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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.

Robert Hughes

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Robert Hughes
Age: 74 †
Born: 1938
Born: July 28
Died: 2012
Died: August 6
Art Critic
Art Historian
Critic
Narrator
Screenwriter
Television Presenter
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Robert Studley Forrest Hughes
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More quotes by Robert Hughes

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There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.
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The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
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We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.
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Why wait for a call when you have a command?
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Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?
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We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism
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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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On Platini's presidential watch... he has to balance all the leagues, all the dreams and needs of hundreds of clubs across his continent.
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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.
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Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.
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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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A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
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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.
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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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Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent.
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What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.
Robert Hughes
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One thing is sure: the Sagrada Familia is the first Catholic temple whose bacon was ever saved by Shinto tourism. Not even Gaudi, who believed in miracles, could have forseen that.
Robert Hughes
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There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.
Robert Hughes
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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.
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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.
Robert Hughes