Top 50 Robert Hughes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”

— Robert Hughes

2. “Why wait for a call when you have a command?”

— Robert Hughes

3. “A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.”

— Robert Hughes

4. “Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre.”

— Robert Hughes

5. “There’s no geist like the Zeitgeist.”

— Robert Hughes

6. “The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.”

— Robert Hughes

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

— Robert Hughes

8. “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

9. “The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It’s not something that committees can do. It’s not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It’s done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.”

— Robert Hughes

10. “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.”

— Robert Hughes

11. “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.”

— Robert Hughes

12. “Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football.”

— Robert Hughes

13. “Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.”

— Robert Hughes

14. “In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.”

— Robert Hughes

15. “In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.”

— Robert Hughes

16. “I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.”

— Robert Hughes

17. “It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.”

— Robert Hughes

18. “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.”

— Robert Hughes

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

— Robert Hughes

20. “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.”

— Robert Hughes

21. “There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.”

— Robert Hughes

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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.”

— Robert Hughes

25. “Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.”

— Robert Hughes

26. “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?”

— Robert Hughes

27. “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.”

— Robert Hughes

28. “Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.”

— Robert Hughes

29. “It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.”

— Robert Hughes

30. “Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne’s old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.”

— Robert Hughes

31. “But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow.”

— Robert Hughes

32. “The failure of language – the tyranny of moral generalization over social inspection – fed the ruling class’s belief that it was endangered from below.”

— Robert Hughes

33. “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

34. “He had been always escaping, always rebelling, always fighting against authority, and always being flogged. There had been a whole lifetime of torment such as this; forty-two years of it; and there he stood, speaking softly, arguing his case well, and pleading while the tears ran down his face for some kindness, for some mercy in his old age. ‘I have tried to escape; always to escape,’ he said, ’as a bird does out of a cage. Is that unnatural; is that a great crime?”

— Robert Hughes

35. “The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.”

— Robert Hughes

36. “Kahn once said, “The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.”

— Robert Hughes

37. “It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not.”

— Robert Hughes

38. “Now that rates are moving up, we’re seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.”

— Robert Hughes

39. “In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.”

— Robert Hughes

40. “Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public.”

— Robert Hughes

41. “Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.”

— Robert Hughes

42. “America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.”

— Robert Hughes

43. “Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?”

— Robert Hughes

44. “No art goes unmediated by other art.”

— Robert Hughes

45. “We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.”

— Robert Hughes

46. “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.”

— Robert Hughes

47. “Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future. This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men start thinking in terms of space, rather than place, and about single rather than multiple meanings. It’s what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.”

— Robert Hughes

48. “The most famous political dictum of early Catalunya was uttered there – the unique oath of allegiance sworn by Catalans and Aragonese to the Spanish monarch in Madrid. “We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws – but if not, not.”

— Robert Hughes

49. “To deprive the Aborigines of their territory, therefore, was to condemn them to spiritual death – a destruction of their past, their future and their opportunities of transcendence.”

— Robert Hughes

50. “Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future.”

— Robert Hughes