But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow.
Robert HughesWhy should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?
Robert HughesIn the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
Robert HughesNevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.
Robert Hughes