"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."
Hughes on Caravaggio: "Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius."
"So much of art – not all of it thank god, but a lot of it – has just become a kind of cruddy game for the self-aggrandisement of the rich and the ignorant, it is a kind of bad but useful business."
"A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion."
"In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity."
Hughes on Cezanne: "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."
