Pauline Kael - Art Quotes

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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Pauline Kael
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.

Pauline Kael
Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.

Pauline Kael
Television as we have it isn't an art form — it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.

Pauline Kael
Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.

Pauline Kael
Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers.

Pauline Kael
When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.

Pauline Kael
I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It's not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It's painful writing about the bad things in an art form, particularly when young kids are going to be enthusiastic about those things, because they haven't seen anything better, or anything different.

Pauline Kael
Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose—selling—that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise.

Pauline Kael
There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory.

Pauline Kael
Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

Pauline Kael
Movies have been doing so much of the same thing — in slightly different ways — for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.

Pauline Kael
Kicked in the ribs, the press says "art" when "ouch" would be more appropriate.

Pauline Kael
Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.

Pauline Kael
The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn't have much to do with art — the expressive use of techniques — it probably doesn't have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either.

Pauline Kael
I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic.

Pauline Kael
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Pauline Kael
In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture — turning it into Pop art and camp — had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures — and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.

Pauline Kael
I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

Pauline Kael
October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913 — the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed — in music history. There was no riot, and no one threw anything at the screen, but I think it's fair to say that the audience was in a state of shock, because Last Tango in Paris has the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism. [...] Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?

Pauline Kael
It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.

Pauline Kael
We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times.

Pauline Kael
The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.

Pauline Kael
Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.

Pauline Kael
For a while in the twenties and thirties, art was talked about as a substitute for religion; now B movies are a substitute for religion.

Pauline Kael
The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.

Pauline Kael
The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it's one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet — one doesn't expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn't go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art.

Pauline Kael