Isaac D'Israeli Quotes

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

When you give an artist a canvas, you shouldn't tell him exactly how much paint to put on it, or exactly how sharp the images should be. You should let the artist get going.

Twyla Tharp put it together from the material I wrote and recorded over my whole career. I thought it was pretty good, but how objective could I be?

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

I don't have anything to say about other people's art and their work.

There are usually three sections of people who like my work. There are those who like them aesthetically. They see beauty in the images. Second, there are those who like the horror aspect, which is by design, and I like that. Third, there are those who are moved by the historical or political nature of them. They want to talk about them.

I think in any work of art, there always will be randomness about what is good, what is bad.

Art is very subjective and having to put numbers on it seems counterintuitive.

I think people should just make art and let the art speak for itself.

People believe that criticism should be objective, whatever that means, but I really don't understand what people mean by that. I guess if you're doing sonata-allegro procedure analysis, you can be objective for a page or two. But in pop? Really hard.

I think my play speaks for itself.

I think competition in any kind of activity like music, art, literature - anything that's not done with a timer - is actually impossible. So, in effect, what you're doing is you're entering the lottery. You're hoping that you play well (and that) you play your best on the day that you're heard, and you're hoping that the people who are judging will like what you do.

In art one idea is as good as another.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.

Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

If the work of art is good enough, it must not be criticized for its theme. I don't think it can be argued.

Every art critic and every writer doesn't have a frame to start off from. If I made a statement saying, "This is Abstract Expressionism," they could go, "Well, he failed miserably," or, "Fantastic, this is a new genius!" But in art history, I don't see any of the artists I like spewing bullshit. I don't see anyone recording it or pronouncing what they were doing.

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

Criticism is a surreal state, like a good drug gone bad. When it's bad you wish it would stop, and when it's good, you can't get enough.