Robert Hughes, requiescat in pace ...

[Richard Ryan]

The greatest art critic of our time (whatever our time is)?  Really?
Compared to Arthur Danto?  Compared to Peter Schjeldahl?

Amazing how a reactionary middlebrow television
personality-cum-boozehound can climb so high.  His non-thoughts about
Beuys and Mapplethorpe are emblematic of his, eh, non-thinking.



On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 3:43 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.
>



-- 
Richard Ryan
New York, New Jersey, and the World
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
       the thing I came for:
       the wreck and not the story of the wreck
                - Adrienne Rich