music
Franz Liszt
"He writes the ugliest music extant."
Claude Debussy
"The music of M. Debussy leads to the emaciation and ruin of our essence."
Richard Wagner
"Destitute of melody, extremely bad in harmony, utterly incoheret in form"
Frédéric Chopin
"... ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophany"
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
"... a musical monster ... ear-flaying horror"
George Gershwin
"... so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!"
Nina Simone
Her “penchant for the mundane renders her intensity as bogus as her mannered melismas” … a “middlebrow keyboard tickler”
Led Zeppelin
"... weak, unimaginative songs ... very dull"
Taylor Swift
"... she’s a terrible singer."
Beyoncé
"She′s no Ashanti"
Nick Drake
... an awkward mix of folk and cocktail jazz ...
Mozart
... too many of his works sound like inter-office memos.
Ludwig van Beethoven
... stupid and hopelessly vulgar music! The unspeakable cheapness ...
Jimi Hendrix
"inartistically violent ..."
literature
Ida B. Wells
… a slanderous and nasty-minded mulatress.
Oscar Wilde
"Unclean .. poisonous ... nasty .. nauseous"
Madeleine L'Engle
Rejected by 26 publishers
Evelyn Waugh
"Too British"
Emily Dickinson
"an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse"
Jane Austen
"I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
acting
Fred Astaire
Can't act; slightly bald; can dance a little.
Jim Carrey
So obnoxious ... appallingly bad.
science
Albert Einstein
I feel as if I had been wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter.
Louis Pasteur
It is absurd to think that germs causing fermentation and putrefaction came from the air; the atmosphere would have to be as thick as pea soup for that.
Galileo Galilei
[If the earth rotated,] buildings and the earth itself would fly off with such rapid motion that men would have to be provided with claws like cats to enable them...
Ignaz Semmelweiss
Mocked, institutionalized, and beaten as a result of his controversial advocacy for ... hand washing
Oleg Losev
Published 43 papers, obtained 16 patents, died of starvation
Trota of Salerno
Scholars literally made up a dude to credit for her work
Marie Curie
Workers in the radium school appear to have cast caution to the winds
philosophy
Socrates
Tried, convicted, poisoned ... then dragged by Nietzsche
art
Claude Monet
A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.
LeRoy Neiman
"The archetypical hack"
Vincent van Gogh
He only sold enough art to pay a few months' rent
poetry
Emily Dickinson
"an eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse"
dance
Fred Astaire
Can't act; slightly bald; can dance a little.
film
