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
sex landscape painting
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
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.
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.
given mediocre prize
Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre
artist doubt inspirational-art
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
running time genius
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
art struggle doe
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?
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.
war distance flower
When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.
art modernism crap
I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.
artist ideas water
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,
art feelings nastiness
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.
stress political arena
Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public
art avant-garde culture
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.