Robert Hughes Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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How immeasurably fortunate my father was in his faith!

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

Robert Hughes
What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.

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

Robert Hughes
The self is now the sacred cow of American culture, self-esteem is sacrosanct.

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

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

Robert Hughes
The existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow.

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

Robert Hughes
The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events.

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

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

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
I managed to fail Arts I, a course that a moderately intelligent amoeba could have passed without special coaching.

Robert Hughes
The contest between education and TV – between argument and conviction by spectacle – has been won by television.

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

Robert Hughes
Machines were the ideal metaphor for the central pornographic fantasy of the nineteenth century, rape followed by gratitude.

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
We all come into the world with baggage which, in the end, we have no hope of reclaiming, The main item in mine was my father.

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.

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

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
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
No original Gauguins were to be seen in Australia, for post-impressionism was officially thought to be the vulgar effusion of five-thumbed lunatics.

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.

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
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
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.

Robert Hughes