Aesthetic Analysis Quotes

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

Music is made up out of these building blocks. Studying how these blocks go together and what they consist of and the math of how it works - it's all the same stuff; it's just different aesthetics that we're talking about.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.

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.

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books.

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.

It is easier to analyze a work in its form, in its evolution, than simply to love it with all the living forces of our heart. It is easier to define its peculiarities and its details than to draw out of it its emotion, its thought.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content.

I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, "what they can live with," and more on an examination of the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view.

We have inherited both Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray. We love them and we respect them and we adore them, so we also have the right to critique them.

The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.

When people listen to music, they don't worry about what it means like they do about art. Everyone's an expert on music, but with art, I always find I have to defend its existence.

It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.

Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't.

The science of style as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression.

Rule of criticism: only attend to the shape, and the purpose will manifest itself.