"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."
"It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot."
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Source: Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.79, Vintage
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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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"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."
"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt."