Robert Hughes, requiescat in pace ...

[David Morris]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/aug/07/robert-hughes-greatest-art-critic

Robert Hughes, who has died aged 74, was simply the greatest art
critic of our time and it will be a long while before we see his like
again. He made criticism look like literature. He also made it look
morally worthwhile. He lent a nobility to what can often seem a petty
way to spend your life. Hughes could be savage, but he was never
petty. There was purpose to his lightning bolts of condemnation.

That larger sense of purpose can best be seen in his two classic books
on art, The Shock of the New and Nothing If Not Critical. The first is
the book of his great BBC television series about the story of modern
art. For Hughes, it is a tragic story. He believed he lived after the
end of the great creative age of modernism. I remember, watching the
television series as a teenager, how excitingly he described the Paris
in the 1900s, when motor cars and the Eiffel Tower were young and
Picasso was painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. But Hughes would not
tolerate any glib pretensions that art in 1980 (when The Shock of the
New aired) lived up to that original starburst of modern energy. For
him, Andy Warhol was an emotionally thin artist bleached by celebrity,
and Joseph Beuys ... Well, he didn't have much time for Beuys.

It was as if the BBC had commissioned the 18th-century satirist
Jonathan Swift to make a documentary about modern life.