Robert Hughes Quotes & Sayings

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity. — Robert Hughes

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

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

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. — Robert Hughes

It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope. — Robert Hughes

MOMA's values were blown through the American education system, from high school upwards-and downwards, too, greatly raising the status of "creativity" and "self-expression" in kindergarten. By the 1970s, the historical study of modern art had expanded to the point where students were scratching for unexploited thesis subjects. By the mid-eighties, twenty-one-year-old art-history majors would be writing papers on the twenty-six-year-old graffitists. — Robert Hughes

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

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

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

Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football. — Robert Hughes

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

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

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art. — Robert Hughes

Barcelona has always been more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commoners; its democratic roots are old and run very deep. Its medieval charter of citizens' rights, the Usatges, grew from a nucleus which antedated the Magna Carta by more than a hundred years. Its government, the Consell de Cent (Council of One Hundred), had been the oldest protodemocratic political body in Spain. — Robert Hughes

Machines were the ideal metaphor for the central pornographic fantasy of the nineteenth century, rape followed by gratitude. — Robert Hughes

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

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

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

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

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre — Robert Hughes

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

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

It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot. — Robert Hughes

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants. — Robert Hughes

Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future. This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men start thinking in terms of space, rather than place, and about single rather than multiple meanings. It's what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens. — Robert Hughes

In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go. — Robert Hughes

America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory. — Robert Hughes

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

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion. — Robert Hughes

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public — Robert Hughes

The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders. — Robert Hughes

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

Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker. — Robert Hughes

But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow. — Robert Hughes

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive. — Robert Hughes

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself. — Robert Hughes

Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist. — Robert Hughes

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial. — Robert Hughes

What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture. — Robert Hughes

Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence- the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life. — Robert Hughes

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel. — Robert Hughes

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

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel. — Robert Hughes

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

that great condenser of moral chaos, The City. — Robert Hughes

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world. — Robert Hughes

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between. — Robert Hughes

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

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. — Robert Hughes

We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism. This conjunction fosters events that go beyond the wildest dream of satire- if satire existed in America anymore; perhaps the reason for its weakness is that reality has superseded it. — Robert Hughes

In one sense, (Duchamp's) "The Large Glass" is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness. — Robert Hughes

It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not. — Robert Hughes

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world. — Robert Hughes

Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius. — Robert Hughes

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