Robert Hughes: The Loss of an Important Voice in the Art World

It is perhaps a bitter irony that the great art critic Robert Hughes (1938-2012) died on August 6^th – Andy Warhol’s birthday.  Warhol was perhaps, to Hughes, emblematic of all of the hucksters, scallywags, con artists and grifters that have taken over the art world since the rise of Modernism (and its unpleasant afterbirth, Post Modernism).  It was Warhol who opened the doors for such frauds and crooks as Damien Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Tracey Eim, draining the ravished corpse of our culture of any remaining vestige of emotion, virtuosity or humanism.

Needless to say, the art establishment loathed Hughes, much as the crooked tailors in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes loathed the little boy who could not help crying, “but he’s naked!”  When slick-suited sharpsters in their squalid Soho PoMo galleries sell to the unsuspecting, unthinking and tasteless collector of today the latest bit of gimcrack tushery created by jaded cynics bent on furthering the greatest fraud in the history of human taste, the last thing they want to hear is an educated man crying … “but, really, it’s not very smart and certainly not very good.” 

Hughes was not against the idea of an art market, nor of artists making a living.  He wrote: On the whole, money does artists much more good than harm. The idea that one benefits from cold water, crusts, and debt collectors is now almost extinct, like belief in the reformatory power of flogging.  He simply saw the contemporary art market as out-of-control and contemporary artists as out-of-touch.

Academics are equally leery of Hughes: he refused to drink the Post Modernist Kool-Aid and was a highly engaging and readable writer equally at home on television.  Ivory Towers find such accessibility and clear-headedness both dangerous and enviable.  As such, Hughes never founded a school of criticism; he merely had legions of grateful readers.

Instead of writing to further the interests of a bloated, corrupt and rapacious art world, Hughes addressed the emotional and philosophical needs of the aesthete and the art-lover and not the crass art investor or star-schtupper.  His book The Shock of the New was also a BBC television series (first aired in 1980), and with it viewers were able to watch art criticism as a gladiatorial sport.  Hughes did not suffer fools or scoundrels gladly, and his withering dismissal of our common crap culture was always more nutritious than a Big Mac. 

To watch Hughes don his gloves and come out swinging, look at this brief clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtMqbbBZ24w.  Equally amusing is this clip, showing a considerably younger Hughes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euPx2QWVl3E&feature=related.

Hughes’ notions on art are now seen as provincial or prehistoric by many of today’s artists and scholars.  They are wrong.  Hughes believed in the notion of genius – someone who created great art of deep meaning after many, many years of study and apprenticeship.  Art, for him, was also a display of craft and mastery, of technical expertise matched with poetic vision.  There was no place in his aesthetic for dead sharks swimming in formaldehyde.

Writers often write their own best epitaphs.  Let’s close with some things Hughes wrote throughout his long career.  Here’s one example that delights my heart from 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.

From his memoir Things I Didn’t Know (2006):

I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn't matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist [shit], no matter how much the demos love it.

Robert Hughes was a first-rate mind engaged in looking at a blasted cultural wasteland unworthy of a child’s scrutiny.  He often was abrasive and condescending, but he was seldom wrong.  He will be missed.

Damien Hirst Hits the Spot

LSD, by Damien Hirst; Insert Your Own Joke Here

One can only imagine that Damien Hirst had a very accommodating mother. Think of them together in little Damien’s nursery so many years ago…

Damien (age three): Look, Mommy, I’ve painted a picture!

Hands her a page littered with multi-colored dots.

Mother Hirst: That’s nice, dear.

Damien: Do you know what it is?

Mother Hirst (turning it this way and that): Ahh … surprise me.

Damien: It’s a painting of Daddy!

Mother Hirst: Someday, lad, you’re going to be a great painter. Or something.

Damien: No, no, Mommy. I’m going to be a rich painter!

Mother Hirst: Come give Mother a kiss and be sure to behave.

Damien Hirst (born 1965) is Britain’s wealthiest living artist, valued at £215m by the Sunday Times. (That’s more than $300 million American, folks.) He stands, with Professor of Drawing Tracey Emin of England’s Royal Academy, as a horrific example of the cynicism and hucksterism that has penetrated the contemporary art scene.

Hirst was born in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. His father, a car mechanic, left the family when Hirst was 12 and he was raised, for the most part, by his mother, Mary Brennan. Though she was a strict disciplinarian (and, if one reads between the lines, boarder-line abusive), Mrs. Hirst encouraged his artistic ambitions. Hirst would later attend the Leeds College of Art.

