Robert Hughes: Quotes about art

Robert Hughes was Australian critic, historian, writer. Explore interesting quotes on art.
Robert Hughes: 74   quotes 1   like

“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?”

Robert Hughes

Source: The Shock of the New

Art , Change

“Some new works of art have values of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value.”

Robert Hughes

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Art

“The truly radical work of art is the one that offers you something to hold on to in the midst of the flux of possibility.”

Robert Hughes

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Art

“It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.”

Robert Hughes

"Komar and Melamid" (1982)
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

Art , Nature

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

Robert Hughes

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

Art , Nature

“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."”

Robert Hughes

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

Life , Death , Money , Fate

“Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence— the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.”

Robert Hughes

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

Life , Art , Imagination , Dead

“I managed to fail Arts I, a course that a moderately intelligent amoeba could have passed without special coaching.”

Robert Hughes

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Art , Intelligence