Art & Creativity Quote by George Jean Nathan

A clean little blade of a line: Nathan flatters “criticism” as an art, then immediately exposes its dirty secret. “Appraising others” sounds like neutral expertise, the cool accounting of merit. But the twist is “at one's own value.” The critic isn’t a judge with calibrated instruments; he’s a merchant tagging every work with his personal price sticker. Nathan’s wit lands because it’s not merely anti-critic snark. It’s a diagnosis of how taste becomes power.

The subtext is that criticism routinely disguises autobiography as evaluation. When a reviewer calls a novel “undisciplined,” they may be praising their own preference for order. When they deem a film “shallow,” they might be advertising their depth as a brand. Nathan suggests that the critic’s standards are less a ladder to climb than a mirror to pose in. That’s why the sentence stings: it collapses the moral hierarchy critics often rely on and replaces it with something closer to self-marketing.

Context matters. Nathan came up in an early 20th-century American media ecosystem where magazines, theater reviews, and literary feuds helped manufacture reputations. Editors and critics weren’t just responding to culture; they were gatekeeping it, often with a performative hauteur that doubled as entertainment. His line reads like a warning from inside the shop: criticism can be indispensable, but it’s never disinterested. Before we accept an appraisal, we should ask what it reveals about the appraiser’s “value” - their class instincts, their aesthetic loyalties, their insecurities, their need to be seen as the grown-up in the room.