Artistic Criticism Quotes

I'm sure with a production that's not particularly well received or mediocrely received, it must be incredibly challenging to get up and keep doing it.

I don't want to admit it, but I do enjoy the feedback from the audience. It's instant feedback. It's like, you could do a movie, shoot it for a year, wait six months, it comes out and you gotta do three weeks of marketing. Three weeks of that, and everyone goes, 'It sucks.'

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

I increasingly fear that nothing good can come of almost any adaptation, and obviously that's sweeping. There are a couple of adaptations that are perhaps as good or better than the original work. But the vast majority of them are pointless.

How absurd these critics must seem to me, who in their modern wantonness have become so ingenious. They want to interpret my Tannhauser as specifically Christian and impute to him a tendency to impotent glorification!

The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about, or even looking at.

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

When you're making pictures out of heartfelt passion, it hurts when someone calls them a calculated business move.

I seem to be the only Western playwright not personally acquainted with the new President of Czechoslovakia [Vaclav Havel]. I envy him though. What a relief to find oneself head of state and not have to write plays but just make history. And no Czechoslovak equivalent of Charles Osborne snapping at your ankles complaining that the history you’re making falls between every possible stool, or some Prague Steven Berkoff snarling that it’s not the kind of history that’s worth making anyway. I wonder whether Havel has lots of uncompleted dissident plays. To put them on now would be somehow inappropriate. Still, he could write a play about it.

I've never claimed that this is investment art. When we first started out, all the art colleges and universities across the country would sort of badmouth what we were doing. It's funny that a lot of them now are sending us letters saying, 'We may not totally agree with the way you paint, but we appreciate what you're doing, because you're sending literally thousands of people into art colleges.'

I'm still very critical of myself in film.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

I always said God was against art and I still believe it.

All these non-singing, non-dancing, wish-I-had-me-some-clothes fools who tell me my albums suck. Why should I pay any attention to them?

Even as one of the best choreographers in the country, I was criticised for a lot of things I have done in life.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

Who are critics? Do they know about music? Have they proved themselves in the field? I remember, when we came up with the music of 'Dil Chahta Hai,' some of the critics said that the songs sounded like jingles.

I don't know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.

I'm accused constantly of having 'no signature.' That's the big artistic demerit. You can't tell a Wyler film from another man's film just by looking at it.

You're an enemy of art and I pity your ignorance," Domingo said.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

I didn't get a Bachelor's degree - I got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, which means I didn't have to take humanities, math, and stuff like that. I think I had to take Art History, which I failed a few times.

What happens a lot in film, though not so much in the theatre, is that you get stroked and sort of massaged, like a little guinea pig.