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.… — Robert Hughes Copy Share
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. — Robert Hughes Copy Share Image
“Most of the time they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers.… — Robert Hughes Copy Share Image
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… — Robert Hughes Copy Share
A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion. — Robert Hughes Copy Share Image
“In one sense, (Duchamp's) “The Large Glass” is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.” — Robert Hughes Copy Share Image
“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… — Robert Hughes Copy Share Image
One thing is sure: the Sagrada Familia is the first Catholic temple whose bacon was ever saved by Shinto tourism. Not even Gaudi, who… — Robert Hughes Copy Share Image
What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture. — Robert Hughes Copy Share Image
For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the… — Robert Hughes Copy Share
“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… — Robert Hughes Copy Share Image
