On Robert Hughes [Robert Hughes has been the art
critic for Time Magazine since 1970.
He wrote The Shock of the New—an influential overview of
Modernism—as well as many other books on art and criticism. More recently he narrated a history of art
for the BBC.] Hughes' quotational prelude to
his book Nothing if not Critical is
from Othello: Desdemona: What wouldst thou write
of me, If thou shouldst praise
me? Iago:
O gentle lady, do not put me to 't, For I am nothing if
not critical. Desdemona: Come on, assay. All right, I shall assay. And I shall start out by praising, for a
change. If you had to choose a
non-artist to be an art critic in the 20th century, it would have to be Robert Hughes. He is well-read, clever, funny,
opinionated, pugnacious, and a very good writer to boot. He has been invaluable in his role as axe
swinger in the Modern forest of deadwood.
A burly, straight-shooting Australian, Hughes is a not a welcome sight to
anyone out on a limb. He has taken the
trunk out from under many big names in art, including Karen Finley, Robert
Mapplethorpe, and Julian Schnabel. His
analysis of the current state of the avant garde is often incisive and
amusing. And much of his broader-based
criticism of American postmodern culture is spot-on. Of
course, in my opinion, one doesn't have to be an artist to critique Modern
art. Hughes is exempt, most of the
time, from my standards of responsible criticism because he is not judging art
but exposing its pretense. He really could
do what Julian Schnabel does, if he hit his head and decided he wanted
to. In some
ways Hughes has sounded the death knell of Modernism. I give him a great deal of credit for convincing many that Modern
art has finally bottomed out. I do not
believe in historical necessity, and I do believe in the great power of
the individual: if Hughes had been of the Greenbergian mold, he might have
propelled Modernism to even greater levels of falseness and insolence on his
personal powers of persuasion alone.
Instead Hughes has been arguing so loudly and so well that the
stagnation of art is upon us, he has made some aware this fact at last
(without, however, realizing how overdue such notice is.) He has seen the writing on the wall, has all
but screamed that "art is dead"—but he can't seem to feel good about
it. There is nothing, in his mind, to
fill the gap. Fortunately there is
a gap that needs filling for him, and that, if nothing else, sets him apart. Despite all this I have always
felt that on the whole, and at the most critical times, Hughes is a man
"lost in his neighbor's fields" (as Whistler said of Ruskin). His cynicism surrounds and dismisses not
only the dying gasps of Modernism, but often the viability of visual art itself. In one lecture we find him, for example, damning
art because "What really changes political opinion is events, argument,
press photographs, and TV." Or
claiming that art is not "morally ennobling" or even
"therapeutic" because it does not have an effect on everyone who
comes in contact with it. But this is like saying that because some boats sink, water
is not bouyant. And judging art
politically is simply to misjudge it, as he seems to understand at other times. For instance, he says in the very same
lecture ["Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy," The
Culture of Complaint ]: Likewise, museum people
serve not only the public but the artist...by a scrupulous adherence to high
artistic and intellectual standards.
This discipline is not quantifiable, but it is or should be
disinterested, and there are two sure ways to wreck it. One is to let the art market dictate its
values to the museum. The other is to
convert it into an arena for battles that have to be fought—but fought in the
sphere of politics. Only if it resists
both can the museum continue with its task of helping us discover a great but
always partially lost civilization: our own. And so he answers his own
question about changing political opinion: it is not the place of art to be so
worldly. A political opinion is mainly
analytical—an opinion on expediency or short-term viability—and therefore
cannot be an artistic statement. In this
sense, politics
may be thought of as the argument that determines the current structure. But art is part of the substructure. Hughes proves this in the next to the last
paragraph of the lecture, where he gives a striking account of his reaction, as
a woodworker himself, to seeing the great Japanese temple of Horyu-ji:
"...resentment? Absolutely
not. Reverence and pleasure, more
like." Did he take away points
because the temple had no message, made no statement, had no clear political, intellectual
or linguistic undertones? I doubt
it. In
fact, I know he didn't, for in a review of Chardin he says, "To see
Chardin's work en masse, in the midst of a period stuffed with every
kind of jerky innovation, narcissistic blurting and trashy 'relevance', is to
be reminded that lucidity, deliberation, probity and calm are still the chief
virtues of the art of painting." Of course they are, and only when Hughes
is judging contemporary art does he forget this. For any contemporary art, almost any 20th century art, fails
miserably when held to these standards.
