Top 67 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Hughes

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

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

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

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

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

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

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. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

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

It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

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.

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.

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.

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

No art goes unmediated by other art.

Why wait for a call when you have a command?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

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

The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.

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.

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.

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

We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders.

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.

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.

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

Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre

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

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

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.