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.
Interpretation
Critics provide insights into art that we might overlook, while we are capable of forming our own judgments.
Pauline Kael highlights the value of critics in the appreciation of art. She suggests that while viewers can often form their own opinions about a piece, critics offer perspectives that deepen our understanding and reveal elements we might not have recognized initially.
In practice
In a discussion on the role of critics in art, one could quote Kael to emphasize their importance in enhancing our understanding.
I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what youβve seen.
The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.
Imagining [The Wizard of Oz] without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why would you want to?
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.
The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
Music is one of the most powerful things the world has to offer. No matter what race or religion or nationality or sexual orientation or gender that you are, it has the power to unite us.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
The flavor of wine is like delicate poetry.
The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.
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