Robert Hughes Quotes

Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

The process of art evolving is always one which has fascinated me.

In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives.

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love.

Art demands of us that we shall not stand still.

Art is a self-replicating force.

Each painting, I feel like I kind of might have gotten something. If I feel like I totally got it, there's probably something wrong and it's not finished. And if I really feel like I understand it then I'm done with these paintings and I'll have to do something else.

A lot of artists are involved with fabrication. Artists today are making more objects and many of them need the participation of a dealer in order to facilitate and provide support for projects. So that has changed. But I don't know if what it means to be an artist has really changed. I hope that it hasn't.

The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it.

Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

I like people that challenge their art, not only in the purist way, but also in terms of how they could provoke and make something different.

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

In any art movement, the art has to move into a new phase - a filmmaker has a desire to make a film that is not like a previous film.

There hasn't been any art yet. Art is just beginning.

From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance.

You don't have to compose a masterpiece every time, but I think the challenge of art is always searching for something different, searching for a new sensitivity, a new perspective, a new vision.

I think if you're a creative person, then you're always kinda looking to move things along - 'Where else can I go? Where can I take this?' From painters to photographers - anything creative in the arts - if you're a true artist, I think you'll always look to do something else. 'Where else can I go with it?' Do you know what I mean?

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.