Quotes & Sayings About Artists And Critics

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

Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them. — Sol LeWitt

It's not curators, it's not critics, it's not the public, it's not collectors who find great artists - it's other artists. — David Galenson

Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease. — Jerry Saltz

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. — Oscar Wilde

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

I understand that artists and critics make a big deal over the Grammys. But when I go to my shows and I'm selling out arenas in London, and when I'm in Australia and Japan, there aren't any Grammys there. There are human beings who I've touched. There are human beings who are inspired by me, who I love dearly. And that's what my career is based on. — Nicki Minaj

The "music of decline" had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts. — Hermann Hesse

These critics with the illusions they've created about artists - it's like idol worship. They only like people when they're on their way up ... I cannot be on the way up again. — John Lennon

Just as the digital dominance of the recording studio seemed complete, analog had its revenge. Musicians, producers, and engineers searching for the sound of the music that inspired them - roots Americana, blues, and classic rock - began thinking about how the process of recording affected the sound. These artists, including White, Dave Grohl, and Gillian Welch, began experimenting with old tape machines and vintage studio equipment, returning to the analog methods they'd once used. Critics and fans noted that these albums sounded different - more heartfelt, raw, and organic - and the industry began to take notice. — David Sax

There are good and bad critics like good or bad artists. A good critic says why they didn't like it. A bad critic gives it away that they don't like you as a person. I quite like that as well, because it means that I've won. — Ricky Gervais

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

Critics are always complaining about the materialism of hip-hop and accusing the artists of living way above their means. But this ostentatious sort of spending isn't strictly the province of hip-hop. It's almost like a continuation of the American Dream. — Simon De Pury

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

I relied mainly on other artists, who I think are smarter than critics, any critics or curators or anybody like that. They really know. — Robert Barry

I am obsessed by the idea of silence. I went through an entire library studying art, artists and their critics, philosophers, too, on the meaning and significance of the color white. I dreamed of white birds and white bears. I thought about the white pages of my mother's journals. I became enthralled with John Cage and his work, 4'33, his masterpiece of ambient sound. Rauschenberg, too. And then at some point I let go. What sticks to the soul is what gets placed on the page. Maybe that's the unknown part, the mystery, the power of the empty page. — Terry Tempest Williams

Obviously all writers, all artists, have their own internal critics; as they write they are being self-critical. — Edna Longley

By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover). — Brenda Ueland

Pseudo-critics prefer to direct their remarks to the artist - Heaven forgive them - but one due rather to a common impression that such an attitude is the correct one, that all paintings should be figuratively mutilated, and that all artists are fair game, or really grateful perhaps for a few tips. — Walter J. Phillips

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

The thing about living in New York is that there are other artists; that is the most difficult, I think they are the hardest critics. — Julian Schnabel

Unfortunately life has a way of sidetracking one's greatest ambitions. Painters, would-be artists, end up whitewashing walls. Sculptors are forced to design toilets. Writers become critics or publicists. Archaeologists, like myself, can become gravediggers. — Salman Rushdie

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

You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them
well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies. — Joseph Campbell

Critics are more committed to the rules of art than artists are. — Mason Cooley

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

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

But fans, including critics, of particular movements of artists, tend to want what they love to stay the same, the regression is not to the mean but to an Edenic past that never actually existed. This — George Grella Jr.

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

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals
and critics of the Women's Movement. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Artists ... do not need the applause or condemnation of the critics, the ideas of other artists, or the demands of the collectors. — Robert Genn

I see around 100 shows a month, going from Niketown-size palaces where you feel like yelling, to storefronts in Bushwick. Each has to pay the bills; keep artists happy; and cope with collectors (oy!), curators (ay-yi-yi), critics (woo-hoo!), and occasionally plumbers. That their fiscal life often hangs in the balance only adds to the energy. — Jerry Saltz