Tracey Emin Quotes

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.

Once, I got slaughtered after 'Blade Runner' by Pauline Kael: three pages of slaughter. I was so offended, I would never read any more press.

Now, I am about to be nailed as the man who disliked 'Howl's Moving Castle.' Lord, give me strength! Also, IT, please disconnect the e-mail thing.

It's not the journalists; it's the critics that I can't understand. I've never understood what kind of a person would want to criticize someone else's work.

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

Criticism pretty much follows anything anyone ever does. So, anytime anyone ever writes a song, plays a show, or does whatever they do, there's going to be a certain amount of criticism because that's kind of what happens.

The art world is the biggest joke going. It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace - never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.

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.

I don't feel any real animosity towards critics when they write negative things. I think some are more perceptive than others. Some are very knowledgeable about painting. But it isn't something I have any influence over, so there isn't any point in worrying about it.

Those damned Abstract Expressionists. They were a major problem. Because the critics adored them to such an extent, reams and reams, pages and pages of articles about Abstract Expressionists, when we came along, we were just not taken seriously at all.

They've been bashing me since I started making films.

The U.S. museums weren't looking at my paintings at all - they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.

My dad used to get to the nastiest letters. But somebody had to take the time to type it, stamp it, send it to him, send it to the radio station. And I mean nasty stuff. It's not like nasty people with nasty opinions just popped up out of nowhere.

We can all accept criticism of creative work, but to be publicly ridiculed for it is incredibly difficult to deal with.

I think criticism is often so pallid, so tame. I wish it were more performative.

I get hate mail. I get bad mail. People say they will boycott you or the team.

Unfortunately, the higher you climb in social media, the more people will want to throw stones at you. But don't retaliate publicly.

Even if you take someone like RuPaul, no matter what she does, people are still going to find something they don't like about her. You just can't win.

As for myself, I met with as much success as I ever could have wanted. In other words, I was enthusiastically run-down by every critic of the period.

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

Everybody's an art critic.

If I say, 'Oh nice,' about seven times in the same show, things aren't going well.

People like to clap back at the people who speak out most.

Very often adverse criticism goes to craft, and that sounds an alarm to which attention should be paid.