Robert Hughes, 1938 - 2012
The American art critic Dave Hickey is supposedly calling it quits or so it appears anyway from an article on the Daily Mail Online website that an old art school professor of mine sent out, adding that it is "what most people of the art world feel." What do they feel? And who are these people? One gathers that it all refers to the contemporary art world, a circumscribed concept defined by museums, galleries, art dealers and their personnel, auction houses and their personnel and art fairs, etc. That this group of business people have interest mainly in money and the celebrity that comes with making money, well, . . . and the sun also rises on the East.
I can't help but wonder what exactly and specifically Mr Hickey has against the multi-tentacled beast that feeds a mass of journalists, galleristas, consultants, organizers of trade fairs, businesses, etc. etc. at the end of 2012 that he didn't appreciate back in say, 2002 or 1982 for that matter. So there are scoundrels and knaves who exploit and profit, often in less than moral circumstances, I can't imagine that has much changed since the start of human civilization. Lance Armstrong cheated and so it appears did Knoedler. I am the last person to defend the contemporary art market's excesses, and indeed, that might be its only virtue, but to make a histrionic fuss about it and to slam the door behind . . . I guess he got tired of the party. An old room-mate of mine would say, "why get your panties all tied up in a bunch."
Mr Hickey's "exit" brings to mind the Australian born art critic Robert Hughes who passed away this past summer after a long illness. Mr Hickey can turn around one day if he wishes and rejoin the party, or he can go to another party (in fact, perhaps the central question of this dramatic exit may more be on the scale of leaving the "big" party because one is tired of it, in order go to another one that is more enjoyable). Unfortunately for us, Mr Hughes has definitively left behind the vulgarity of our gluttony for celebrity and money.
Before his passing, I had often wondered what the day would be like--when the critical voice that shaped my view of art for so long, especially in the formative years, passed away. My parents had a subscription to TIME magazine, and as a teenager, we were then in Hong Kong, living far away from any major museum or collections, the articles of Mr Hughes, his reviews of museum exhibitions, and for a while still, his critiques of contemporary artists, were one of the primary sources I had of knowing about things happening outside of the ultra-liberal money worshipping cut-throat cultural tabula-rasa that was Hong Kong. I religiously collected his articles in binders and read and re-read them, they were not biblical, but nearly so. The binders were my collection of Nothing if Not Critical before the fact.
Of course, as I grew older, and as I set out on this journey that brought me from Hong Kong to the United States (Michigan, Vermont, Indiana, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia) and now Paris, I began to take what he wrote and said with more circumspection. It appeared to me, reading his autobiography, Things I didn't know, that perhaps I was not wrong in finding Mr Hughes' judgements and verdicts human and not faultless. As a critic, he was often much better at pointing out the bad than he was in recognizing the good. He lampooned with zest and energy the excesses of the contemporary art world and its celebrities but at times, there lacked objective assessment of the work (his glorification of Lucien Freud and his belittling of Basquiat may have been excessive in both respects).
But back in the late 1980s, for a young provincial mind, Hughes' blacks and whites were reassuring and an easy foundation to stand on. After all, he was most often right in his assessments of the artists of the 1980's when he was at the height of his influence -- Sean Scully, Terry Winters, Leon Kossoff, Elizabeth Murray lauded, and rightly so, Julian Schabel, David Salle, Jeff Koons, Donald Sultan, Francisco Clemente harshly criticized, and rightly so. One can no doubt off-handedly say that the zingers he crafted at the expense of the ex-darlings of the art world were based on theoretically problematic "aesthetics" often rooted in his own "provincial" Australian background. Unfortunately for Mr Hughes, for every Julian Schnabel that he dethroned, there would be five other usurpateurs taking up the imperial mantle of art stardom, one after the other, all the more vulgar and puerile, and not always American.
At the end of his life, Mr Hughes was an avid critic of the art market, of the people with money involved in the buying and selling of art. He took a back seat in the evaluation of contemporary art and artists. It was probably a decision he willfully made. In his criticism of the follies of the art market, he did not distinguish the artists from the tradesmen, and he did not distinguish between artists and the art world. The two are not definitively enmeshed with each other, they are not the same exact beast. If Mr Hughes was right in being a severe critic of the art market, he did not seek to look outside of this circumscribed entity in order to escape its underpinnings and prejudices in order to establish the alternative.
