Critical Understanding Quotes

I read the art reviews of my work. Some critics understand my art correctly, while some don't. I simply ignore the reviews written by the latter.

Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important — but we’ve merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.

What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge but its quality. You can know many things without knowing the most important.

The critic is beneath the maker, but is his needed friend. The critic is not a base caviler, but the younger brother of genius. Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty. And of making others appreciate it.

I remember the review from Michael Wilmington in Chicago, and Gene Siskel wrote really smart reviews where I thought, "Oh, they totally get what we're attempting to do."

It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood.

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.

I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.

Well, I think what's most important is the idea of something.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music - his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting - that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and all modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.

What I do find enormously gratifying is the reviews my books get from the American press. They are so on the ball compared to anywhere else. It's so satisfying to get a review that conveys the reader understood precisely what I was trying to get at.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

I look back on shows now that I thought were good, and I don't like them so much anymore. Or criticism I didn't understand or agree with now makes sense.

A lot of critics sometimes get into analyzing the way actors direct versus non-actors directing. And they really always miss it. It's one of those things where, by not being practitioners, they just came up with something that made sense to them.