Robert Hughes, requiescat in pace ...

[David Morris]

Hughes makes his anger with the depths that art has sunk to even
clearer in the essays gathered in Nothing If Not Critical. For the
best part of his career as a critic, he lived in New York. It was the
decline he perceived there, from Robert Rauschenberg to Robert
Mapplethorpe, that so disgusted him with the fall of modern art. This
was a political and ethical judgment, as well as artistic. Art had
become the plaything of the market, he believed. It was getting too
expensive as it turned into the sport of 1980s investors. Artists like
Jeff Koons and – he later added – Damien Hirst were barely real
artists at all, but grotesque market manipulators.

If he was right, God help us all, for the conquest of art by money and
the proliferation of celebrity artists that he condemned continues to
multiply. The art world of today might be mistaken for an apocalyptic
vision dredged from his darkest satirical imaginings.


On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 2:43 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.