1,290 Quotes About Criticism

If you want to know who rules over you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are non-coercive knowledge produced in the interest of human freedom

The best way for a critic to fight against bad art is to keep it a secret.

Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.

When someone is cruel, harsh, mean, to not take their words personally is one thing, but to hear the silent cry within those words is another. This sort of perspective can not only liberate us from crippling self-doubt in the face of criticism, it can also liberate us from automatically becoming blind participants in the interaction patterns that the cruel person has become accustomed to—a favour we do for the other person as much as for ourselves.

People make the mistake of supposing that genius is complicated. It is the opposite. We regular folks are complicated — tied in knots of ambivalence and befogged with uncertainties. Genius has the economy of a machine with a minimum of moving parts. Everything about Picasso came to bear when he drew a line.

True criticism praises true art for what it does-praises as plainly and comprehensively as possible-and denounces false art for its failure to do art's proper work. No easy task, the task of the critic, since the trolls are masters of disguise.

You want to evaluate musical art on its own terms, first. It is only when you have a solid grasp of that, that you can start to speculate.