Jean Kerr Quotes

To many people, dramatic criticism must seem like an attempt to tattoo soap bubbles.

An artist is usually responsible only for the creation of a particular art. It's up to the critics to label it.

Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, "thin and unconvincing", "turgid and uninspired", "competent and serviceable,"...you know'.

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.

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

People who have a reputation for being evil are usually good.

Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.

I would hate to think of the theatre world without critics. Without them, we'd not have the record of each season.

Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.

Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them.

Charles Saatchi has never liked my work at all.

One way to test a picture's integrity is to turn it upside down - a technique used not only by connoisseurs but also by artists trying to see their work with a fresh eye.

In the eight years I worked at newspapers, even during a little stretch when I was a film critic, I was never, ever doing exclusively criticism. In the daily newspaper world, much more value is placed on reporting than on thinking abstractly about art. The eight years I was in newspapers, I was mainly a journalist in the conventional sense, and just doing criticism when there were opportunities.

The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.

Don't be taken in by the guff that critics are killing the theater. Commonly they sin on the side of enthusiasm. Too often they give their blessing to trash.

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.

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.

The people have no ear, either for rhythm or music, and their unnatural passion for pianoforte playing and singing is thus all the more repulsive. There is nothing on earth more terrible than English music, except English painting.

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.

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

The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

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."

It always bothered me when people came off stage and were told how great they were. They weren't, really, in my opinion. It was then I started thinking that, contrary to conventional wisdom, film was the artful medium for the actor, not the stage.