"All critics should be assassinated"
About this Quote
A surrealist grenade disguised as a one-liner, Man Ray's "All critics should be assassinated" isn’t a policy proposal so much as an attack on the power structure of taste. Coming from a photographer who made his name by breaking rules (rayographs, solarization, portraits that feel like optical pranks), it reads as contempt for the idea that art needs a hall monitor. The violence is rhetorical: assassination as a fantasy of removing the middleman between maker and audience, between experiment and permission.
The line works because it performs the very thing critics often demand from avant-garde art: provocation. It’s an artist refusing the court system of reviews, where a few appointed interpreters turn living work into verdicts, movements into labels, people into "schools". Man Ray operated in ecosystems - Dada, Surrealism, Paris salons - where manifestos and feuds were part of the medium. Critics weren’t just writers; they were gatekeepers and myth-makers, capable of domesticating the unruly into a marketable narrative. If you’re trying to keep art strange, that’s an existential threat.
There’s also swagger here, the kind artists deploy when they know they need critics even as they resent them. The insult flatters the target: you only fantasize about killing what can kill you back. Under the bluster is a cleaner demand - stop treating art like a translation exercise. Let images stay insolent, illogical, and free to fail without being sentenced for it.
The line works because it performs the very thing critics often demand from avant-garde art: provocation. It’s an artist refusing the court system of reviews, where a few appointed interpreters turn living work into verdicts, movements into labels, people into "schools". Man Ray operated in ecosystems - Dada, Surrealism, Paris salons - where manifestos and feuds were part of the medium. Critics weren’t just writers; they were gatekeepers and myth-makers, capable of domesticating the unruly into a marketable narrative. If you’re trying to keep art strange, that’s an existential threat.
There’s also swagger here, the kind artists deploy when they know they need critics even as they resent them. The insult flatters the target: you only fantasize about killing what can kill you back. Under the bluster is a cleaner demand - stop treating art like a translation exercise. Let images stay insolent, illogical, and free to fail without being sentenced for it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Dark Humor |
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