True karate is this: that in daily life one's mind and body be trained and developed in a spirit of humility, and that in critical times, one be devoted utterly to the cause of justice.
— Gichin Funakoshi
Eye-opening Art Critic quotations
Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.
I don't listen to what art critics say.
I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.
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.
For it is easy to criticize and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes a lifetime.
Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.
Art cannot be criticized because every mistake is a new creation
More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship.
Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
Studio Ghosts: When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.
When people in a democracy are not educated in the art of living -- to strengthen their conscience, compassion, and ability to question and think critically -- they can be easily manipulated by fear and propaganda. A democracy is only as wise as its citizens, and a democracy of ignorant citizens can be as dangerous as a dictatorship.
The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.
I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.
I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
Art is a criticism of society and life, and I believe that if life became perfect, art would be meaningless and cease to exist.
Once you learn to look at architecture not merely as an art more or less well or more or less badly done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant.
All art critics are useless or harmful.
Move not unless you see an advantage;
use not your troops unless there is something to be gained; fight not unless the position is critical.
When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.
Critics, mathematicians, scientists and busybodies want to classify everything, marking the boundaries and limits... In art, there is room for all possibilities.
PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART.
Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.
In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'
If a man has the assurance within his own heart that he is worthy, and that he is laboring to the best of his ability to do good, he can stand up under the condemnation, the criticism and the censure of those by whom he is surrounded.
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas.
The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
The word 'art' is very slippery. It really has no importance in relation to one's work. I work for the pleasure, for the pleasure of the work, and everything else is a matter for the critics.
We need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical.
Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.
An art critic is someone who appreciates art, except for any particular piece of art.
The art of the novel, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation - a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion - that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change. To many, the solution seems simple enough: such a change being impossible, the art of the novel is dying.
I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together.
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.
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.