Art Critic Quotes

It was a movement that had all the art critics, all the museum directors in its thrall.

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.

The idea of going to school to be an art critic is a very crazy idea. I educated myself in public, which is a very painful way to learn - by writing and then discovering that I don't know what the f**k I'm talking about. But you remember the lessons vividly.

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

It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.

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.

I could play a cop, I could play a crook, I could play a lawyer, I could play a dentist, I could play an art critic-I could play the guy next door. I am the guy next door. I could play Catholic, Jewish, Protestant. As a matter of fact, when I did The Odd Couple, I would do it a different way each night. On Monday I'd be Jewish, Tuesday Italian, Wednesday Irish-German-and I would mix them up. I did that to amuse myself, and it always worked.

Cortissoz was art critic of the New York Herald Tribune.

Art critics are like every other critic.

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

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

I think something happens with age. And I find this really a lot in what I read from certain art critics: For people who are all about change-people who are supposed to be intellectually and culturally drawn to the idea of change and how the voice of a creative person affects the world on a bigger scale than just the canvas-I would expect a person in that position to have that open mind. It's only a sign of age that they become so locked in their own rules that they forget that this is what it's all about.

Most artists, or at least most of the ones I know, deny having a philosophical outlook that they try to translate into their works. Some had thought of the work of Cezanne and others as being a 'painted epistemology.' But Cezanne himself denied this and Daniel-Henri Kahnwiler, the art critic and art dealer, insisted that none of the many painters he had known had a philosophical culture.

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.

Aren't maids the ultimate art critics?

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

To appreciate a work of art, is it okay to like what you like, and the heck with the art critics and experts? Absolutely.

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.

I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

All art critics are useless or harmful.

The first assumption of an art critic is that the artist meant to paint something else.

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?

Everybody's an art critic.

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

An art critic is someone who hopes to see his ideas translated to canvas without having to learn how to paint.

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.

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.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

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.

An art critic is someone who appreciates art, except for any particular piece of art.