothers in general possess toward their children. There is the same sensitivity to any criticism, the same possessive pride ...

Beatrice M. Hinkle

#69. A true artist willingly removes their heart, allows constructive criticism to stomp it, then puts it back
bruised and aching
to continue improving due to the all-consuming obsessive love for their art.

H.G. Mewis

#70. If connoisseurship is the art of appreciation, criticism is the art of disclosure ... Connoisseurs simply need to appreciate what they encounter. Critics, however, must render these qualities vivid by the artful use of critical disclosure.

Elliot W. Eisner

#71. Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art - and in criticism - today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.

Susan Sontag

#72. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#73. The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?

Steven Pinker

#74. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Walter Benjamin

#75. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off - that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

Walter Pater

#76. I was trying to release emotions, exercise emotions, and then I entered the art world. Even after grad school, some of [the earlier works] were still lingering in my head. I realized there were some pieces where I felt that I had to respond to the criticism.

Kalup Linzy

#77. 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

#78. What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Octavio Paz

#79. Speaking out against rap music is useless, and it's futile. The reality is there's criticism for everything, but Jay-Z is one of the most remarkable artists of our time of any genre, and as a hip-hop artist he carries the weight of that art form with such splendor and grace and genius.

Michael Eric Dyson

#80. The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another; and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture.

Samuel Johnson

#81. A true artist removes his heart willingly, allows constructive criticism to stomp it, then puts it back - bruised and aching - as he continues to strive for excellence due to the all-consuming obsession and love for his art.

H.G. Mewis

#82. Instead of books, art, theatre, and music being consigned to specialized niches, we might have a criticism that better reflects the eclecticism of our time, a criticism that takes in various arts all at once.

Lee Siegel

#83. In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Susan Sontag

#84. Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the best American higher criticism.

Camille Paglia

#85. Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.

Jasper Johns

#86. 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

#87. Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

George Steiner

#88. One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, 'Don't get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.

Chris Ware

#89. Fortunately for me, I know well enough what I want, and am basically utterly indifferent to the criticism that I work to hurriedly. In answer to that, I have done some things even more hurriedly theses last few days.

Vincent Van Gogh

#90. What he imagines evokes nothing imaginary, it evokes the reality of the world that experience and reason treat in a confused manner.

Rene Magritte

#91. A lot of people are intimated by art, but it's something to be revered beyond criticism.

Hannah Gadsby

#92. It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.

Ken Livingstone

#93. Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

George Jean Nathan

#94. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

Northrop Frye

#95. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

Rainer Maria Rilke