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What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.

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
Strip
Market
Culture
Art
Nature
Become
Mining

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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.
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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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A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
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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.
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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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There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.
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Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.
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Fishing largely consists of not catching fish failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football.
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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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The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
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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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It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
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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.
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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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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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Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?
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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.
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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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Why wait for a call when you have a command?
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There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.
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