Russell Lynes
Russell Lynes
Russell Lyneswas an American art historian, photographer, author and managing editor of Harper's Magazine...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth2 December 1910
CountryUnited States of America
wise insult old-you
I'd love to ask how old you are, but unfortunately I know you can't count that high.
art wall home
The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there.
drinking excellent novel
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
attitude school forever
There are times when you just get down, you feel like nobody likes you. We're in high school forever. It's just what we do with it.
men gentleman behave
A lady is a woman who makes a man behave like a gentleman.
negative wasting-time idleness
Wasting time is negative, but there is something positive about idleness.
brother moving feet
There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating; accumulators act at random. The Collyer brothers, who died among the tons of newspapers and trash with which they filled every cubic foot of their house so that they could scarcely move, were a classic example of accumulators, but there are many of us whose houses are filled with all manner of things that we "can't bear to throw away.
art new-orleans expression
Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art.
art cutting islands
The Good Quality Snob, or wearer of muted tweeds, cut almost exactly the same from year to year, often with a hat of the same material, [is] native to the Boston North Shore, the Chicago North Shore, the North Shore of Long Island, to Westchester County, the Philadelphia Main Line and the Peninsula area of San Francisco.
art distance sides
The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side
mirrors taste television
For all its flexibility, television is more a mirror of taste than a shaper of it.
art book car
The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art.
friendly useless possession
Clutter is what happens to things when they become useless but friendly.
art mean challenges
The world of the arts is by no means always comfortable, but neither is it likely ever to be boring. It is full of surprises, humor, traps for the unwary, and challenges to smugness. It is a world of moods as well as of revelation, of beliefs and fears, of unpleasant truth as well as of delicious fantasy. Perhaps it is arrogant to say that anyone who does not venture into this world is only half-interested in life. I say it, nonetheless.