In his recent memoir, Things I Didn't Know, art critic Robert Hughes pinpoints the moment he decided to leave his native Australia to begin a new life as a permanent expatriate. It was a warm evening in 1962. Hughes and his mentor, popular historian Alan Moorehead, were talking shop as they pounded down Gewürztraminer at Hughes' apartment in Sydney. "If you stay here another ten years," Moorehead told him, "Australia will still be a very interesting place. But you will have become a bore, a village explainer."
Hughes heeded his friend's advice, staying first at Moorehead's villa in Tuscany, then moving to London, where he lived on the fringes of hippie counterculture ("all dope, rhetoric, be-ins, and powdered bullshit," as he recalls) and wrote art reviews for the "quality Sundays": the Times, the Telegraph, the Observer, the Spectator. In 1970, he got a call from Time (on a neighbor's phone; his had been disconnected) offering him a job as the magazine's art critic. His anecdote about this incident is a perfect snapshot of the good old days of cultural journalism: The editor who called him was drunk from his habitual three-martini lunch; Hughes was stoned to the gills on hash and, in his paranoia, assumed he was talking to the CIA. They worked it out; he took the job, moved to New York, and over the course of 30 years churned out hundreds of eloquent, witty, briskly opinionated columns for his target audience of intelligent, nonspecialist readers.
Hughes' forays into television further broadened his exposure and established him as a celebrity art critic. He honed his amiably pugnacious persona as writer and presenter of The Shock of the New (1980), an eight-part series on modern art for the BBC, and American Visions (1997), his PBS survey of four centuries of American art. The series and their accompanying books are exemplary works of cultural history for a mass audience, masterpieces of education-as-entertainment. Hughes has turned out to be a "village explainer" in the best sense, bringing the insights of a clear-eyed expat to a village that encompasses most of the English-speaking world. At the same time, his memoir reveals just how formative an influence Aussie culture of the '50s was, in particular its aspirational yet skeptical relationship to European art. It helped produce a critic of rare bluntness—who also has blinkers of his own.
Hughes is a bravura performer, both on the screen and on the page. He writes with astounding verve, in a voice that slips easily between boisterous vulgarity and polished eloquence. In Things I Didn't Know, which chronicles his career through 1970, he says the single greatest influence on his approach to criticism was George Orwell. For Hughes, Orwell's no-nonsense prose style and clear, everyday language offered an astringent antidote to the "airy-fairy, metaphor-ridden kind of pseudo-poetry" that filled the art magazines of the early '60s. As a result of this early training—and probably also as a matter of temperament—Hughes' writing is muscular and dazzlingly lucid; he refuses to indulge in sublime metaphysical musings or languid adjectival swooning, opting instead for precise, verbally nimble descriptions of art's effects. His critical perspective is that of an erudite outsider, which makes him immensely appealing to a mainstream readership: He knows his stuff, but he hasn't drunk the Kool-Aid.
Hughes' skepticism served him well during the boom years of the early '80s, when inflated reputations sprouted like mushrooms in the rich soil of an overheated art market. Bad reviews are always the most fun to read, and for sheer entertainment value nothing beats his poison-pen takedowns of art stars like Julian Schnabel (whose "work is to painting what Stallone's is to acting—a lurching display of oily pectorals"), or Jeff Koons, whom he described as having "the slimy assurance … of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida." (Hughes' pop-culture metaphors are vicious fun, and far from "airy-fairy.") His "SoHoiad: or, The Masque of Art," a satire in heroic couplets published in the New York Review of Books in 1984, remains the snarkiest skewering of the contemporary art world that has yet seen the light of day.
Mia Fineman is a writer and curator in New York. Remarks from the Fray Editor:
For an example of the Fray at its finest, check out the discussion between Utek1 and melvil in the Art Fray. I've reproduced some of the dialogue below, but the full discussion isn't to be missed. –G.A.
Remarks from the Fray:
Hughes was a kind of provincial: a country-boy poser. He loved to flaunt his classical education -- nothing like the Latin for showing up the rubes, eh? And he didn't know a hell of a lot about art that hadn't been made in London or New York, but generally got away with faking it. He doesn't like writing about Beuys because he doesn't know a word of German and hasn't the patience to learn from people who do. The Schwarzkogler fiasco was entirely Hughes' fault and was entirely avoidable.
In late middle age, Hughes has gradually overcome the ugliest aspect of his psyche -- that hyper-masculine "muscular prose" crapola: the conviction nearly every lout from the antipodes seems to have that every living homosexual wants him, wants him badly. Hughes has always had a penchant for dressing like rough trade -- you know, the Mapplethorpe look. Hughes' kinks are not my concern here -- what is, is his tendency to fag-bait artists whose work he fails to understand.
