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Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes Quotes

Art critic

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Famous Robert Hughes Quotes

“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.”

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Book:The Shock of the New
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“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
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“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.”

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Book:The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes
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“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
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