"I never wish for critics"
About this Quote
A line like "I never wish for critics" lands less as a tantrum than as a cool, Jasper Johns-style refusal to let other people finish the work for him. Coming from the artist who turned flags, targets, and numbers into high-stakes paintings, it reads as a defense of ambiguity. Johns made images that feel instantly legible, then sabotaged that comfort with surface, repetition, and deadpan restraint. Critics thrive on closing the circuit: naming movements, assigning meanings, building ladders out of footnotes. Johns is protecting the gap where looking stays active.
The phrasing matters. "Wish" implies desire, not tolerance. He isn't arguing that critics are illegitimate; he's saying they aren't part of the dream. That distance is strategic. Postwar American art culture built a new priesthood of tastemakers, and Johns was caught in it early, canonized almost immediately. Praise can be as distortive as dismissal. Being "understood" too quickly freezes an artist into a brand: the Flag Guy, the Neo-Dada bridge, the formalist darling. Johns's work resists that kind of capture, because its subject is often the act of perception itself.
There's also a wry humility in the negative: not "I don't need critics", but "I never wish for" them, as if criticism were bad weather - sometimes it comes, you live with it, but you don't schedule your life around it. In an era when artists are pressured to supply statements, positions, and instant legibility, Johns's sentence is a quiet insistence that art doesn't owe anyone a tidy explanatory receipt.
The phrasing matters. "Wish" implies desire, not tolerance. He isn't arguing that critics are illegitimate; he's saying they aren't part of the dream. That distance is strategic. Postwar American art culture built a new priesthood of tastemakers, and Johns was caught in it early, canonized almost immediately. Praise can be as distortive as dismissal. Being "understood" too quickly freezes an artist into a brand: the Flag Guy, the Neo-Dada bridge, the formalist darling. Johns's work resists that kind of capture, because its subject is often the act of perception itself.
There's also a wry humility in the negative: not "I don't need critics", but "I never wish for" them, as if criticism were bad weather - sometimes it comes, you live with it, but you don't schedule your life around it. In an era when artists are pressured to supply statements, positions, and instant legibility, Johns's sentence is a quiet insistence that art doesn't owe anyone a tidy explanatory receipt.
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| Topic | Art |
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