Robert Hughes
Robert Hughes
Most remembered for a bestselling Australian historical study titled The Fatal Shore, he also worked as a Time magazine art critic and hosted an art-themed television program called The Shock of the New.
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 July 1938
CountryAustralia
keys ideas doubt
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.
horse moving past
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.
leader choices library
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.
political intellectual needs
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.
past garden museums
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.
stress political arena
Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public
strong stupid thinking
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.
portraits trout rubens
A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
motivational perseverance determination
A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.
drawing desire skins
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.
running time genius
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
waiting missionary command
Why wait for a call when you have a command?
dope gossip
It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.
soccer football dream
On Platini's presidential watch... he has to balance all the leagues, all the dreams and needs of hundreds of clubs across his continent.