Quotessence
Home / Authors / Robert Hughes
Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes Quotes

Art critic

Filter quotes by topic

AllArtArtistIfsWorldCultureDoePaintingWholeAmericaDoubtGreat ArtThinkingWayAgeAnalysisAudienceAustraliaBeliefEndsEuphemism

Famous Robert Hughes Quotes

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." [Modernism's Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]”

ArtDoubtSelf EsteemGreatnessHumilityConfidenceFameDepressionSelf AwarenessInsecurityCreative ProcessNarcissismIntrospectionGreat ArtArtistsGreat ArtistSelf DoubtSelf DelusionCezanneFame And FortuneSelf Esteem Or Lack ThereofDepression HumorSelf DoubtsPaul Cezanne
Author:Robert Hughes
Create image

“It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.”

ArtPoliticsCreativityRevolutionFameCapitalismEntertainmentArtistsConsuemrism
Book:The Shock of the New
Create image

“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.”

ThinkingNeedsFeelsArtRunningGrowsWaterMediaTenSkillsPerceptionMessagesMassOppositesSecondsHookMake You ThinkIconicMass MediaSensationalVasesDoggedness
Author:Robert Hughes
Create image

“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.”

ArtEndsInspirationArtistCultureGivenExistenceTeachingModernMediaEventsInformationProduceSourceFineMassGainsMereDataFabricEchoesReignImaginativeDrainsFine ArtsMass MediaDead EndsAffording
Book:The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes
Create image

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

InspirationalArtMotivationalArtistPerfectSuccessfulDoubtGreaterGrantedPersistencePrizeConsolationGreat ArtGreat ArtistFine ArtsBeing An ArtistSelf-doubtCreative ArtistsArt And ArtistsInspirational ArtistArtists And CreativityInspirational ArtFavorite ArtistInspiring ArtBest ArtistPainting ArtPainting And ArtConsolation Prize
Author:Robert Hughes
Create image

“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.”

WorldWayPersonsArtDoneWholeFeelingsIndividualCan DoGroupsMovementProjectsGloryArt IsArgumentTasksGapsCommitteesOccasionalNastiness
Author:Robert Hughes
Create image

“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.”

WayArtCultureBeliefLostMetaphorNoblePlentyTerritoryIdealismAvant GardeDisinterested
Book:The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes
Create image

“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.”

WorldFirstsArtWarAgeCultureLanguageForeverChangedMassFormerBrokeWar Of The WorldsValleysWorld War IIndescribable
Book:The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes
Create image

“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.”

ThinkingArtMadeBookHardArtistCertainDifferencesLossPaintingJewSavedWorks Of ArtSculptureVietnameseNaivete
Author:Robert Hughes
Create image