Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on
television: ‘It’s beautiful, but I don’t
like it.’ And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of
such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t
like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the
lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful.
What would it mean to separate those two impressions for art
making and for art criticism?
— Sarah Ruhl,
100 Essays I
Don't Have Time to Write
