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Quotes from Nothing If Not Critical — Robert Hughes

1938–2012 Australia

← All quotes by Robert Hughes

9 quotes

The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

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

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

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

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

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.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

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

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

Like most artists who have made an invention of some kind, he tends to overplay the significance of his own and goes on about it as though it were a Rosetta Stone, with whose help all representation can be rescued from one-eyed falsehood.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

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.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton give 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.

Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Hughes (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.