In the second lecture in The
Culture of Complaint, "Multi-Culti and Its Discontents," Hughes
again proves he knows what art is for.
He quotes a fellow Aussie, Andrew Riemer, who sees that
The literature of
England [Tennyson, Keats, Shelley] conducted us into the world of the romantic
imagination which served one of the essential needs of adolescence. It also catered generously for others: a
heroic or noble past in which we could participate, and ethical structures to
provide models for fantasies, if not for actual life. Hughes does not take exception
to this view. The only thing to be added to such a concise statement is that
surely the needs of the imagination do not die with adolescence. We will always need, both as individuals and
as a society, a source for such spiritual replenishment. Still,
Hughes is apt to forget this. He mentions
William James' account of a trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in
Boston with little reverence: "Visiting such a place, he [James] wrote,
would give harried self-conscious Americans the chance to forget themselves, to
become like children again, immersed in wonder." But Hughes begins the next paragraph with a sneer: "The idea
that publicly accessible art would help dispel social resentment lay close to
the heart of the American museum enterprise." As if "forgetting themselves" and
"dispelling social resentment" are strictly equivalent. Here Hughes has fallen into the modern trap
of seeing all pleasure as politically regressive. He implies that classical art is simply or predominately an
opiate. It does not follow, however,
that children, or adults like children, immersed in wonder, would have
their social resentment dispelled by such an encounter with art. I believe it more likely that a positive
encounter with art causes social resentment. For why, a visitor will think, should such moments of purity and
wonder be available only in museums?
Why, if such visions of beauty, peace, or emotional honesty are
imaginable, are paintable, are they not liveable? Despite his aggression toward
certain contemporary artists, Hughes has come down on the side of the Moderns
in their redefinition of art as theory and politics. The Shock of the New, his most influential book, is
both panegyric and apologia for Modernism. He certainly never takes the big names in the book to task for
anything. He rarely applies the same
standards to the early stars of Modernism that he applies later to the lesser
stars of PoMo. We get more myth-making
than we do criticism. He is clearly not
interested in attacking Modernism as a whole.
Although Hughes sometimes shows traditional tendecies, he never
sides with classical writers. He would
never agree with Hesiod, for instance, who said, "The Muses were born that
they might be a forgetfulness of evils and a truce from all cares." Or with Schiller, who said, "All art is
dedicated to Joy." These
sentiments are clearly pre-Modern and passe, and no one who even knew of them,
much less mentioned them in print, could have hoped to have been hired by any
magazine in 1970, or accepted by a major publisher. No, the opinions of pre-Modern artists and
writers are never seriously addressed by Hughes, or anyone else, except in the
case they can be given a spin in the direction of Modernism. Whistler is misrepresented as being a
pre-formalist, for example, but what he actually said about art is never
mentioned. Nor is Matthew Arnold, one
of my favorite writers, who said this, Tragic art has failed
when a state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by hope; in which
there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably
something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are
painful, not tragic; the representation of them in art is also painful. Hughes would never mention it
since clearly this one quote undercuts the entire Modern argument for its
"shocking" choice of subject matter, and completely dissipates the
"shock of the new." According
to Hughes, the shock of contemporary art is meant to educate—at least to the
extent that propaganda can educate. But
not even propaganda can successfully propel by causing pain alone. Brutality and vulgarity, shock and horror,
can educate and propel only in the way that tragedy has done, in the way that
Arnold implies—that is, by artistically resolving the pain it causes. Modernism has attempted to divorce the
subject matter of tragedy from its artistic context and forms. It causes visual or emotional or
psychological pain without giving a clue to its end. In this way it has become an unwitting accomplice to the
oppressor it claims to oppose—whether that oppressor is Nature or the Gods,
in the case of classical tragedy, or some social flaw, in the case of
contemporary theory. It does not
resolve pain, it only adds pain to pain.
It does not educate through horror; it only horrifies further. If this paper was useful to you in any way, please consider donating a dollar (or more) to the SAVE THE ARTISTS FOUNDATION. This will allow me to continue writing these "unpublishable" things. Don't be confused by paying Melisa Smith--that is just one of my many noms de plume. If you are a Paypal user, there is no fee; so it might be worth your while to become one. Otherwise they will rob us 33 cents for each transaction. |