All the same, in his series for the BBC, The Mona Lisa Curse, he showed the underpinnings of the contemporary art business model, this ultra-liberal anything goes as long as it sells art market, in full ebullition, our own tulip mania, our own 19th century vulgar academic salon re-birthed in the frothy waves of dollars and euros, blown by the breath of Mammon.
I can't help but wonder what exactly and specifically Mr Hickey has against the multi-tentacled beast that feeds a mass of journalists, galleristas, consultants, organizers of trade fairs, businesses, etc. etc. at the end of 2012 that he didn't appreciate back in say, 2002 or 1982 for that matter. So there are scoundrels and knaves who exploit and profit, often in less than moral circumstances, I can't imagine that has much changed since the start of human civilization. Lance Armstrong cheated and so it appears did Knoedler. I am the last person to defend the contemporary art market's excesses, and indeed, that might be its only virtue, but to make a histrionic fuss about it and to slam the door behind . . . I guess he got tired of the party. An old room-mate of mine would say, "why get your panties all tied up in a bunch."
Mr Hickey's "exit" brings to mind the Australian born art critic Robert Hughes who passed away this past summer after a long illness. Mr Hickey can turn around one day if he wishes and rejoin the party, or he can go to another party (in fact, perhaps the central question of this dramatic exit may more be on the scale of leaving the "big" party because one is tired of it, in order go to another one that is more enjoyable). Unfortunately for us, Mr Hughes has definitively left behind the vulgarity of our gluttony for celebrity and money.
Robert Hughes, 1938 - 2012
Before his passing, I had often wondered what the day would be like--when the critical voice that shaped my view of art for so long, especially in the formative years, passed away. My parents had a subscription to TIME magazine, and as a teenager, we were then in Hong Kong, living far away from any major museum or collections, the articles of Mr Hughes, his reviews of museum exhibitions, and for a while still, his critiques of contemporary artists, were one of the primary sources I had of knowing about things happening outside of the ultra-liberal money worshipping cut-throat cultural tabula-rasa that was Hong Kong. I religiously collected his articles in binders and read and re-read them, they were not biblical, but nearly so. The binders were my collection of Nothing if Not Critical before the fact.
Of course, as I grew older, and as I set out on this journey that brought me from Hong Kong to the United States (Michigan, Vermont, Indiana, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia) and now Paris, I began to take what he wrote and said with more circumspection. It appeared to me, reading his autobiography, Things I didn't know, that perhaps I was not wrong in finding Mr Hughes' judgements and verdicts human and not faultless. As a critic, he was often much better at pointing out the bad than he was in recognizing the good. He lampooned with zest and energy the excesses of the contemporary art world and its celebrities but at times, there lacked objective assessment of the work (his glorification of Lucien Freud and his belittling of Basquiat may have been excessive in both respects).
But back in the late 1980s, for a young provincial mind, Hughes' blacks and whites were reassuring and an easy foundation to stand on. After all, he was most often right in his assessments of the artists of the 1980's when he was at the height of his influence -- Sean Scully, Terry Winters, Leon Kossoff, Elizabeth Murray lauded, and rightly so, Julian Schabel, David Salle, Jeff Koons, Donald Sultan, Francisco Clemente harshly criticized, and rightly so. One can no doubt off-handedly say that the zingers he crafted at the expense of the ex-darlings of the art world were based on theoretically problematic "aesthetics" often rooted in his own "provincial" Australian background. Unfortunately for Mr Hughes, for every Julian Schnabel that he dethroned, there would be five other usurpateurs taking up the imperial mantle of art stardom, one after the other, all the more vulgar and puerile, and not always American.
At the end of his life, Mr Hughes was an avid critic of the art market, of the people with money involved in the buying and selling of art. He took a back seat in the evaluation of contemporary art and artists. It was probably a decision he willfully made. In his criticism of the follies of the art market, he did not distinguish the artists from the tradesmen, and he did not distinguish between artists and the art world. The two are not definitively enmeshed with each other, they are not the same exact beast. If Mr Hughes was right in being a severe critic of the art market, he did not seek to look outside of this circumscribed entity in order to escape its underpinnings and prejudices in order to establish the alternative.
All the same, in his series for the BBC, The Mona Lisa Curse, he showed the underpinnings of the contemporary art business model, this ultra-liberal anything goes as long as it sells art market, in full ebullition, our own tulip mania, our own 19th century vulgar academic salon re-birthed in the frothy waves of dollars and euros, blown by the breath of Mammon.
Mr Hughes in the late 1960's
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