“In one sense, (Duchamp's) “The Large Glass” is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.”
Robert Hughes“Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.”
Robert Hughes“Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre”
Robert Hughes“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation p”
Robert Hughes“Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.”
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New“Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.”
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New“that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.”
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New“In one sense, (Duchamp's) “The Large Glass” is a glimpse into Hell; a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness.”
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New“In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.”
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New“What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?”
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New“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.”
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New