Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Hughes

A whole art-world economy gets skewered in one deadpan line: art has been reassigned from meaning to markup. Hughes isn’t lamenting that prices rise; he’s accusing the system of replacing art’s cultural labor with a purely financial one. “New job” is the tell - a bureaucratic phrasing that makes creativity sound like corporate restructuring. The painting isn’t made to disturb, delight, or argue anymore; it’s hired to perform as an asset.

The bite lands because the verbs are so small and so damning. “Sit” drains art of agency, turning it into inert décor, the tasteful wallpaper of power. “Get more expensive” is a passive miracle, like bread rising, except the yeast is speculation. Hughes is pointing at how value becomes self-justifying: if it costs more, it must matter more. The wall, too, matters - not a museum wall where publics negotiate meaning, but the private wall of the collector, the fund manager, the oligarch. Art becomes a credential, an index of belonging, a silent sign that money has taste.

Contextually, this is Hughes at war with the late-20th-century boom cycles: auction theatrics, brand-name artists, galleries acting like gatekeeping banks, and a critical culture too easily dazzled by numbers. The subtext is not anti-art; it’s pro-art, furious that the market has learned to impersonate judgment. The joke stings because it’s true often enough to feel like reportage.