Magazines: Childish, Idiotic & Asinine

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Most playwrights hate theater critics, and many politicians claim that political reporters misquote them. But last week an artist complained that almost everything that's wrong in this world is caused by people who write.

"The first mistake in this whole world was the invention of printing," said Architect Philip Cortelyou Johnson in an interview in Vogue. "I am sick and tired of all the word-minded people in this world. The word-minded people are the ones who set the standards. An artist or an architect conceives and creates, but then in the final analysis he's at the mercy of some writer—a man who knows absolutely nothing about what the artist spent his life trying to do—a man who uses up hours and days of his time asking him childish, idiotic, asinine questions and then, as a final irony, assesses him for all time. Why I'm submitting to it I don't know.

"The visual arts are simply unable to rise above our communicative publicity media—all of which are, by definition, words. An architect, on the rare occasion when he is allowed to come in by the front door, still ranks between the accountant, who is, of course, vastly more important, and the Fuller Brush man, who is only slightly less."