Top 42 Robert Hughes Quotes
#1. The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
Robert Hughes
#2. In one sense, (Duchamp's) "The Large Glass" is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.
Robert Hughes
#3. In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.
Robert Hughes
#4. America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.
Robert Hughes
#5. What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.
Robert Hughes
#6. One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.
Robert Hughes
#7. A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
Robert Hughes
#8. In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
Robert Hughes
#9. But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow.
Robert Hughes
#10. Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.
Robert Hughes
#11. Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
Robert Hughes
#12. If you want to be successful in the gym, in the classroom, in college or when you get out and go into the world of work, that is going to be determined by how hard you are willing to work.
Robert Hughes
#13. Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public
Robert Hughes
#14. Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
Robert Hughes
#15. It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
Robert Hughes
#16. Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.
Robert Hughes
#17. Most of the time they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers. If one wants Schnabel, they all want Schnabel, if one buys a Keith Haring, two hundred Keith Harings will be sold.
Robert Hughes
#19. The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.
Robert Hughes
#20. What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
Robert Hughes
#21. Art grows out of modes of perception that make you feel and think ... that hooks on to something deep-running in our natures.
Robert Hughes
#22. At 40 years of age, I thought I knew everything. I got a reality check with this class. Kenny (Winston) has become like a big brother to me. We've learned to agree to disagree. I hope and pray that this program continues and we all keep in touch. I'm a st
Robert Hughes
#23. An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.
Robert Hughes
#24. We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism
Robert Hughes
#25. A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.
Robert Hughes
#26. It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not.
Robert Hughes
#27. Kahn once said, The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.
Robert Hughes
#28. It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.
Robert Hughes
#29. In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.
Robert Hughes
#30. One thing is sure: the Sagrada Familia is the first Catholic temple whose bacon was ever saved by Shinto tourism. Not even Gaudi, who believed in miracles, could have forseen that.
Robert Hughes
#31. that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.
Robert Hughes
#32. The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
Robert Hughes
#33. Christmas began in the heart of God. It is complete only when it reaches the heart of man.Why wait for a call when you have a command?
Robert Hughes
#34. It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.
Robert Hughes
#35. I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.
Robert Hughes
#36. Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football.
Robert Hughes
#37. Machines were the ideal metaphor for the central pornographic fantasy of the nineteenth century, rape followed by gratitude.
Robert Hughes
#38. It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.
Robert Hughes
#39. The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.
Robert Hughes
#40. On the whole, money does artists much more good than harm. The idea that one benefits from cold water, crusts and debt collectors is now almost extinct, like belief in the reformatory power of flogging,
Robert Hughes
#41. Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.
Robert Hughes
#42. Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.
Robert Hughes
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