Quotes from Robert Hughes

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

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

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?

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation p

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

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

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

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

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.

The failure of language—the tyranny of moral generalization over social inspection—fed the ruling class's belief that it was endangered from below.

Barcelona has always been more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commoners; its democratic roots are old and run very deep. Its medieval charter of citizens' rights, the Usatges, grew from a nucleus which antedated the Magna Carta by more than a hundred years. Its government, the Consell de Cent (Council of One Hundred), had been the oldest protodemocratic political body in Spain.

Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future.

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.

There was practically nothing on Catalan painting, though the world's greatest surviving body of Romanesque frescoes, salvaged from decaying churches in the Ampurdan and the Pyrenees, was (and is) right there in the Museu d'Art de Catalunya up on Montjuïc.

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.

If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook's landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will.

Cultural Imperium' suggesting the idea of cultural hegemony such that what appears to be 'avant garde' and 'radical' is in fact intensely conservative and defined by the forces of economy and commodity trading which have absolutely no bearing on intrinsic value.

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.

So there was always work, but the one project by which Fontana is remembered, and which gave him a deserved immortality as an engineer, was moving and re-erecting the obelisk of Saint Peter's, that huge spike rising from what would become the heart of Christianity.

People rarely like the humanitarian plans of their social superiors.

As the eighteenth century went on, fewer people were actually hanged for capital crimes that they had been convicted of.

A young country does not serve as the pad on which England drew its sketches for the immense Gulags of the twentieth century without acquiring a few marks and scars.

This is what I see," becomes replaced by a question: "Is this what I see?" You share his hesitations about the positions of a tree or a branch; or the final shape of Mont Ste-Victoire, and the trees in front of it. Relativity is all. Doubt becomes part of the painting's subject.

transports (and lost only three of the