Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Take
Master
Explosives
Function
Picasso
Masters
Clown
Century
Masterpiece
Artist
Earlier
Conjurer
Art
Museums
Masterpieces
Seems
Centuries
Volatile
Back
Presence
Explosive
More quotes by Pauline Kael
The words Kiss Kiss Bang Bang which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies
Pauline Kael
When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once.
Pauline Kael
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
Pauline Kael
a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
Pauline Kael
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.
Pauline Kael
Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
Pauline Kael
Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace made me expect the worst.
Pauline Kael
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Pauline Kael
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
Pauline Kael
If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.
Pauline Kael
Being creative is having something to sell, or knowing how to sell something, or having sold something. It has taken over what we used to mean by being wised up knowing the tricks, the shortcuts.
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
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
Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
Pauline Kael
Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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
In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.
Pauline Kael
If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
Pauline Kael
The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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