One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.

Robert Hughes
300

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

Robert Hughes
206
We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism. -Robert Hughes
194

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
169

[It] was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.

Robert Hughes
161
[The prisons are] the monuments of Australia-the Paestums [of] an extraordinary time-an effort to exile en masse a whole class. -Robert Hughes
152

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

Robert Hughes
150

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.

Robert Hughes
130
Woven through these galleries are some of the most deliriously awful canvases of the 19th century high-finance porn of the ripest sort. -Robert Hughes
107