Chuck Klosterman 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.

To appreciate a work of art, is it okay to like what you like, and the heck with the art critics and experts? Absolutely.

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

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

Art is always good. It just depends if you like or not.

In my reviews, I feel it's good to make it clear that I'm not proposing objective truth, but subjective reactions; a review should reflect the immediate experience.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

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.

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.

Being critical of art is a way of showing art respect. No sports writer would say, "Well the Yankees had a great season this year." No food critic would get a bad meal and say, "Oh, it was so lovely." It always strikes me as odd when people say, "Why do you write negatively about any art?" I think that everybody has mixed feelings about everything - even Goya. I mean, I look at Rembrandt sometimes and I hear a voice in my head go, "It's pretty brown."

While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

A critic should always strive to recapture the sense of wonder and surprise with which he first beheld a now-familiar work of art.

Everybody's an art critic.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

There is no best anything in art.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation. Star Trek and Spock, if they are works of art, can be discussed. But finally the response comes in individual terms. Each viewer sees what is there for him, depending on his frame of reference.

What I like or dislike in music is my internal affair. I never want an audience out there to be influenced because John said. I don't want to have to endure that kind of nonsense. I work for the art of the individual.

I've always been very opinionated, for lack of a better term, about art. Not to sound too arrogant, but I guess I'm a connoisseur of telling people what I think is good and bad.

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.