Robert Hughes Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

Robert Hughes
Some new works of art have values of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value.

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
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
... what has become my frequent prayer since I have had to face death -"Thy holy will, O Lord, not mine be done!"

Robert Hughes
The home of the Utopian impulse was architecture rather than painting or sculpture. Painting can make us happy, but building is the art we live in; it is the social art par excellence, the carapace of political fantasy, the exoskeleton of one's economic dreams. It is also the one art nobody can escape.

Robert Hughes
In the real world, mice do exist and they generally go about their business whether we see them or not.

Robert Hughes
So fishing contributed to an important lesson of my life -how to be alone. I still think solitude is one of the world's great gifts. "Se sei solo," [if you are alone] wrote Leonardo da Vinci, "sarai tutto tuo" [you'll be all yours.]

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
Our culture puts enormous emphasis on "socialization", on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others.

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
The best thing fishing taught me, I think was how to be alone. Without this ability no writer can really survive or work, and there is a strong relationship between the activity of the fisherman, letting his line down into unknown depths in the hope of catching an unseen prey (which may be worth keeping, or may not) and that of a writer trolling his memory and reflections for unexpected jags and jerks of association.

Robert Hughes
The truly radical work of art is the one that offers you something to hold on to in the midst of the flux of possibility.

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
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
What the convict system bequeathed to later Australian generations was not the sturdy, skeptical independence…but an intense concern with social and political respectability. The idea of the 'convict stain', a moral blot soaked into our fabric, dominated all argument about Australian selfhood by the 1840s.

Robert Hughes
How immeasurably fortunate my father was in his faith!

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
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.

Robert Hughes
The past is pervasive; it seeps into everything;... And yet because the past is irreplaceable and cannot be done again, it was that very past, not the present or the future, that was so delicate, so vulnerable, so dreadfully easy to erase.

Robert Hughes
Enforced solitude, as in solitary confinement, is a terrible and disorienting punishment, but freely chosen solitude is an immense blessing. To be out of the rattle and clang of quotidian life, to be away from the garbage of other people's amusements and the overflow of their unwanted subjectivities, is the essential escape. Solitude is, beyond question, one of the worlds great gifts and an indispensable aid to creativity, no matter what level that creation may be hatched at.

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

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

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

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
Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.

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
Would Australians have done anything differently if their country had not been settled as the jail of infinite space? Certainly they would. They would have remembered more of their own history.

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