Ms. Fineman is, I think, excessively kind about that tendency. Life has been rough on Hughes: he had a terrible car crash and also had the ugly experience of returning to Australia and discovering that he was a joke there: an explainer without a village. These experiences seem to have made him a better person, which says a lot that's good about him. I like him, NOW. In his first act, he was a blowhard and a poser.
--melvil
(To reply, click here.)
Hughes is, first and foremost, a journalist, a prose stylist whose forthright opinions and biting wit are what makes him so refreshing amidst the fog of pretentious gobbledygook found in art journals. What people call Hughes' masculine prose is not some sort of macho preening but about the ability to craft a sentence that is by turns funny, smart, earthy, vivid, and always packing a punch. You may find it snobbish, but I think his high-brow/lowbrow routine is part of what makes him entertaining. Like Twain and Mencken, he has little tolerance for cant and takes no prisoners when it comes to skewering artists whose work he disdains.
He can be politically incorrect and proud of it, unleashing his barbs against all comers, propriety be damned, gays and straights alike. To consider him a fag-baiter is to ignore his careful appreciation of gay artists from Caravaggio to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. [...] If Hughes fails to give Joseph Beuys what you consider his due, it is not because Hughes is ignorant of things German, given his championing of Beuys' countryman Anselm Kiefer, it may simply be because he feels that the work of Beuys has his limitations.
--Utek1
(To reply, click here.)
The best thing about Hughes, and the best stroke of luck in his life, is Time. Time, the passage of days and weeks, has changed him from the blowhard of youth to the far more temperate and nuanced writer of middle age. This is so unusual, so much the opposite of what you'd expect, I have to point at it, though I don't know just what it means. And _Time_ has also been kind to Hughes: Time, the magazine, which has been his academy, giving him a new little self-education project weekly for decades, building him into one of the great aesthetic generalists one brick at a time. [...]
He cares about art in a religious way: it's like church to him. He hates what Dorothy Day used to call cheap grace. The artwork itself can't be too excessive for him -- he loves Canova, for instance. Kitsch, where he sees it, is almost entirely a matter of marketing, which is why his reaction to Koons was so toxic. He got mad at Conceptualism early on and got stuck with the couple of cute things that he came up with in response to it. But look at conceptualism seriously -- it was at its biggest and most important a movement of what, five artists and a small flock of grad students, sort of an outgrowth of Fluxus? When you're a secondary growth of a movement nobody's ever heard of, what does that mean?
On the other hand, ANTI-Conceptualism has been huge for decades. it's just like Communism, which in America has never been much more than an impoverished cult, even in the thirties. But anti-communism has been a huge multi-million dollar business for over a hundred years. It's easy as pie to be an anti-conceptualist. You don't even have to know what it is that you're so opposed to. You can just talk about beauty as if there are other people who are big in the art world and don't care about beauty at all, which is total nonsense. Everyone loves beauty. Joseph Kosuth, who invented conceptualism (just ask him) is as big a fan of beauty as anyone breathing. Enough on the past. Enough.
--melvil
(To reply, click here.)
I'm with you and with Hughes on this one. Most Conceptual Art leaves me cold. "Not the idea, but the thing itself" wrote William Carlos Williams, and it was never more true than in the visual arts. Humans are visual creatures, blessed with a wonderful instrument for observation, able to see in astonishing depth, detail and color, and Hughes values artwork that rewards our primary physical sense.
Whether it is abstract or representational, art should be interesting to look at. One would think that such a conceit would be self-evident, but the rise of Conceptualism has overturned this bit of common sense. Conceptual art is like conceptual music, which may have its own internal logic that can be appreciated intellectually but nevertheless usually sounds awful. Certainly, Conceptual art can be good, but only so long as it is visually strong as well.
That Conceptual Art has generated so much critical ink over the years is because it is easier to write about an artwork that comes with its own built-in philosophy. On the other hand, to be able to explain a visual performance using only words requires a writer of unusual dexterity, especially if one is determined to avoid the worn-out old art jargon that makes most art criticism unreadable. Hughes is one of the very few people who can make a painting come alive on the page. Far from dismissing 20th century art, Hughes book "The Shock of the New" is the best survey I know of that tumultuous era. That Hughes is also willing to point out when the Emperor has no clothes is simply a bonus. Ms. Fineman may think that this is provincial, but I prefer to use the term discriminating instead.
--Utek1
(To reply, click here.)
(1/21)
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Remarks from the Fray Editor:
For an example of the Fray at its finest, check out the discussion between Utek1 and melvil in the Art Fray. I've reproduced some of the dialogue below, but the full discussion isn't to be missed. –G.A.
Remarks from the Fray:
Hughes was a kind of provincial: a country-boy poser. He loved to flaunt his classical education -- nothing like the Latin for showing up the rubes, eh? And he didn't know a hell of a lot about art that hadn't been made in London or New York, but generally got away with faking it. He doesn't like writing about Beuys because he doesn't know a word of German and hasn't the patience to learn from people who do. The Schwarzkogler fiasco was entirely Hughes' fault and was entirely avoidable.
