"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."
Quote collection
Robert Hughes quotes (page 2 of 4)
65 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"At 40 years of age, I thought I knew everything. I got a reality check with this class. Kenny (Winston) has become like a big brother to me. We've learned to agree to disagree. I hope and pray that this program continues and we all keep in touch. I'm a st"
"There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude."
"Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself."
"Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art"
"If you want to be successful in the gym, in the classroom, in college or when you get out and go into the world of work, that is going to be determined by how hard you are willing to work."
"We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism."
"There's no geist like the Zeitgeist."
"We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism"
"The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself."
"Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?"
"Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination."
"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."
"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."
"In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity."
"Drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies – the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about – is apparently immortal."
"Art grows out of modes of perception that make you feel and think...that hooks on to something deep-running in our natures."
"The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive."
"We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal."
"I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between."