Time & Perspective Quote by Jim Dine

Jim Dine’s line lands like a switchblade confession: not a literal threat so much as a brutally honest sketch of how criticism can feel to an artist whose work is bound up with ego, craft, and survival. The phrasing is deliberately over-hot. “I hold a lot of homicide in my heart” is cartoonishly extreme, the kind of sentence you reach for when ordinary language can’t cover the mix of humiliation, rage, and helplessness that comes with being publicly judged. It’s also performance. Dine isn’t just describing emotion; he’s staging it, turning critique into a drama where the artist is cornered and the critic is a kind of sanctioned attacker.

The subtext is less “I want to hurt someone” than “I resent the power arrangement.” Critics get to be definitive in print; artists have to absorb it and keep making. By saying “If this was another time, I’d be packing a piece,” Dine invokes a mythic older masculinity - frontier justice, personal score-settling - precisely to underline how disempowered he feels in the modern cultural economy, where the only weapon you’re allowed is your next body of work. The anachronism (“another time”) lets him vent without confessing intent: it’s conditional, hypothetical, safely theatrical.

Context matters: Dine came up in a postwar art world that increasingly professionalized taste-making, with critics helping to crown movements and careers. His outburst reads as an artist’s refusal to be domesticated by that apparatus. He’s not arguing with an opinion; he’s arguing with a system that turns opinion into authority.