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Robert Hughes Quotes

Best Quotes by Robert Hughes (Top 10)

  1. The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
  2. 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.
  3. A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.
  4. Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre
  5. 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.
  6. The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
  7. 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.
  8. A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
  9. Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
  10. 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.

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