Hirst hit the jackpot when crackpot Charles Saatchi (of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi) promised to fund whatever work Hirst wanted to make. With this bankroll, Hirst “created” The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which debuted at the misnamed Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Physical Impossibility was a dead shark pickled in a tank of formaldehyde -- it sold for £50,000 and Hirst was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Hirst went back to the slaughterhouse with Away From the Flock, which was a sheep in a tank of formaldehyde. Sadly … Hirst gets the money, but not the joke. In 1993 artist Mark Bridger walked into the gallery where Away From the Flock was on display and poured black ink into the tank, retitling the work Black Sheep. One would think the world owed Bridger a vote of profound thanks (at least we could no longer see the sheep), but Hirst did not enjoy being topped by a wit greater than his, and pressed charges.

Hirst is currently in the news again thanks to The Complete Spot Paintings, 1986-2011, which are featured in Larry Gargosian’s 11 galleries dotted around New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Rome, Athens, Hong Kong, and Beverly Hills. And if you love spots, then these 331 paintings are for you. Teenagers with acne – beware!

Now, the most amazing thing about these paintings – aside from how utterly puerile and ridiculous they are – is that Hirst himself did not paint most of them. He has had a team of assistants spotting canvasses for him for decades – for Hirst, like a deadbeat dad, the creative act often begins and ends with conception. Many of his spot paintings were actually done by Rachel Howard – and Hirst himself has said the only difference between spots painted by himself and spots painted by someone else was merely a question of money...

Fortunately, we here at The Jade Sphinx are not the sole voices of sanity wailing in the wilderness. In a recent New Yorker review Peter Schjeldahl wrote that, “…to like them would entail identifying with the artist’s cynicism, as heards of collectors, worldwide, evidently do. Hirst will go down in history as a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth. That’s not Old Master status, but it’s immortality of a sort.”

Substitute “immorality” for “immortality,” and I could not agree more.

Tracey Emin … Professor of Drawing?

"No Sleep" a 1994 Drawing by Tracey Eim

The good news is that I did not write about many of the horrible wrongs in the art world during the holiday season.  The bad news is that the holiday season is over and I have to explain the persistent rumbling you hear below ground.

Rumbling, you ask?  Yes, what you hear is William Turner and John Constable and dozens of other great masters rolling in their unquiet graves.  And what disturbs their well-earned rest, you ask?  Simply this – England’s Royal Academy has appointed Tracey Emin as Professor of Drawing.

Take a moment to pull your chins from the floor.

Emin is perhaps best known for deluding an alternately arrogant and ignorant art market into believing that her unmade bed was a work of art.  This work, called My Bed, had yellow-stained sheets and the surrounding area was festooned with condoms, empty cigarette packets, menstrual-stained underwear and her slippers.  This Post Modern joke was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999.  One amusing story about My Bed is that the museum cleaning lady tried to tidy it up, and had to be stopped by security… Another work from this period was Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, which was a tent embroidered with (you guessed it) the names of everyone she had ever slept with.

A youthful folly, perhaps?  Perhaps not.  Emin has recently spent her artistic energies (just writing that phrase makes my fingers cramp) “creating” drawings rendered out of stitching, which she often accompanies with various bon mots, such as:  You Cruel Heartless Bitch Rot in Hell and, my favorite, Harder and Better Than All of You F---ing B------s.

The Royal Academy Schools form the oldest art school in Britain, and currently about 60 students study in the Schools on a three-year postgraduate course.  This important link (or former important link) to the studio-based practice in all fine arts was a haven for students who had demonstrated ability, commitment and potential for significant work.  Under “Professor” Emin’s tutelage, who knows what they may accomplish?  An over-used duffel bag, perhaps?  Or maybe scuffed and muddy shoes, filled with sand?  Dentures floating in a glass of cloudy water, anyone?

For those of you think my objections sound like a bachelor uncle shocked over naughty words scrawled in his art history book, think again.  My objection has nothing to do with her lack of talent, or that fact that Emin is less an artist and more a publicity stunt than anything else.  My fundamental objection lies in the fact that we (yes, the collective “we”) are willing and eager to toss aside our important artistic heritage to accommodate frauds, mountebanks and hucksters.  I’m appalled that theory has taken precedence over emotion, that human connection has been sacrificed to “cool” and that we have become as a people so afraid of beauty and its expression.  Have we gone so far in our flight from the beautiful, from the sublime and from the transcendent that now we rob our young artists of achieving these things by putting them under the influence of the scribbling huckster? 

Emin is quoted as saying: “being an artist isn’t just about making nice things, or people patting you on the back; it’s some kind of communication, a message.”  I believe, in her heart of hearts (deep down where one may still reside), Emin’s message to the world is: “sucker!”