Robert Hughes - Art Critic and Historian - 1938 - 2012

"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."

Hughes had a unique ability to demystify the art world, a elegant speaker that wrote with passion, insight, and humor he was not afraid to express an opinion, even when that opinion was not the popular one. His works, writings, books and documentaries have been a inspiration to myself and countless others.

Robert Hughes will be missed.

You can watch his entire BBC documentary on this You Tube Channel.

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

"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."

"So much of art – not all of it thank god, but a lot of it – has just become a kind of cruddy game for the self-aggrandisement of the rich and the ignorant, it is a kind of bad but useful business."

Robert Hughes Obituary by Benjamin Genocchio
"Looking back, he was the greatest prose stylist since Ruskin to write art criticism." 



The Shock of the New BBC Documentary
Robert Hughes on Modernism

Robert Hughes on Rembrandt

Robert Hughes on Damien Hirst

More Quotes at The Daily Beasts

The Shock of the New on Amazon





Explore - Question - Learn - Enjoy, Jim