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About critics

Critics have tried to stop me every inch of the way, they've always had bad stuff to say about me… Fuck 'em. I'll see them all in their graves.Those who've passed judgment on me are wussies and pussies, idiots who don't know what they're talking about, evil motherfuckers who can rot in hell.

Bob Dylan

Rolling Stone, Sept 12, 2012

I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Jean-Michel-Basquiat

Ich betrachte das Barometer der Opposition als eine gesunde Anzeige der Tiefe des individuellen Ausdrucks. Je feindseliger die Kritik, desto mehr sollte der Künstler ermutigt sein.

Marcel Duchamp

The world doesn't like people who are different from the average. Rulers throughout history have always hated those who stood out from the masses - the geniuses, poets, artists, witches and saints; and usually burned them or put them in dungeons, concentration-camps or mental institutions, thinking of what a nice and peaceful slave-camp this planet could be without them.

Gottfried Helnwein

Dictators and authoritarians always target artists first, because artists speak directly to the hearts and minds of the people, and they see what is happening before anyone else."

Ai Weiwei

You can crush a man as easily as a bug, but you cannot crush an idea. You can kill the artist, but the art lives on.

Salman Rushdie

They can snip all the flowers, but they can’t stop the spring.

Pablo Neruda

If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.

Wassily Kandinsky

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

William Shakespeare

These so-called critics aren't worth their weight in ruptured condoms.

William Burroughs

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Winston Churchill

Was ich scheiße, ist besser als das, was du je gedacht hast!

Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethovens Antwort an einen Kritiker

The world would be a lot better off if it paid more attention to its philosophers and artists than to its own tiny egotistic spirit, which lacks an overview. People should place their belief in Beethoven and Socrates.

Elfriede Jelinek

Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

I have already settled it for myself, so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.

Georgia O'Keefe

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

Peter Greenaway

I’ve never had an easy relationship with critics. I hold a lot of homicide in my heart. If this was another time, I’d packing a piece. (gun)

Jim Dine

We are not trying to entertain critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.

Walt Disney

Tomorrow's culture is always dictated by the artists, not the critics.

David Bowie

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

William S. Burroughs

We live in capitalism, it’s power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

Aristotle

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.

Brendan Francis Behan

Irish poet, novelist, playwright

Submitting to censorship is like agreeing to be castrated because you are afraid of getting someone pregnant."

Arthur Miller

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been a statue erected to a critic.

Jean Sibelius

A work of art is a declaration of freedom. There has never been anything so difficult for mankind to bear as freedom.

Oskar Schlemmer

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.

Benjamin Franklin

Critics are quite hopeless - drooling, driveling, doleful, depressing, dropsical drips.

Thomas Beecham

conductor and impresario, founder of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors

Ernest Hemingway

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Henry Miller

What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

Charles Bukowski

All critics should be assassinated.

Man Ray

I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

Andy Warhol

The rules of art do not exist, because what makes art art is the fact that it obeys no rules at all.

Elfriede Jelinek

‘Wonderful, Wonderful Times’ (1990)

I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.”

William S. Burroughs

(in German)

Ich gehöre nicht zu diesen schwächlichen, rührseligen Amerikanern, die von allen um sie herum geliebt werden wollen. Es ist mir völlig egal, ob die Leute mich abgrundtief hassen; ich gehe ohnehin davon aus, dass die meisten das tun. Die entscheidende Frage ist, ob sie überhaupt in der Lage sind, etwas dagegen zu tun. Meine Zuneigung gilt nur wenigen Menschen; ich verschwende sie nicht in einem widerlichen Versuch, missmutige, wertlose Arschlöcher bei Laune zu halten.

William Burroughs

Sie sind elende Wanzen, diese Kritiker.

Honoré de Balzac

Censorship is the tribute that snobbery pays to vulgarity.

Oscar Wilde

The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.

Victor Hugo

It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man’s oration, it is very easy; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.

Plutarch

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievment, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosvelt

Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

It is to be regreted that this word, sentiment, which is meant to describe the poetical efforts of an artist living soul, has been misused and finally, ridiculed. Was there ever a great word that the masses did not try immediatly to cheapen and desecrate?

Wassily Kandinsky

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Don’t criticize what you don’t understand, son. You never walked in that man’s shoes.

Elvis Presley

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I write about my own work because I want to speak for myself. I might not be the only authority, nor the best authority, but I want to participate in the writing of my own history. Why should artists be validated by outside authorities. I don't like being paternalised and colonised by every Tom, Dick or Harry that comes along (male or female).

Marlene Dumas

Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts.

The artist must be blind to distinction between 'recognized' or 'unrecognized' conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age.

Wassily Kandinsky

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

When I look at a work of Art I ask myself: does it inspire me, does it touch and move me, do I learn something from it, does it startle or amaze me - do I get excited, upset? And this is the test any artwork has to pass: can it create an emotional impact on a human being even when he has no education or any theoretical information about art? I’ve always had a problem with art that can only be understood by somebody with a degree in art history, and I have a problem with theories. Most of them are bullshit anyway. Most critics and theorists have little respect for art and artists, and I think the importance of theory in art is totally overrated. Real art is self-evident. Real art is intense, enchanting, exciting and unsettling; it has a quality and magic that you cannot explain. Art is not logic, and if you want to experience it, your mind and rational thinking will be of little help. Art is something spiritual that you can only experience with your senses, your heart, your soul.

Gottfried Helnwein

We have been educated to such a fine - or dull - point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind.

Henry Miller

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Marcel Proust

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

Chuck Palahniuk

American novelist

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.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ein Kritiker ist ein Huhn, das gackert, wenn ein anderes ein Ei legt.

Giovanni Guareschi

Italian journalist, cartoonist, author

Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

Edgar Degas

You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.

Benjamin Disraeli

Not everyone is an artist,but everyone is a fucking critic.

Marcel Duchamp

Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember, the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you.

Zig Ziglar

Instead of having ‘critics’ who can’t themselves direct, write, act, sing, dance or claim any other kind of expertise, would we not get superior commentary from people who can? Why should artistic criticism from untalented people be preferred to that of outstandingly talented ones?

John Cleese

It's better to create something that others criticize than to create nothing and criticize others.

Ricky Gervais

Man darf nie einem Theoretiker (Kunsthistoriker, Kritiker und so weiter) glauben, wenn er behauptet, dass er irgendeinen objektiven Fehler im Werke entdeckt habe.Das Einzige, was der Theoretiker mit Recht behaupten kann, ist das, dass er bis jetzt diese oder jene Anwendung des Mittels noch nicht gekannt hat. Und: die Theoretiker, die von der Analyse der schon dagewesenen Formen ausgehend, ein Werk tadeln oder loben, sind die schädlichsten Irreführer, die zwischen dem Werk und dem naiven Beschauer eine Mauer bilden. Von diesem Standpunkt aus, (welcher leider meistens der einzig mögliche ist) ist die Kunstkritik der schlimmste Feind der Kunst.

Wassily Kandinsky

Ich habe mich inzwischen daran gewöhnt, daß es Leute gibt, die sich nicht daran gewöhnen können, daß es keine Reichskulturkammer mehr gibt.

Gottfried Helnwein

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Norman Mailer

Most journalism is: people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

Frank Zappa

Some of the best laughs I've got have been the one-liners that have come out of the worst reviews.

Sean Penn

What I would say is: 'I'm 57, my pool's heated—you can say anything you like.

Sean Penn

If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.

Ernest Hemingway

Tom Waits. When told by a critic his voice sounded like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smoke house for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car, Tom Waits said, “flattery will get you nowhere with me.”

Tom Waits

Corporate journalists have license to use their huge platforms to malign, expose and destroy anyone they want. Your moral duty: sit in respectful silence and never object.

Glenn Greenwald

Frankly, despite my distaste of the press, I'd love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers.