In late middle age, Hughes has gradually overcome the ugliest aspect of his psyche -- that hyper-masculine "muscular prose" crapola: the conviction nearly every lout from the antipodes seems to have that every living homosexual wants him, wants him badly. Hughes has always had a penchant for dressing like rough trade -- you know, the Mapplethorpe look. Hughes' kinks are not my concern here -- what is, is his tendency to fag-bait artists whose work he fails to understand.
Ms. Fineman is, I think, excessively kind about that tendency. Life has been rough on Hughes: he had a terrible car crash and also had the ugly experience of returning to Australia and discovering that he was a joke there: an explainer without a village. These experiences seem to have made him a better person, which says a lot that's good about him. I like him, NOW. In his first act, he was a blowhard and a poser.
--melvil
(To reply, click here.)
Hughes is, first and foremost, a journalist, a prose stylist whose forthright opinions and biting wit are what makes him so refreshing amidst the fog of pretentious gobbledygook found in art journals. What people call Hughes' masculine prose is not some sort of macho preening but about the ability to craft a sentence that is by turns funny, smart, earthy, vivid, and always packing a punch. You may find it snobbish, but I think his high-brow/lowbrow routine is part of what makes him entertaining. Like Twain and Mencken, he has little tolerance for cant and takes no prisoners when it comes to skewering artists whose work he disdains.
He can be politically incorrect and proud of it, unleashing his barbs against all comers, propriety be damned, gays and straights alike. To consider him a fag-baiter is to ignore his careful appreciation of gay artists from Caravaggio to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. [...] If Hughes fails to give Joseph Beuys what you consider his due, it is not because Hughes is ignorant of things German, given his championing of Beuys' countryman Anselm Kiefer, it may simply be because he feels that the work of Beuys has his limitations.
--Utek1
(To reply, click here.)
The best thing about Hughes, and the best stroke of luck in his life, is Time. Time, the passage of days and weeks, has changed him from the blowhard of youth to the far more temperate and nuanced writer of middle age. This is so unusual, so much the opposite of what you'd expect, I have to point at it, though I don't know just what it means. And _Time_ has also been kind to Hughes: Time, the magazine, which has been his academy, giving him a new little self-education project weekly for decades, building him into one of the great aesthetic generalists one brick at a time. [...]
He cares about art in a religious way: it's like church to him. He hates what Dorothy Day used to call cheap grace. The artwork itself can't be too excessive for him -- he loves Canova, for instance. Kitsch, where he sees it, is almost entirely a matter of marketing, which is why his reaction to Koons was so toxic. He got mad at Conceptualism early on and got stuck with the couple of cute things that he came up with in response to it. But look at conceptualism seriously -- it was at its biggest and most important a movement of what, five artists and a small flock of grad students, sort of an outgrowth of Fluxus? When you're a secondary growth of a movement nobody's ever heard of, what does that mean?
On the other hand, ANTI-Conceptualism has been huge for decades. it's just like Communism, which in America has never been much more than an impoverished cult, even in the thirties. But anti-communism has been a huge multi-million dollar business for over a hundred years. It's easy as pie to be an anti-conceptualist. You don't even have to know what it is that you're so opposed to. You can just talk about beauty as if there are other people who are big in the art world and don't care about beauty at all, which is total nonsense. Everyone loves beauty. Joseph Kosuth, who invented conceptualism (just ask him) is as big a fan of beauty as anyone breathing. Enough on the past. Enough.
--melvil
(To reply, click here.)
I'm with you and with Hughes on this one. Most Conceptual Art leaves me cold. "Not the idea, but the thing itself" wrote William Carlos Williams, and it was never more true than in the visual arts. Humans are visual creatures, blessed with a wonderful instrument for observation, able to see in astonishing depth, detail and color, and Hughes values artwork that rewards our primary physical sense.
Whether it is abstract or representational, art should be interesting to look at. One would think that such a conceit would be self-evident, but the rise of Conceptualism has overturned this bit of common sense. Conceptual art is like conceptual music, which may have its own internal logic that can be appreciated intellectually but nevertheless usually sounds awful. Certainly, Conceptual art can be good, but only so long as it is visually strong as well.
That Conceptual Art has generated so much critical ink over the years is because it is easier to write about an artwork that comes with its own built-in philosophy. On the other hand, to be able to explain a visual performance using only words requires a writer of unusual dexterity, especially if one is determined to avoid the worn-out old art jargon that makes most art criticism unreadable. Hughes is one of the very few people who can make a painting come alive on the page. Far from dismissing 20th century art, Hughes book "The Shock of the New" is the best survey I know of that tumultuous era. That Hughes is also willing to point out when the Emperor has no clothes is simply a bonus. Ms. Fineman may think that this is provincial, but I prefer to use the term discriminating instead.
--Utek1
(To reply, click here.)
(1/21)