“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)

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Robert Hughes 37

Australian critic, historian, writer 1938–2012

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