Quote

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

Robert Hughes

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Rubens
Crucifixion
Trout
Portrait
Portraits
Death
Whole

More quotes by Robert Hughes

Image
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.
Robert Hughes
Image
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?
Robert Hughes
Image
Fishing largely consists of not catching fish failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football.
Robert Hughes
Image
Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?
Robert Hughes
Image
Why wait for a call when you have a command?
Robert Hughes
Image
It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
Robert Hughes
Image
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.
Robert Hughes
Image
On Platini's presidential watch... he has to balance all the leagues, all the dreams and needs of hundreds of clubs across his continent.
Robert Hughes
Image
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.
Robert Hughes
Image
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.
Robert Hughes
Image
There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.
Robert Hughes
Image
We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.
Robert Hughes
Image
The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
Robert Hughes
Image
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.
Robert Hughes
Image
What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.
Robert Hughes
Image
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Robert Hughes
Image
We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism
Robert Hughes
Image
We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.
Robert Hughes
Image
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
Image
Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.
Robert Hughes