Judith Martin Quotes

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.

A good critic is the man who describes his adventures among masterpieces.

Critics of art are like eunuchs in harem. They see how it's done when the men come to see the women, but they can't do it themselves.

I've always said that an art critic can put aside politics around art.

Overhearing people's conversations about art - that's always entertaining.

I don't pretend to know anything about art. I make pictures for entertainment, and then the professors tell me what they mean.

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.

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.

Chatter about art is almost always useless.

The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side

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.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.

Art critics are like every other critic.

It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself--which is what they are most needed for.

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.

Being critical of art is a way of showing art respect.

Critics have a job to do. I understand that. It's not just to criticize. They're trying to interpret art for the public.

People go into a gallery, and they're afraid to express their opinions about art. No one's afraid to say, 'Keanu Reeves was bad in that movie.' We see so many films that we can tell who's faking it. But with art, we can't always tell.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.

The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there.

In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.