#criticism

It shows a mediocre architect at the top of his game [on the Beetham Tower in Manchester] ↗

— Owen Hatherley

#criticism #manchester #modern #architecture

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#creativity #literary-criticism #self-expression #art

Music resembles poetry, in each Are nameless graces which no methods teach, And which a master hand alone can reach. ↗

— Alexander Pope

#an-essay-on-criticism #art #genius #music #poet

There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf ’s work, and her life has been as much debated as her writing. I would recommend the following three which represent three different biographical contexts and a range of positions on Woolf ’s life: Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972), Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1996), and Julia Briggs’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005). There is no one, true biography of Woolf (as, indeed, there cannot be of any subject of biography), but these three mark important phases in the writing and rewriting of Woolf ’s life. Hot debate continues over how biographers represent her mental health, her sexuality, her politics, her suicide, and of course her art, and over how we are to understand the latter in relation to all the former points of contention. ↗

— Jane Goldman

#art

Most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mindmatter question; they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces. This rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art. ↗

— Jewel Spears Brooker

#art

It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#art

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon. ↗

— D.H. Lawrence

#art #emotion #feeling #interpret #interpretation

Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#independence #attitude

Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and truly creative writer. It will replace attitude with genuine confidence, and empty arrogance with artistry. ↗

— Molly Cochran

#revision #writers-on-writing #writing-craft #attitude

Criticism is an act of love. We can never learn those people we love, but we can learn about them in such ways as to perceive more clearly that unfathomable, mysterious core that is the source of their beauty. ↗

— Richard L. McGuire

#love #beauty