Robert Hughes Quotes

I don't think '90s music was as significant as '60s music in terms of changing the world, but it was significant, and I think it was similarly disillusioning when you realize the mainstream just views it as like a curiosity.

The importance of the arts to the societies in which they thrive is well documented.

There is incredible power in the arts to inspire and influence.

Observe that it is a great error to believe that all mediums of art are not closely tied to their time.

It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.

Quality cinema is not changing anything, everything is the same. The artistes and other people involved in these films get some recognition at international film festivals and award shows only.

The value of the arts cannot be measured by its ability to preserve life but rather to enhance existence.

Art isn't supposed to change the world, but it can.

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

We started to confuse entertainment with art, because art has a component of entertainment. It has to have that or it becomes too boring. It becomes too lost in its own devices. But I just think that we started to lose, and even before that, it's not necessary.

In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

In Europe they understand that the arts are incredibly important both culturally and economically.

One filmmaker makes films that are deep, intellectual, profound and confrontational. And the other one makes purely vacuous, escapist films. I'm not sure the one who makes escapist films is making a poorer contribution than the one who makes the deeper films.

It was the case in the 70s and 80s that people believed music could change the world. But now people aren't making music because they want to change the world; they're making music because they want to just make a ton of money.

Shakespeare has done far more for the world than the Bible.

Art has a smaller audience than, say, movies or other forms of mass consumption. But that doesn't mean the work doesn't have an impact in a way that transcends just a few cultural arbiters.

The arts can bring the heart to the aid of the head, the personal to the political.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.