Luis Buñuel

Critics are people who originally wanted to become executioners but just missed the mark.

Jean Genet

Most societies are ruled by mediocre people who have no vision and no imagination. Most rulers are scared of creation and creative people. Artists are funny, all they want is to touch and move, challenge and surprise others. But dictators hate surprises more than anything else. All they want is to turn their territory into a neat little toy prison camp and play with their little toy people. Push them around, rip a leg or a head off now and then and throw them into the garbage when they are tired of their stupid, little doll faces.

Gottfried Helnwein

Dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans... And those people are artists.

Toni Morrison

After all, dictators are always afraid of poets.

Ursula K. Le Guin

“Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.”

William S. Burroughs

The tigers have found me and I do not care.

Charles Bukowski

The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. it is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits -a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

Hunter S. Thompson

(in German):Die Presse ist eine Bande von gefühllosen Schwuchteln. Journalismus ist kein Beruf oder ein Handwerk . Es ist ein billiges Allheilmittel für Arschlöcher und Spinner, eine Scheintüre zum Arsch des Lebens, ein dreckiges, verpisstes kleines Loch, das der Bauinspektor zugenagelt hat, aber gerade tief genug, dass sich ein Penner vom Bürgersteig hineinrollen und wie ein Schimpanse in einem Zookäfig masturbieren kann.

Hunter S. Thompson

We are a cancer and there is no cure…The mainstream media blocks ‘diversity of thought’ in favor of promoting hysterical voices for ratings.

Ariana Pekary

TV veteran, MSNBC producer Ariana Pekary explained the reason for her deciding to quit her job.

The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

John Swinton

‘New York Times’ Chief Editor, later editorial writer for the ‘New York Sun’, in a speech he delivered to fellow journalists, at a press dinner, 1883.

I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value -However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.

Mark Twain

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors.

Thomas Jefferson

The liberty of the Press is called the Palladium of Freedom, which means, in these days, the liberty of being deceived, swindled, and humbugged by the Press and paying hugely for the deception.

Mark Twain

From Author's Sketch Book, Nov. 1870

(in German)

Die Freiheit der Presse wird als heiliges, unantastbares Gut der Freiheit bezeichnet. Was heutzutage bedeutet, die Freiheit betrogen, beschwindelt, und reingelegt zu werden, und ordentlich für diesen Betrug zu bezahlen.

Mark Twain

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true or false, no longer exists.

Hannah Arendt

The Origins of Totalitarianism

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

Charles Bukowski

Kein Urteil ist schneller und keines hält sich für sicherer als das der Unwissenheit.

Adalbert Stifter

Wie lange haben die Hunde den Mond angebellt, ohne daß er sein Schweigen gebrochen hätte.

Gerhart Hauptmann

They insulted me in seventy lines and only the spelling mistakes bothered me.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Ansel Adams

Art is to look at, not to criticize.

Edgar Allan Poe

I have a strict policy never to criticize other artists. Making art is incredible difficult, and since critics are already waiting to ‘kill’ artists, fellow creators should be supportive rather than harsh.

Jerry Seinfeld

Die Insekten stechen nicht aus Bosheit, sondern weil sie auch leben wollen; ebenso unsere Kritiker: sie wollen unser Blut, nicht unsern Schmerz.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Schlagt ihn tot, den Hund! Es ist ein Rezensent!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sarkastische Schlusszeile aus dem 1774 entstandenen Gedicht ‘Rezensent’, in dem Goethe mit Kritikern abrechnet..

Professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.

Ernest Hemingway

Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.

John Steinbeck

It’s odd that, given film critics’ inabilities in acting, directing, or screenwriting, they are then put in judgement over people who can write, direct and act.

John Cleese

“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

Susan Sontag

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet

A “critic” is a man who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative men. There is logic in this; he is unbiased—he hates all creative, people equally.

Robert A. Heinlein

The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint!

Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht,

Ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht;

Drum besser wär's, daß nichts entstünde.

So ist denn alles, was ihr Sünde,

Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt,

Mein eigentliches Element.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run.

Channing Pollock

There's a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.

Sean Penn

It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time.

Alexander Boris Johnson

Former journalist, later Mayor of London and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.

Mark Twain

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

Norman Mailer

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives - has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

Carl Bernstein

American investigative journalist and author. Together with Bob Woodward, he covered the Watergate scandal

Fuck the press... They can just go fuck themselves"

Harold Pinter

English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years.

Ich steh vor meinem Gartentor und da sind 50 Journalisten - und von keinem Menschen, der zu mir kommt, höre ich, dass er sagt, dass er irgendetwas von mir gelesen hat, dass er weiß, was ich geschrieben hab, es sind nur die Fragen: Wie reagiert die Welt, Reaktion auf Reaktion. Ich bin ein Schriftsteller, komme von Tolstoi, ich komme von Homer, ich komme von Cervantes, lasst mich in Frieden und stellt mir nicht solche Fragen.“

Peter Handke

Schreiben allein genügte. Im Grund war das schon seit den Gedichten drinnen, daß man mich als Stinktier bezeichnet hat.

Thomas Bernhard

Ich überlasse meine Figuren nicht gern dilettantischen Tiefschlägern.

Thomas Bernhard

My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 – or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.

Harold Pinter

English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years.

Jede Kritik ist gerechtfertigt, aber ob sie trifft, das weiß man ja nicht, es kann jeder sagen, was er will, und man kann es nicht ändern.

Thomas Bernhard

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.

Thomas Jefferson

in a letter to John Norvell in 1807

You wouldn't understand my works. You wouldn't have the faintest idea of what they were about. You wouldn't appreciate the points of reference. You're way behind. All of you. There's no point in sending you my works. You'd be lost. It's nothing to do with a question of intelligence. It's a way of being able to look at the world. It's a question of how far you can operate on things and not in things. I mean it's a question of your capacity to ally the two, to relate the two, to balance the two. To see, to be able to see! I'm the one who can see. That's why I can write my critical works.You're just objects. You just...move about. I can observe it. I can see what you do. It's the same as I do. But you're lost in it. … I won't be lost in it.

Harold Pinter

English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists.

It is not so much what is factually happening, it’s who owns the narrative. And we have to be very, very careful and watchful about looking at the media. What are the media doing? Is there some sort of almost collective brainwashing going on or not? … We have to be quite vigilant and we should think on our own.

Werner Herzog

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

Andy Warhol

Die Literaturkritik wertet, für die Bewertung aber besteht in der Sprache nur ein begrenzter Vorrat an Worten; dieser Vorrat schießt automatisch in die Gedanken, wenn die Sprache des zu beurteilenden Textes beurteilt werden soll: das ist es, was die Literaturkritik oft zu einem leeren Geschäft macht.

Peter Handke

Kein Wort von dem, was ich über Jugoslawien geschrieben habe, ist denunzierbar, kein einziges. Das ist Literatur.

Peter Handke

Mit nichts kann man ein Kunst-Werk so wenig berühren als mit kritischen Worten: es kommt dabei immer auf mehr oder minder glückliche Mißverständnisse heraus. Die Dinge sind alle nicht so faßbar und sagbar, als man uns meistens glauben machen möchte; die meisten Ereignisse sind unsagbar, vollziehen sich in einem Raume, den nie ein Wort betreten hat, und unsagbarer als alle sind die Kunst-Werke, geheimnisvolle Existenzen, deren Leben neben dem unseren, das vergeht, dauert.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Ein Kunstwerk ist gut, wenn es aus Notwendigkeit entstand. In dieser Art seines Ursprungs liegt sein Urteil: es gibt kein anderes.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Briefe ab einen jungen Dichter, Paris , 1903

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

John Steinbeck

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Des Künstlers Gefühl ist sein Gesetz

Caspar David Friedrich

Nie aber darf das Gefühl eines andern uns als Gesetz aufgebürdet werden.

