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
greatness ineptitude today
There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.
taste should smarter
Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?
zeitgeist
There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.
christmas xmas heart
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?
miracle catholic firsts
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.
mistake hands cities
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.
rhinos giving vision
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.
motivational sports successful
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.
travel cathedrals dedicated
It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
tired player piano
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.
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.
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.