Robert Hughes
Robert Hughes
Most remembered for a bestselling Australian historical study titled The Fatal Shore, he also worked as a Time magazine art critic and hosted an art-themed television program called The Shock of the New.
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 July 1938
CountryAustralia
artist style hallmark
The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.
art enemy looks
It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.
mean analysis painting
It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.
rhinos giving vision
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.
political intellectual needs
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.
sex landscape painting
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
strong stupid thinking
The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.
past garden museums
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.
given mediocre prize
Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre
artist doubt inspirational-art
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.
running time genius
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
art struggle doe
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
drawing desire skins
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.
war distance flower
When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.