Robert Hughes and Beauty
“Abstract painting often has to do with time, with depicting a place where time no longer applies, closer, perhaps, to music. It represents a search for harmony and grace — a place of timelessness and to use a word which dropped out of fashion
sometime back, of beauty.
A hundred years, ago 75 years ago, even, people used to talk about revolution as though it were the model of art. Art was supposed to be revolutionary, it was going to produce, if you did it right, it was going to produce some kind of social change. I’m not at all sure that that was ever achieved and if it was it was almost invisibly so.
And today I think we’re left with a more modest but an equally difficult task for art to do and that is to be beautiful. To manifest beauty.” Robert Hughes. _The New Shock of The New_ (2004)
Original
My version
