Robert Hughes quotes

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. (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. View quote
Robert Hughes
The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive. View quote
Robert Hughes
It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope. View quote
Robert Hughes
It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel. View quote
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. View quote
Robert Hughes
The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds. View quote
Robert Hughes
What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture. View quote
Robert Hughes
In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Robert Hughes
There's no geist like the Zeitgeist. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Robert Hughes
No original Gauguins were to be seen in Australia, for post-impressionism was officially thought to be the vulgar effusion of five-thumbed lunatics. View quote
Robert Hughes
The essential difference between a sculpture like Andre's Equivalent VIII, 1978, and any that had existed before in the past is that Andre's array of bricks depends not just partly, but entirely, on the museum for its context. A Rodin in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin; Andre's bricks in the same place can only be a pile of bricks. View quote
Robert Hughes
Like most artists who have made an invention of some kind, he tends to overplay the significance of his own and goes on about it as though it were a Rosetta Stone, with whose help all representation can be rescued from one-eyed falsehood. View quote
Robert Hughes
With hindsight, one can perhaps see that unachievable projects were the right monuments to an ideal. Because they were not built, they could not be destroyed. View quote
Robert Hughes
I managed to fail Arts I, a course that a moderately intelligent amoeba could have passed without special coaching. (Robert Hughes)
I realized that there is nothing whatever outside of the life we have; that the "meaning of life" is nothing other than life itself, obstinately asserting itself against emptiness and nullity. View quote
Robert Hughes
...what has become my frequent prayer since I have had to face death -"Thy holy will, O Lord, not mine be done!" View quote
Robert Hughes
The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events. View quote
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? View quote
Robert Hughes