Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Hughes

The line skewers one of culture’s favorite consolation prizes: the myth that history is a fairer audience than the present. Hughes, a critic who spent his career watching reputations inflate, collapse, and resurrect, compresses a whole economy of wishful thinking into a neat reversal: “Popular in our time, unpopular in his.” The phrase mimics the rhythm of a proverb, which is part of the joke. It sounds like wisdom precisely because it’s prepackaged.

The “stereotype of rejected genius” is doing heavy lifting here. Hughes isn’t denying that some artists were misunderstood; he’s puncturing the lazy certainty with which we narrate that misunderstanding. The subtext is a critique of how we launder taste through time. Declaring yesterday’s outcast a “genius” flatters us twice: it lets us feel morally superior to the blinkered contemporaries who “didn’t get it,” and it casts our own preferences as historically validated. In other words, the myth isn’t just about the artist; it’s about the audience auditioning for sophistication.

Context matters because Hughes wrote amid late-20th-century canon-making, when museums, publishers, and markets turned “rediscovery” into a genre. The stereotype also serves as an alibi for mediocrity: if you’re ignored now, maybe you’re simply ahead of your time. Hughes’ compact cynicism warns that posterity isn’t a neutral court; it’s another crowd, with its own fashions, incentives, and institutional gatekeepers. The line works because it attacks a comforting narrative at its weakest point: its smugness.