It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot. Robert Hughes
About This Quote

During the 20th century, there were many terrible events in the world that killed millions of people. Adolf Hitler was one of them. His plan to exterminate the Jews was given to him by a friend in the German army in the 1930's. He was successful in his plans.

Now imagine if he had not been successful in his plans. Hitler would have never rose to power. If he did not rise to power, there would have been no World War II where millions died.

There would have been no Holocaust. But, even if Hitler had never existed, another man would have risen to power and destroyed millions of lives. It may sound morbid, but the loss is that we can’t create art that will save millions of lives today.

We may not be able to save millions of lives today, but we can still save millions of lives in the future because we are human beings who strive for greatness.

Source: The Shock Of The New

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something. - Rainbow Rowell

  2. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done. - Vincent Van Gogh

  3. Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep. - Clive Barker

  4. Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. - Chuck Klosterman

  5. There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. - Vincent Van Gogh

More Quotes By Robert Hughes
  1. For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before — the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and...

  2. It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence...

  3. It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and...

  4. Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public

  5. The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is...

Related Topics