88 Quotes by Robert Hughes

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre.

There’s no geist like the Zeitgeist.

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.

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.

We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism.

We’ve got a recipe for disaster. It’s huge – this combination of body image issues and the drug’s weight loss appeal.

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.

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

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