Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Artist
Arts
Profitably
Art
Traditional
Decays
Stills
Basic
Exceptions
Still
Mass
Decay
Difference
Medium
Media
Mediums
Differences
Exception
Grows
Allowing

More quotes by Pauline Kael

Image
tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch.
Pauline Kael
Image
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
Pauline Kael
Image
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
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
Image
This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Pauline Kael
Image
McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business they've freed people from the shame of not reading. They've rationalized becoming stupid and watching television.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
Pauline Kael
Image
All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for.
Pauline Kael
Image
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