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.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
Fashion is not beautiful, neither is it ugly. Why should it be either? Fashion is fashion.
You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you
Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue
When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.
Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.
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