Quotes from Robert Hughes

MOMA's values were blown through the American education system, from high school upwards-and downwards, too, greatly raising the status of "creativity" and "self-expression" in kindergarten. By the 1970s, the historical study of modern art had expanded to the point where students were scratching for unexploited thesis subjects. By the mid-eighties, twenty-one-year-old art-history majors would be writing papers on the twenty-six-year-old graffitists.

But cruelty is an appetite that grows with feeding

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

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?

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

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

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.

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

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.

Works of art... do not force meanings on their audience; meaning emerges, adds up, unfolds from their imagined centres... takes one through the process of discovering meaning.

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

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

No art goes unmediated by other art.

It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.

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

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

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre