61+ Robert Hughes Quotes On Education, Freedom And Warhol

Robert Hughes was an Australian art critic, writer and broadcaster. He was best known for his work on modern and contemporary art, particularly for his book The Shock of the New and his television documentary series The Shock of the New. Hughes was also well known for his criticism of modernism and postmodernism in the arts. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Robert Hughes on leadership, education, life.

Top 10 Robert Hughes Quotes

1. Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
2. A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.
3. The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
4. 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.
5. A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
6. 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?
7. Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
8. There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.
9. Why wait for a call when you have a command?
10. 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.

Robert Hughes Short Quotes

• The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
• In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.
• There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.
• Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.
• It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
• It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.
• It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not.
• Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?
• What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.
• Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.

Robert Hughes Quotes About Artistic

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. — Robert Hughes

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

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. — Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes Famous Quotes And Sayings

Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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 — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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

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. — Robert Hughes

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

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

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. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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

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

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

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

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre — Robert Hughes

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

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. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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

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. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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

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. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

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

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

No art goes unmediated by other art. — Robert Hughes

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

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. — Robert Hughes

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. — Robert Hughes

Life Lessons by Robert Hughes

1. Robert Hughes taught us to appreciate the beauty of art and to look for the deeper meaning behind it. He also emphasized the importance of having a critical eye and being able to question the status quo. Lastly, he showed us that it is possible to find joy and meaning in life through the exploration of art and culture.