What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory t…

- Robert Hughes

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

- Robert Hughes

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

- Robert Hughes

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none …

- Robert Hughes

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

- Robert Hughes

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

- Robert Hughes

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

- Robert Hughes

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

- Robert Hughes

Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of ins…

- Robert Hughes