A Quote by Robert Hughes
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?
Related Quotes
When Art struggles, it succeeds; when revelling in its own successes, it as singularly fails.
Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not. It does or doesn't disturb optical monotony, and succeeds or fails in surmounting sterility of style or visual stereotype; it creates new beauty or it doesn't.
I'm the type of guy who fails and fails and fails, and then, as if failure has become sick of him, succeeds.
The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
When your focus is social change and not financial change, why wouldn't you want to share that openly? Innovation only succeeds when it's shared.
When your focus is social change and not financial change why wouldn't you want to share that openly? Innovation only succeeds when it's shared.
The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.
Art is not and never has been subordinate to moral values. Moral values are social values; aesthetic values are human values. Morality seeks to restrain the feelings; art seeks to define them by externalizing them, by giving them significant form. Morality has only one aim - the ideal good; art has quite another aim - the objective truth... art never changes.
Our environment, the world in which we live and work, is a mirror of our attitude and expectations. If we feel that our environment could stand some improvement, we can bring about that change for the better by improving our attitude. The world plays no favorites. It's impersonal. It doesn't care who succeeds and who fails. Nor does it care if we change. Our attitude toward life doesn't affect the world and the people in it nearly as much as it affects us.
What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses.
The man who seeks to please God is the man who people are pleased with. The man who seeks to please others won't satisfy anyone.
Change does not fail to occur because of insincerity. The heart patient is not insincere about his wish to keep living, even as he reaches for another cigarette. Change fails to occur because we mean both things. It fails to occur because we are a living contradiction.
In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.
When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.
I think art is beautiful. It's decoration and adornment. But art is also a really important vessel for social change, and social change begins with thought. And so if you can find humor in something and take a moment to rethink it, you can take a step back and look at your values from a different angle. I think that's a really important way of carrying on with life. I think the best art for me is funny and the best comedy for me is art. Some of my favorite artists are comedians. Comedy is art, and art can be comedy, and the intersection is vital - at least for my own work.
When your focus is social change and not financial change why wouldn't you want to share that openly? Innovation only succeeds when it's shared. If you're a pioneer and you come up with something that can change the world and you turn round and say 'I'm not going to share this idea with anyone' then you only impact the few and not the many.
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