Robert Hughes, requiescat in pace ...

[malignd at aol.com]

The word "greatest" always has the potential to contaminate an argument.  I like Arthur Danto a lot, but Hughes is a lot of fun and easy to underestimate.  He chose journalism, mostly, rather than academia, but he's not a blind dog barking at the sun.  No reason to choose between them unless we're forced to vote.


And, what's "our time"?  What about the Red and the Green?  Are they before our time?



-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com>
To: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
Cc: Rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>; Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tue, Aug 7, 2012 10:31 pm
Subject: Re: Robert Hughes, requiescat in pace ...


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

 
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