Remembering Robert Hughes

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Somerset Maugham said that before embarking on a new book he read Voltaire’s Candide as a way of cleansing his style. Other writers have used Hemingway or Tom Wolfe in the same way. I have often reached for Robert Hughes or Clive James when feeling jaded or pedestrian, not because I wanted to try and emulate their styles but because I wanted to inhale something of their approach to writing: serious without being pompous; a talent for muscular prose with an inbuilt-capacity to shock or surprise; unwillingness to take the great and the good at their inflated estimations of themselves; and a wonderful capacity for caricature. Who will ever forget Clive’s description of Arnold Schwarzenegger as “a condom filled with walnuts”? Or Hughes’s dismissal of Jeff Koons? (“He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him.”)

So I mourn the passing of Robert Hughes, who even when he was wrong, was wrong in entertaining and thought-provoking ways. Looking for a round-up of obituaries and tributes, I went straight to the wonderful Arts & Letters Daily, which is normally terrific at doing that kind of round-up (See, for example, what they did for Gore Vidal recently). But, strangely, they seem to have missed out on Hughes.

So here is my tentative substitute.

  • “Hughes didn’t merely write muscular prose, he was the Arnold Schwarzenegger of art criticism.” Blake Gopnik in The Daily Beast.
  • “His prose was lithe, muscular and fast as a bunch of fives. He was incapable of writing the jargon of the art world, and consequently was treated by its mandarins with fear and loathing. Much he cared.” Michael McNay, the Guardian.
  • “His style was forthright, humorous and often irreverent. At a time when much of modern art was riddled with posturing and hyperbole, Hughes fixed his gaze unwaveringly on the work of art itself, regardless of its political or social agenda. His judgments could be merciless. Of Jeff Koons, for example, he said: ‘Koons is the baby to Andy Warhol’s Rosemary. He has done for narcissism what Michael Milken did for the junk bond.’ The duo Gilbert and George were among the ‘image-scavengers and recyclers who infest the wretchedly stylish woods of an already decayed, pulped-out postmodernism’.” Daily Telegraph.
  • “Robert Hughes: Forthright critic who transformed the public perception of modern art.” Marcus Williamson, The Independent.
  • “I prefer to remember him, however, … as the kind of god of criticism that he was to a generation of young writers like myself. He could turn a phrase on a dime, he could paint and write poetry, he could speak Latin, Spanish, and Italian — he was a polymath in an age of imbeciles. He was, in short an intellectual warrior, fierce in his views, frequently combative, but ever passionate about the necessity of art.” Benjamin Genocchio, ArtInfo.com.
  • “The eloquent, combative art critic and historian who lived with operatic flair and wrote with a sense of authority that owed more to Zola or Ruskin than to his own century”. New York Times.
  • LA Times.

    • My favourite, though, is Nick Cohen’s terrific tribute in the Spectator

    Sensation! Experts find that increased prices reduce demand!

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    From today’s Guardian:

    The increase in tuition fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year has led to a “clear drop” in the number of English students applying for university places this autumn, an independent analysis of the impact of the coalition’s controversial reform has found.

    There are 15,000 “missing” applicants who might have been expected to have sought a place on a degree course this academic year but did not, according to the Independent Commission on Fees.

    Well, you don’t say.

    A renaissance of reading?

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    Hmmm… I’m not entirely surprised by this Guardian report. I’ve noticed that teenagers of my acquaintance who have Kindles are definitely reading more. An interesting way-point on the journey to a new ecosystem.

    Underlining the speed of change in the publishing industry, Amazon said that two years after introducing the Kindle, customers are now buying more ebooks than all hardcovers and paperbacks combined. According to unaudited figures released by the company on Monday, since the start of 2012, for every 100 hardback and paperback book sold on its site, customers downloaded 114 ebooks. Amazon said the figures included sales of printed books which did not have Kindle editions, but excluded free ebooks.

    In a surprise move in May, the company went into partnership with the UK’s largest bricks-and-mortar books retailer, Waterstones.

    Much to the consternation of the publishing industry, Amazon has refused to release audited figures for its digital book sales, something it does for printed books. It told the Guardian that the company would not discuss future policy on the matter.

    The company said its figures also showed that British Kindle users were buying four times as many books as they were prior to owning a Kindle, a trend it described as a renaissance of reading.

    “As soon as we started selling Kindles it became our bestselling product on Amazon.co.uk so there was a very quick adoption … [And they] are buying four times more books prior to owning a Kindle,” an Amazon spokeswoman said. “Generally there seems to be … a love of a reading and a renaissance as a result of Kindle being launched.”

    So much for “the end of the book” complaint.