Remembering Robert Hughes: What did he do for art?

Robert Hughes was a 'scourge of phony art and absurd demagoguery', remembered one admirer. Photograph: David Corio/Redferns

Typing "Robert Hughes" into Twitter today returns a stream of condolence messages, quotes and praise for his books The Fatal Shore, Things I Didn't Know and The Shock of the New.

One tweet reads:

RIP Robert Hughes, scourge of phony Art & absurd demagoguery, & up there with Vidal & Hitchens as one of the great talkers of our times.

Another, sent by Simon Sellar, editor of Architectural Review Asia Pacific, says:

'One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture. It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse.' Robert Hughes

While author Bret Easton Ellis tweeted this very intriguing line which begs to be expanded upon:

The only time I came in contact with Robert Hughes was in 1991 when he threatened to leave Random House if they published "American Psycho."

And in Hughes's obituary, Michael McNay wrote of his TV series The Shock of the New that it was "the best series of programmes about modern art yet made for television, low on theory, high on the kind of epigrammatic judgment that condenses deep truths."

What do you think Robert Hughes did for art criticism? Leave your tributes and comments in the thread below.