Robert Hughes Quotes

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO was an Australian-born art critic, writer, and producer of television documentaries. His best seller The Fatal Shore is a study of the British penal colonies and early history of Australia. He was described in 1997 by Robert Boynton of The New York Times as "the most famous art critic in the world."Hughes earned widespread recognition for his book and television series on modern art, The Shock of the New, and for his longstanding position as art critic with TIME magazine. Known for his contentious critiques of art and artists, Hughes was generally conservative in his tastes, although he did not belong to a particular philosophical camp. His writing was noted for its power and elegance. Wikipedia  

✵ 28. July 1938 – 6. August 2012
Robert Hughes: 37   quotes 1   like

Famous Robert Hughes Quotes

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”

"Modernism's Patriarch (Cezanne)", Time Magazine, June 10, 1996
Time Magazine (1996)

Robert Hughes Quotes about art

“What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.”

"Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

“It's bad to use words like 'genius' unless you are talking about the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, the black Chatterton of the 80s who, during a picturesque career as sexual hustler, addict and juvenile art-star, made a superficial mark on the cultural surface by folding the conventions of street graffiti into those of art brut before killing himself with an overdose at the age of twenty-seven. The first stage of Basquiat's fate, in the mid-80s, was to be effusively welcomed by an art industry so trivialized by fashion and blinded by money that it couldn't tell a scribble from a Leonardo. Its second stage was to be dropped by the same audience, when the novelty of his work wore off. The third was an attempt at apotheosis four years after his death, with a large retrospective at the Whitney Museum designed to sanitise his short, frantic life and position him as a kind of all-purpose, inflatable martyr-figure, thus restoring the dollar value of his oeuvre in a time of collapsing prices for American contemporary art. One contributor to the catalogue proclaimed that "Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of immortality"; another opined that "he is as close to Goya as American painting has ever produced." A third, not to be outdone, extolled Basquiat's "punishing regime of self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle of inverse ascetism to which he was so resolutely committed."”

These disciplines of inverse ascetism, one sees, mean shooting smack until you drop dead.
Page 195
Culture of Complaint (1993)

Robert Hughes Quotes about life

Robert Hughes Quotes

“The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.”

"Alex Katz" (1986)
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

“How immeasurably fortunate my father was in his faith!”

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

“The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.”

"Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

“There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.”

New York Review of Books, 27 Oct 1983

“The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events.”

"R.B. Kitaj" (1981)
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

“In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.”

"Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

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