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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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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
Especially
Virtue
Virtuosity
Today
Ineptitude
Spectacle
Protects
Tedious
Greatness
Protect

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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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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's no geist like the Zeitgeist.
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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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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 greater the artist, the greater the doubt perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
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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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The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
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What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.
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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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Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.
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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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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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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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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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It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
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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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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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A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
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