"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."
"Most of the time they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers. If one wants Schnabel, they all want Schnabel, if one buys a Keith Haring, two hundred Keith Harings will be sold."
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Source: Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.181, 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."
"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."
"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."