Robert Hughes Quotes

21 quotes in 401 categories

• Why wait for a call when you have a command?
• If you like your soccer cerebral, and the triumph ultimately to be wrung out of staying power, Milan was the place to be. If you…
• The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
• 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 basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its…
• Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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 hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one…
• The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
• Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
• Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.
• It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.
• It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
• Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.
• Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
• The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
• 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…

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