Robert Hughes Quotes

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  • Art Critic
  • 1938 - 2012
  • 67 quotes

Robert Hughes, Art Critic (1938 - 2012), is quoted 67 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Art, Artist, Doubt and America.

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No art goes unmediated by other art.

There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.

Why wait for a call when you have a command?

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art

It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.

Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.

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

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

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

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

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

Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?

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

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

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

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

There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.

We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.

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

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism

We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.

Art grows out of modes of perception that make you feel and think...that hooks on to something deep-running in our natures.

A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.

The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.

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?

On Platini's presidential watch... he has to balance all the leagues, all the dreams and needs of hundreds of clubs across his continent.

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?

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.

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.

Works of art... do not force meanings on their audience; meaning emerges, adds up, unfolds from their imagined centres... takes one through the process of discovering meaning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies – the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about – is apparently immortal.

Robert Hughes is quoted on

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