Caspar David Friedrich

Der Sensible muß verbrennen, dieser zarte Nachtfalter.

Elfriede Jelinek

Die Klavierspielerin

Don't think for a minute that bad publicity and endless criticism don't leave their claw marks on everyone concerned. Your friends try to cheer you up by saying lightly, "I suppose you get used to it, and ignore it." You try. You try damned hard. But you never get used to it. It always wounds and hurts.

Ava Gardner

Ava: My Story

When you first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I'm lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I'm really lucky, I will too.

Philip Guston

High' and 'low' in Art are completely arbitrary and artificial distinctions that some bloated assholes invented to make life more complicated. Comics are considered "low", but when Roy Lichtensein comes and picks out one panel of a comic, projects and paints it on a canvas then it's suddenly "high" art? Give me a break. The only thing that I care about in art is quality, intensity. Is a work of art capable of touching and moving me? Does it cause an emotional impact on me? Does it startle, surprise, upset, excite me? Does it make me think? Does it inspire me? Does it stimulate my imagination? Does it change the way I view the world to some degree?

Gottfried Helnwein

Denn die Kunst ist nicht für einen kleinen abgeschlossenen Kreis weniger vorzugsweise Gebildeter, sondern für die Nation im Großen und Ganzen da.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Avant-garde is French for bullshit.

John Lennon

Treat criticism like bubble gum. Chew on it a little, and then spit it out.

Paul Chappell

You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.

Winston Churchill

Unsere Väter lachten über Courbet und siehe da, jetzt schwärmen wir für ihn. Wir lachen über Manet und unsere Söhne werden für seine Bilder schwärmen... Ich bin überzeugt davon, dass Manet morgen als ein Meister gelten wird, dass ich sicher bin, ein gutes Geschäft zu machen, wenn ich reich genug wäre, alle seine Bilder zu kaufen. In zehn Jahren werden sie fünfzehn oder zwanzig Mal soviel Wert sein und dann werden gewisse Bilder, die jetzt vierzigtausend Francs kosten, keine vierzig wert sein. Man braucht nicht einmal sehr gescheit zu sein, um so etwas zu prophezeien...

Emile Zola

I think a single sentence by Van Gogh is better than the whole work of all the art critics and art historians put together.

John Olsen

Warum sollte Poesie Sinn machen?

Charlie Chaplin

Opinions that one now pastes in a book labelled cock-a-doodle-dum and keeps for reading to select audiences on summer nights once drew tears, I can assure you. Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony. Moreover, it is all very well for you, who have got yourself to college... to say that genius should disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them. Remember Keats. Remember the words he had cut on his tombstone. Think of Tennyson; think — but I need hardly multiply instances of the undeniable, if very unfortunate, fact that it is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own, 1929

Über Malerei reden, das hat keinen Sinn. Indem man mit der Sprache etwas vermittelt, verändert man es.

Gerhard Richter

Criticism is necessary and good. It's just that most of it is stupid.

Gerhard Richter

While critics and scientists seek to classify everything, art itself has room for all possibilities.

Picasso

Picasso hat gesagt: "Als Kind ist jeder ein Künstler. Die Schwierigkeit liegt darin, erwachsen zu werden und einer zu bleiben." Das ist deshalb so schwer, weil die meisten Erziehungssysteme wie Mähdrescher funktionieren: vorne kommen die lieben Kinder hinein, und hinten kommen sie fein geschrotet und gemahlen wieder heraus. Und so werden Erwachsene erzeugt: durch die Zerstörung des Kind-seins, des Spielens und Träumens, der Kreativität und jeder Spontanität. Aber das ist wahrscheinlich unvermeidlich, wenn man sich ordentliche Staatsbürger wünscht, wie Soldaten, Steurfahnder, Zuhälter, Banker, Psychiater, Geheimagenten und Rennfahrer...

Gottfried Helnwein