Art criticism, I would say, is about the most ungrateful form of 'elevated' writing I know of. It may also be one of the most challenging.. if only because so few people have done it well enough to be remembered.. but I'm not sure the challenge is worth it.

The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.

Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas.

The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.

The precondition for kitsch, is the availability of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It draws its lifeblood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience

Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.

The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility.