Top 77 Quotes About Art Critics
#2. Art critics are like every other critic.
Marc Jacobs
#3. It was a movement that had all the art critics, all the museum directors in its thrall.
Jack Levine
#4. 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
#5. When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
Pablo Picasso
#6. To appreciate a work of art, is it okay to like what you like, and the heck with the art critics and experts? Absolutely.
Thomas Hoving
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Critics have a job to do. I understand that. It's not just to criticize. They're trying to interpret art for the public.
Paul Emsley
#12. Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.
Robert Anton Wilson
#13. Criticism really used to hurt me. Most of these critics are usually frustrated artists, and they criticise other people's art because they can't do it themselves. It's a really disgusting job. They must feel horrible inside.
Rosanna Arquette
#14. Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#15. 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
#16. A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.
David Gerrold
#17. Theatre critics have no special access to the truth. And there should be no objective truth to art.
Tim Crouch
#18. Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?
Amy Tan
#19. What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.
Anthony Burgess
#20. No one, though has to go to college to make or understand or enjoy art. Wonderful artists and critics - some of the best - have educated themselves.
Robert Adams
#21. Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.
John Steinbeck
#22. Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits ... In art, there is room for all possibilities.
Pablo Picasso
#23. Great Art is Great because it inspired you greatly. If it didn't, no matter what the critics, the museums and the galleries say, it's not great art for you.
Yoko Ono
#24. They say everything looks better with odd numbers of things. But sometimes I put even numbers - just to upset the critics.
Bob Ross
#25. 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
#26. Different critics go to different lengths to disagree with that sentiment, but ultimately, they're the person experiencing this art, and whatever judgment or taste they use is internal, and says more about them than about the record they're writing about.
Chuck Klosterman
#27. The word 'art' is very slippery. It really has no importance in relation to one's work. I work for the pleasure, for the pleasure of the work, and everything else is a matter for the critics.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo
#28. The public is the tribunal before which all art is judged - not the critics or the academies. The public is the artist's only patron, and has certain fundamental rights. It will submit to education, and will respond to suggestion, but it will not be bullied.
Walter J. Phillips
#29. Like most people, I've always felt using words like 'best' when applied to art is a fun way for critics to stay busy at the end of the year, and I guess a good way to help get ratings for awards shows, which is fine.
Steven Van Zandt
#30. Judging art is like caging a bird. Instead of seeing it soar, you can only watch it flutter.
Ron Brackin
#31. Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.
Robertson Davies
#33. The artist is the only one qualified to criticize his art, because only the artist knows what he was trying to express and how satisfied he is with the attempt.
Ron Brackin
#34. What I am trying to do is something different an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism , a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner , the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.
Claude Debussy
#35. Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are.
Mason Cooley
#36. Many artists and critics see collectors like kids see their parents: as the ones with money and power who just don't get it. Once they start to mingle with the collectors and learn that they are people who have achieved something who then expand into art, they change their minds.
Mark Kostabi
#37. PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART. Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.
George Maciunas
#38. Some critics claim to know what art has to be and do, and consider it their task to steer art along the path they have chosen. Others receive art gladly, and try to distinguish degrees of excellence ...
Norbert Lynton
#39. Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.
Harold Rosenberg
#41. If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings.
Jack Kerouac
#42. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.
Mel Brooks
#43. Listen not to the critics who put their own dreams on the shelf.
Garth Brooks
#44. The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we're not pure enough, good omens appear.
Jerry Saltz
#45. Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.
Dave Hickey
#46. My experience in the music industry made me very thick-skinned. Your art is something very personal and there's never a shortage of critics when it comes to art.
Romany Malco
#47. More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.
Jerry Saltz
#48. When I was your age, art was a lonely thing: no galleries, no collecting, no critics, no money. We didn't have mentors. We didn't have parents. We were alone. But it was a great time, because we had nothing to lose and a vision to gain.
John Logan
#49. Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers.
Pauline Kael
#50. I am doing what I want to do - painting pictures people want and understand. I have no burning ambition to create the kind of 'art' which the confused critics praise for its 'plastic significance,' 'fluid lines,' and 'inner awareness,' or 'must be understood on three levels.
Arnold Friberg
#51. 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
#54. I've had so much positive reaction and emotional fulfillment from the creation of my art and sharing it with everyday people that I never paid too much attention to the opinion of critics.
Thomas Kinkade
#55. When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square ... the critics ... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert" ... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling ...
Kazimir Malevich
#56. By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).
Brenda Ueland
#57. Art has a noble task: to educate man. That's why the writer's part in our society is a most responsible one. The writers are the architects of human souls and the critics are the architects of the writer's souls.
Slawomir Mrozek
#58. By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop's critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth.
Michael Eric Dyson
#59. If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.
Oscar Wilde
#60. The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films.
Agnes Varda
#61. 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
#62. There's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is popular or unpopular. What is banned in Boston may be bid on at Christie's.
Ron Brackin
#63. The London 'Academy' has seen fit recently to scoff at the critics who have been exercising themselves ove rthe so-called art of the Short Story ... But the new Short Story has gained more individuality. It supports the magazines and has invaded the newspapers
Henry Seidel Canby
#64. When critics or art historians or curators ask me why I still paint, the answer is that I am not naive.
Luc Tuymans
#65. All art, in spite of the struggles of some critics to prove otherwise, is based on emotion and projects emotion.
Louise Bogan
#66. During the days of my youth, critics and art-lovers resorted freely to this term of abuse. Even some of the most renowned Old Masters were also pilloried as having manufactured insipid and sugary paintings that were offensive to good taste.
Ernst Gombrich
#67. Frank Fay turned into the most consistent stand-up comic of the late 1920s and essentially changed the art form. Crowds and critics eventually came to accept a man standing alone, cracking wise. No longer did Fay bill himself as a 'Nut Monologist.
Kliph Nesteroff
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. It's about finding your people, your listeners, your readers, and making art for and with them. Not for the masses, not for the critics, but for your ever-widening circle of friends. It
Amanda Palmer
#71. The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#72. 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
#73. Cortissoz was art critic of the New York Herald Tribune.
Abraham Lincoln
#74. Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.
Jonathan Raban
#75. Transforms old print To zigzag manuscript, and cheats the eyes Of gallery critics by a thousand arts.
William Cowper
#76. You always feel like rock critics are frustrated musicians. I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment.
Todd Haynes
#77. This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.
Kurt Schwitters
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