"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."
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Quote collection
Robert Hughes quotes (page 1 of 4)
65 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel."
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"A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop."
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"Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent."
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"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt."
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"The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world."
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"We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism. This conjunction fosters events that go beyond the wildest dream of satire- if satire existed in America anymore; perhaps the reason for its weakness is that reality has superseded it."
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"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."
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"On the whole, money does artists much more good than harm. The idea that one benefits from cold water, crusts and debt collectors is now almost extinct, like belief in the reformatory power of flogging."
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"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."
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"One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs."
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"If you like your soccer cerebral, and the triumph ultimately to be wrung out of staying power, Milan was the place to be. If you love the uncertainty of teams that cannot defend yet have the courage to attack, attack, attack, then Seville was heaven... The common denominator between the victories of Arsenal and Fenerbache? The strength of mind, the courage to dare in another team's domain, the inner belief that is as much a part of sporting success as the skill a fellow may be born with."
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"Why wait for a call when you have a command?"
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"A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion."
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"Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre"
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"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?"
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"Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public"
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"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."
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"For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing."
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"Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius."
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