“ I think that the greatest characteristic of genius is, above all, energy. Hence, what I detest most of all in the arts, what sets me on edge, is the ingenious, the clever. This is not at all the same as bad taste, which is a good quality gone wrong. In order to have what is called bad taste, you must have a sense for poetry; whereas cleverness, on the contrary, is incompatible with genuine poetry.
Grace Hartigan (via Lucian Freud)
