Goodbye, Robert Hughes

[caldwell.brobeck]

Robert Hughes, whom Jonathan Jones has justifiably called the greatest art critic of our time, passed away yesterday. He will be missed.

[Keith Russell]

Absolutely. RIP.

[caldwell.brobeck]

From his book, The Shock of the New:

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

I recommend that book, as well as Nothing If Not Critical, for anyone with an interest in art.

[bethanyt]

I loved his tv series. We get so few art shows here...

[TeAnne]

RIP Mr Hughes

[caldwell.brobeck]

Simon Schama, another of my favourite authors, has written quite a good tribute to Hughes over on the Daily Beast.

One of the things I really loved about Hughes, as well as the few other great contemporary writers on art (like Schama, and TJ Clark) is that they never shied away from fairly evaluating opinions antithetical to their own. They might be polemical, but rarely did their work sound like a manifesto. Examples of the opposite abound, from Marinetti's 1909 The Futurist Manifesto, to most of Greenberg, and now the latest screed on The New English Review, The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism

Another thing to love about all three (Hughes, Schama, Clark, though Schama fails at this more than the other two) is the simple, straightforward concision of their styles. I'm currently rereading The Shock of the New, and it seems that just about every other sentence is worth remembering, one rarely gets a sense of having waded through a densely worded slurry to achieve nothing. Rosalind Krauss is probably the biggest offender in this category. For a fairly amusing take on that, there's an interesting bit of research published on Triple Canopy, International Art English. (The layout on that one is awkward to say the least, to read through the article click on the plus sign on the right).

[StephenC]

I appreciated Hughes' essays on art and artists. He was not a jargonist, but communicated his ideas as if they were important and he wanted the reader to fully absorb them. My introduction to him was in reading The Shock of the New, and I found his essay on Brasilia fascinating in his exploration of what can go wrong with utopian ideas in real world settings.

I've wondered, however, about art writing today and its treatment of contemporary realist painting. This is what I do. I am aware of a certain part of Hughes' work devoted to this subject. But the present writing on the subject of realist work, as opposed to other forms of art, is overly tied to the art gallery and there is the air of the commercial all around it.

At one time I thought there was going to be some good writing on realist/impressionist art from the Art Renewal Center when Miles Mathis wrote some essays for them. But these proved to be a disappointment because almost all of what he said about the works there was negative and that was the story for every other article I've read by him. The ARC fired him, of course, and I can't blame them. Like I've said, realist art get little enough autonomous review as it is, so why go with overly negative attention?

I hope someone in Hughes' mold will get a national audience and do more in the realist direction. All kinds of art can now peacefully co-exist and I would like some more light on my part of the stage.

[Clive Green]

I too am rereading Shock of the New, as well as Hughes' autobiography. Although I am not totally on board with many of his views he was a thoughtful and considered critic. How good can be judged by a cursory glance through magazines such as Art Forum which are required reading for anyone interested in contemporary art and yet bedeviled by poor writing filled with pop psychology references and regional bias.

A sad loss.

[ianuk]

I'm watching Robert Hugh's on Goya, it's interesting.