Robert Hughes famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
-
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
-- Robert Hughes -
A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.
-- Robert Hughes -
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
-- Robert Hughes -
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
-- Robert Hughes -
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.
-- Robert Hughes -
Why wait for a call when you have a command?
-- 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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre
-- Robert Hughes -
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.
-- 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
You may also like:
-
Andrew Sarris
Film critic -
Barry Humphries
Comedian -
Clement Greenberg
Essayist -
Clive James
Author -
Damien Hirst
Artist -
David Lynch
Film director -
Francisco Goya
Painter -
Frank Auerbach
Artist -
Germaine Greer
Journalist -
Howard Jacobson
Author -
Javier MarÃas
Novelist -
Jeff Koons
Artist -
Julian Schnabel
Artist -
Lucian Freud
Painter -
Malcolm Turnbull
Member of the Australian Parliament -
Matthew Collings
Critic -
Robert Crumb
Cartoonist -
Robert Rauschenberg
Painter -
Terry Zwigoff
Filmmaker -
Thomas Keneally
Novelist