“Critics always seem so much smarter when they like your work.”
—Jim Vecchi

Critics and Criticism

There’s really not too much to be said about critics that’s not fairly obvious. Some critics may provide insights or perspectives that may benefit the artist, many more will be so unperceptive—or just plain stupid—as to provide a source of mirth and amusement. Some artists have done well by paying attention to criticism; others have been equally successful ignoring it. Whether or not to pay attention to critics is a matter of personal tastes.

(Although financial considerations are generally beyond the scope of this book, it should be remembered that critics are an important part of the arts business establishment. The artist seeking critical recognition as part of a business plan should remember that most critics can be bribed, and that money is rarely the best currency for such an investment. Sycophantic behavior is generally an important component of a successful commercial art enterprise.)

“Much criticism is based on the mistaken notion that, because art is mysterious, criticism should be too.”
—Robert Adams

“The qualities of a first-rate writer cannot be defined, but only experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.”
—Roland Barthes

“What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.”
—Charles Baudelaire

“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

“Good. Bad. Who cares? There’s a soft spot in my brain for all of it!”
—Stanley Bing

“Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.”
—Heywood Broun

“It is sufficient to have a sense of art—and this sense is doubtless the horror of the bourgeois. Therefore institutions, pensions, honors can only be made for cretins, rogues, and rascals. Do not become an art critic, but paint; therein lies salvation.”
—Paul Cézanne

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate it. It is you.”
—Jean Cocteau

“ ‘Postmodern’ photography, collectively, has struck me as intriguing in theory but dismal in practice. How my colleagues have managed to go on and on about the stuff can only be explained by the demonstrable fact that many of my colleagues love to go on and on.”
—A. D. Coleman

“Dumb, insensitive critics have destroyed a lot of great music and musicians who just weren’t as strong as I was in having the ability to say ‘Fuck y’all.’ ”
—Miles Davis

“A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.”
—Edmond de Goncourt

“Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples.”
—François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

“The majority of the stupid is inevitable and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency.”
—Albert Einstein

“The only kind of art worth talking about is the one happens to like.”
—Thomas Stearns Eliot

“There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are al right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—that, I cannot stand. An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!”
—Richard P. Feynman

“Snoring is the highest form of operatic criticism.”
—David Fingleton

“Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what it lost in interpretation.”
—Robert Frost

“The reporting of art should not be concerned with values, but should confine itself to description. Such reporting should give the public a chance to make its own judgments, should stimulate it to form an opinion about artistic achievements through its own attitudes and feelings.”
—Joseph Goebbels

“I’m a photographer. I’m therefore concerned with how they are made. I am not interested in how they are judged.”
—Charles Harbutt

“No author is a man of genius to his publisher.”
—Heinrich Heine

“Finding that you have written a ‘popular’ piece of criticism, however, is not a particularly salutary experience. It really means that you’ve lost a step, that the world is catching up to you. Because criticism is not supposed to be popular, it’s supposed to be annoying. If a lot of people agree with your criticism, you’ve stopped being a critic and become some sort of village explainer which, as Gertrude Stein noted, is all right if you are a village. If not, not.”
—Dave Hickey

“The art pundits and arbiters of taste wander through the modern world like tourists lost in London with only maps of nineteenth-century Paris to guide them.”
—Michael Hiley

“When I receive violent criticism for anything I have done, I have a simple response. I ask myself: knowing that criticism in advance, would I have done anything differently? If the answer is no, then what is the point of worrying about criticism?”
—Bill Jay

“Spending time devising the next confrontational culture is how the culture industry organizes the time of the intelligentsia.”
—Ronald Jones

“One of the surest signs of a Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.”
—Pauline Kael

“But the devil whoops, as he whooped of old: ‘It’s clever, but is it art?’ ”
—Rudyard Kipling

“I have been underestimated for decades. I have done very well that way.”
—Helmut Kohl

“The pleasure of criticizing robs us of the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.”
—Jean de La Bruyère

“It is for others to judge. I am doing it. I do. I don’t stand back and judge; I do.”
—John Lennon

“If you can’t say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.”
—Alice Roosevelt Longworth

“I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.”
—Dudley Field Malone

“A painter has no real enemy but his own bad painting.”
—Henri Matisse

“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.”
—William Somerset Maugham

“The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand.”
—George Moore

“People who write about photography are only writing for other people who write about photography.”
—Helmut Newton

“Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics—they desire our blood, not our pain.”
—Friederich Nietzsche

“Meanings are for museum directors.”
—Mark Pauline

“My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back.”
—Francis Picabia

“Those trying to explain pictures are, as a rule, completely mistaken.”
—Pablo Picasso

“Culture is what your butcher would have if he were a surgeon.”
—Mary Pettibone Poole

“All critics should be assassinated.”
—Man Ray

“I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

“With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the color of a child’s eyes.”
—George Santayana

“The questioner, I believe, was suffering from a particularly virulent form of a disease that affects almost all of us working in creative mediums. That malady is our desire for approval, or, if not approval, at least a set of clear guidelines for images that will win us approval. In short, we want someone with authority to tell us if our work is good or bad and, if it’s bad, what we need to do to make it good. The problem lies in the fact that almost nothing in our upbringing prepares us for the ambiguity and uncertainty that is part of the creative endeavor.”
—Julia Scully

“When the photographer takes to forgery, the Press encourages him. The critics, being professional connoisseurs of the shiftiest of old makeshifts, come to the galleries where the forgeries are exhibited. They find, to their relief, that here, instead of a new business for them to learn, is a row of monochromes which their old jargon fits like a glove. Forthwith they proclaim that photography has become an art.”
—George Bernard Shaw

“Pay no attention to what the critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic.”
—Jean Sibelius

“I read your review last week and it was like being sprayed with hot shit ... I hope you get some life-threatening disease very soon.”
—Richard E. Grant

“We deplore rankings at the same time we ask for them.”
—Scott Simon

“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and interpreting that, one tames the work of art.”
—Susan Sontag

“It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”
—David St. Hubbins

“Every false work extolled by the critics serves as a door through which the hypocrites of art at once crowd in.”
—Leo Tolstoy

“Like many of the leading authorities on Duchamp, Arturo Schwarz has very little sense of humor, and this sometimes makes his writings extremely funny.”
—Calvin Tomkins

“Like sport, art is an arena in which elitism can display itself at a negligible cost in social harm.”
—Virgil Tracy

“Before debating a critic, remember an old Chinese proverb: ‘Don’t wrestle with a pig: the pig enjoys it and you get dirty.’ ”
—Glenn Trahenir

“If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot!”
—Harry S. Truman

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”
—Kurt Vonnegut

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”
—E. B. White

“Bad artists always admire each other’s work.”
—Oscar Wilde

“If you’re attacked enough, you can’t miss.”
—Tom Wolfe

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
—Virginia Woolf