Robert Hughes Quotes

Quotes about:

Age Art Belief Culture Doubt Football Motivational

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

Robert Hughes

Inspirational, Motivational, Art

89 Copy quote
What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

Robert Hughes

Running, Art, Thinking

"A bastion against cultural obscenity". www.theguardian.com. June 3, 2004.

18 Copy quote
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 committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

Robert Hughes

Art, Feelings, Groups

"A Few Words About Robert Hughes (1938-2012)" by John Seed, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 6, 2012.

21 Copy quote
A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.

Robert Hughes

Motivational, Perseverance, Determination

35 Copy quote
No art goes unmediated by other art.

Robert Hughes

Art, Standards

4 Copy quote
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

Art, Add, Process

Robert Hughes (2013). “The Shock of the New”, Knopf

4 Copy quote
Art grows out of modes of perception that make you feel and think...that hooks on to something deep-running in our natures.

Robert Hughes

Running, Art, Thinking

7 Copy quote
The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

Robert Hughes

Art, Jobs, Wall

7 Copy quote
In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

Robert Hughes

Art, Progress, Intensity

7 Copy quote
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.

Robert Hughes

Dream, Reality, America

17 Copy quote
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

Art, Teaching, Inspiration

Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.89, Vintage

15 Copy quote
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

Keys, Ideas, Doubt

Robert Hughes (2013). “The Shock of the New”, p.30, Knopf

8 Copy quote
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.

Robert Hughes

Art, War, Forever

Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.29, Vintage

6 Copy quote
Drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies – the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about – is apparently immortal.

Robert Hughes

Drawing, Desire, Skins

"A bastion against cultural obscenity" by Robert Hughes, www.theguardian.com. June 03, 2004.

7 Copy quote
A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

Robert Hughes

Portraits, Trout, Rubens

10 Copy quote
Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre

Robert Hughes

Given, Mediocre, Prize

10 Copy quote
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

Art, Struggle, Doe

Robert Hughes (2013). “The Shock of the New”, Knopf

6 Copy quote
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

Artist, Ideas, Water

Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.165, Vintage

16 Copy quote
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.

Robert Hughes

Eye, Views, Perspective

Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.25, Vintage

5 Copy quote
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 explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

Robert Hughes

Art, Avant Garde, Culture

Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.16, Vintage

7 Copy quote
What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.

Robert Hughes

Art, Culture, Mining

Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.95, Vintage

4 Copy quote
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

Moving, School, Numbers

Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.181, Vintage

4 Copy quote
At 40 years of age, I thought I knew everything. I got a reality check with this class. Kenny (Winston) has become like a big brother to me. We've learned to agree to disagree. I hope and pray that this program continues and we all keep in touch. I'm a st

Robert Hughes

Brother, Reality, Years

9 Copy quote
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

Political, Intellectual, World

Robert Hughes (2013). “The Shock of the New”, Knopf

4 Copy quote
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

Art, Enemy, Looks

9 Copy quote

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Born: July 28, 1938
Died: August 6, 2012
Occupation: Art critic
Cite this Page: Citation

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