Robert Hughes Quotes

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not.

It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.

Christmas began in the heart of God. It is complete only when it reaches the heart of man.Why wait for a call when you have a command?

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

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

We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public

There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.

Works of art... do not force meanings on their audience; meaning emerges, adds up, unfolds from their imagined centres... takes one through the process of discovering meaning.

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.