#Robert Hughes

[rashmeerl]

As the great cultural critic Robert Hughes wrote in his last book #Rome, the Spanish Steps might almost be a marker for the difference between Rome past and present. After the Steps were built in the 18th century, “the great city gradually ceased to be a place from which one could expect major painting or sculpture to emerge,” he writes. Why this happened is hard to say but “cultures do grow old" https://www.rashmee.com/rome-spanish-steps-robert-hughes-staircase/

[the-painting-space]

Robert Hughes on Brett Whiteley

[dreamy-conceit]

... we decided to put Jeff Koons in the new programme: not because his work is beautiful or means anything much, but because it is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks.

Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him.

— Robert Hughes, art critic, on Jeff Koons (The Guardian, 30 June 2004).

[schizografia]

Mi stupisco che qualche imbroglione non abbia ancora pensato di aprire una scuola di scrittura.

Arthur Cravan (1914 ripeto 1914)

[spectaculardistractions]

To Robert Hughes Mexico City, 1959 Questionnaire for the yearly publication Film: Book 1 (The Audience and the Filmmaker) Q1. What specific difficulties have you experienced which have been caused by interpretations of the ‘audience’ by producers, distributors, censors, etc? A1. Except during my first three films, all made before 1932, and produced with absolute independence – An Andalusian Dog, The Golden Age and Land Without Bread – I have always felt the pressure more or less heavily exerted by the producer. But one might deduce from your questions that the producers and distributors are to blame by their special interpretation of public taste for the limitations imposed on the filmmaker. In my opinion, the real responsibility for the spiritual stagnation of cinema lies with the amorphous mass, routinary and conformist, that makes up the audience. The producer limits himself merely to throwing to the beasts the food they demand of him. A businessman neither better nor worse than the others of his time, the producer has no scruples. He is capable of leaping from one ideological plane to another, even if the systems are morally and artistically antagonistic, so long as he is guaranteed prestige and economic success. For the moment it is impossible to foresee any moral elevation of human society. For this reason, there does not appear even a glimmer of the spiritual improvement of the audience. One might even predict the contrary. Filmmakers will continue dragging the heavy chains of servility put upon them by the industry and the producers, who, as faithful representatives of the public, will continue their tyrannical repression of the artists’ freedom. Q2. What do you consider one of the most encouraging developments in film in recent years? Q3. What do you consider one of the most discouraging developments? A2 & 3. To my way of thinking there is not one indication in the film production of recent years, either ‘capitalist’ or ‘communist’ that encourages any hope of the spiritual improvement of cinema – unless it be in its technical aspect, where the progress of both is unquestionable. Q4. What film or films would you make if you were free from the non-artistic limitations of sponsorship, censorship, etc.? A4. If it were possible for me, I would make films which, apart from entertaining the audience, would convey to them the absolute certainty that they DO NOT LIVE IN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS. And in doing this I believe that my intentions would be highly constructive. Movies today, including the so-called neo-realist, are dedicated to a task contrary to this. How is it possible to hope for an improvement in the audience – and consequently in the producers – when every day we are told in these films, even in the most insipid comedies, that our social institutions, our concepts of Country, Religion, Love, etc., etc., are, while perhaps imperfect, UNIQUE AND NECESSARY? The true ‘opium of the audience’ is conformity; and the entire, gigantic film world is dedicated to the propagation of this comfortable feeling, wrapped though it is at times in the insidious disguise of art.

Jo Evans & Breixo Viejo, Luis Buñuel: A Life in Letters

[oldshowbiz]

Silent film writer Robert Hughes was a hardcore reactionary who despised women and liberals. “Of course they put communist propaganda in film,” he said. “They paint a rich man as a fiend. … Women’s intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking.”

[ars-solitudine]

"Più è grande il tuo potenziale, più sarà grande la tua insicurezza. La presunzione è il premio di consolazione dei mediocri".

- Robert Hughes

[jacobwren]

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

Robert Hughes

[goodsniff-m8]

“I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn't matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more perhaps than it ever has. I hate populist shit, no matter how much the demos love it.

Robert Hughes - The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes

[montair]

Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future. This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men start thinking about single rather than multiple meanings. It’s what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.”

Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Trouble in Utopia, BBC2, 12 October 1980

(2013)

[schizografia]

L’appello al linguaggio politicamente corretto, se trova qualche risposta in Inghilterra, nel resto d’Europa non desta praticamente alcuna eco. In Francia nessuno ha pensato di ribattezzare Pipino il Breve «Pépin le Verticalement Défié», né in Spagna i nani di Velázquez danno segno di diventare «las gentes pequeñas». E non oso immaginare il caos che nascerebbe se nelle lingue romanze, dove ogni sostantivo è maschile o femminile – e dove per giunta l’organo genitale maschile ha spesso un nome femminile e viceversa (la polla / el coño) –, accademici e burocrati decidessero di buttare a mare i vocaboli di genere definito.

Robert Hughes, La cultura del piagnisteo

[thunderstruck9]

Frank Auerbach (British, b. 1931), Head of Robert Hughes, 1986. Charcoal and white chalk on two joined sheets of paper, 87 x 76.5 cm.

Robert Hughes (1938-2012) was an Australian art critic, writer, and producer of television documentaries

[thesufjanstevensmodel69]

One of their (the cubists) experimental materials was the art of other cultures, Oceanic and African as despised as they then were. At the time there were no museums of Tribal art to consult. One of the mild ironies of Cubism was the extent to which it was helped by the French Empire in Africa. Picasso and Braque both owned African carvings but they had no antropological interests in them at all, they didn’t care about their ritual uses, they knewn nothing of their original Tribal meanings or about the societies out of which they came. They simply used them formally and in that regard Cubism was like a small parody of the imperial model, the masks were simply raw material from the darkest Congo, like copper or palm oil and Picasso’s use of them was in effect a kind of cultural plunder.

- Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New, episode 1.

[iamcinema]

Memorial Valley Massacre (1989)

[movie-titlecards]

Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension (2011)

My rating: 8/10

As completely unnecessary movies based on comedy adventure cartoons go, this one has the requisite number of epic robot battles and interdimensional hijinks to be highly, highly entertaining.

[mina-tepes]

“I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. . . Consequently l, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate.”

-Robert Hughes