Robert Hughes is a famous Australian writer, historian, television presenter and art critic. He is best known for being the art critic at the Time magazine and for his influential books and television programs. Famous Robert Hughes books include “American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America”, “The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change”, “The Fatal Shore”, “Goya”, “Barcelona: the Great Enchantress”, and “Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir”.
Mini biography: Born Robert Studley Forrest Hughes on the 28th of July, 1938 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. His mother was Margaret Eyre Sealy and his father Geoffrey Forrest Hughes. The art critic died on the 6th of August, 2012 in The Bronx, New York City, New York, U.S. at the age of 74.
List of Robert Hughes Critic Quotes
One of the abiding mysteries of Goya seems to be that so fiery a spirit, so impetuous and sardonic, so unbridled in his imagination, could ever have adapted not just occasionally but consistently, for more than forty years, to the conditions of working for the successive Bourbon courts. Robert Hughes
Drawing brings us into a different, a deeper and more fully experienced relation to the object. Robert Hughes
With its hacked contours, staring interrogatory eyes, and general feeling of instability, Les Demoiselles is still a disturbing painting after three quarters of a century, a refutation of the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fashion, must necessarily wear off. No painting ever looked more convulsive. Robert Hughes
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
Art prices are determined by the meeting of real or induced scarcity with pure, irrational desire, and nothing is more manipulatable than desire. Robert Hughes
The museum has very largely supplanted the church as the emblematic focus of the American city. Robert Hughes
A fair price is the highest one a collector can be induced to pay. Robert Hughes
The idea that money, patronage and trade automatically corrupts the wells of imagination is a pious fiction, believed by some utopian lefties and a few people of genius such as (William) Blake but flatly contradicted by history itself. Robert Hughes
The colossal popularity of Picasso flows from his protean energy and unquestionable genius. But it also represents the triumph of publicity over accessibility, of curiosity about the man over real love of his work. Much the same is true about Dali: a genius at publicity but ultimately a self-destructive one, an artist of extraordinary power in his youth – for nothing can ever diminish the marvelous poetry of his work in the 1920s and his film collaborations with Luis Bunuel – but a catastrophically self-repeating bore in his old age. Robert Hughes
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
The idea that you have to be in a particular imperial place, which was a very real need for an artist like Caravaggio, is not really so intense in our own time, although people think it is. I mean, I think it’s a good idea to have been to Rome and New York and blah blah. But the idea that you can’t make stuff that’s worthwhile except under the gravitational field of the center: I don’t think that’s really so true anymore. Robert Hughes
The auction room, as anyone knows, is an excellent medium for sustaining fictional price levels, because the public imagines that auction prices are necessarily real prices. Robert Hughes
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
Robert Hughes Portrait Painting
More on Famous Australian Art Critic Robert Hughes
How has Robert Hughes influenced your thinking about art? Is he one of your favorite famous Australian art critics? Let us know what you think about Robert Hughes in the comments below.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.