Robert Hughes: Work

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

“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 best thing fishing taught me, I think was how to be alone. Without this ability no writer can really survive or work, and there is a strong relationship between the activity of the fisherman, letting his line down into unknown depths in the hope of catching an unseen prey (which may be worth keeping, or may not) and that of a writer trolling his memory and reflections for unexpected jags and jerks of association.”

Robert Hughes

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Hope , Jerk , Thinking , Fish

“It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.”

Robert Hughes

"Vincent van Gogh, Part I" (1984)
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

Painting , Madness

“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'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