Robert Hughes Quotes

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

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

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.

Why wait for a call when you have a command?

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

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

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.

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

Christmas began in the heart of God. It is complete only when it reaches the heart of man.Why wait for a call when you have a command?

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art

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

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

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.

There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.

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

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

If you want to be successful in the gym, in the classroom, in college or when you get out and go into the world of work, that is going to be determined by how hard you are willing to work.

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

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

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism

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?

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.

It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.

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.

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

The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.

On Platini's presidential watch... he has to balance all the leagues, all the dreams and needs of hundreds of clubs across his continent.

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.

But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow.

America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.

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.

Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.

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

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

Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football.

It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not.

No art goes unmediated by other art.

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.

that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation p