Robert Hughes Quotes
-
Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.
→ -
In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.
→ -
Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre
→ -
When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.
→ -
Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Art grows out of modes of perception that make you feel and think...that hooks on to something deep-running in our natures.
→ -
The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.
→ -
The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.
→ -
A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
→ -
We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism
→ -
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 love the uncertainty of teams that cannot defend yet have the courage to attack, attack, attack, then Seville was heaven... The common denominator between the victories of Arsenal and Fenerbache? The strength of mind, the courage to dare in another team's domain, the inner belief that is as much a part of sporting success as the skill a fellow may be born with.
→ -
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 by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.
→ -
I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.
→ -
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.
→ -
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
→ -
In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.
→ -
It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.
→ -
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?
→ -
Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public
→ -
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 church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.
→ -
Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football.
→ -
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
→ -
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 and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
→ -
Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.
→ -
Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.
→ -
What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.
→ -
Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?
→ -
We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism. This conjunction fosters events that go beyond the wildest dream of satire- if satire existed in America anymore; perhaps the reason for its weakness is that reality has superseded it.
→
Related Authors
-
Francisco Goya Painter -
Lucian Freud Painter -
Germaine Greer Journalist -
Howard Jacobson Author -
Frank Auerbach Artist -
Clive James Author -
Andrew Sarris Film critic -
Matthew Collings Critic -
Julian Schnabel Artist -
Malcolm Turnbull Member of the Australian Parliament -
Barry Humphries Comedian -
David Lynch Film director -
Jeff Koons Artist -
Javier Marías Novelist -
Robert Crumb Cartoonist -
Thomas Keneally Novelist -
Clement Greenberg Essayist -
Damien Hirst Artist -
Robert Rauschenberg Painter -
Terry Zwigoff Filmmaker