I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the speaker's recognition of their past inability to appreciate art subjectively, instead relying on rigid standards.
Tom Stoppard's quote illustrates the tension between objective and subjective evaluations of art. It conveys the idea that the speaker once believed in a definitive measure of artistic quality, dismissing personal interpretations and feelings. This realization highlights a more nuanced understanding of art appreciation, emphasizing the importance of individual responses and the subjective nature of aesthetic experiences.
In practice
During an art workshop, this quote can be used to encourage participants to trust their feelings about art.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
They say that to be a writer you must first have an unhappy childhood. I don't know if unhappiness is necessary, but I think maybe some children who have suffered a loss too great for words grow up into writers who are always trying to find those words, trying to find a meaning for the way they have lived
The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
To me, there are things you're good at and things you're not so good at. For some reason, I'm good at darker characters. It has to do with how you look.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
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