Nothing If Not Critical: Essays on Art and ArtistsFrom Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present. As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject. For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughes—astute, vivid and uninhibited—on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists. He observes that Caravaggio was “one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same”; he remarks that Julian Schnabel’s “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting”; he calls John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park “almost the last word on Eden-as-Property”; he notes how “distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.” He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic). Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded. His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art market—its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture. There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate. And as a finale, Hughes gives us “The SoHoiad,” the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s. A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains. |
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Page 1705
... architecture , film , dance or theater is of unknown value until it is judged by people outside your own society . It is the reflex of the kid with low self - esteem hoping that his work will please the implacable father but secretly ...
... architecture , film , dance or theater is of unknown value until it is judged by people outside your own society . It is the reflex of the kid with low self - esteem hoping that his work will please the implacable father but secretly ...
Page 1733
... architectural history . Trends can be condensed at will , and young artists , with careers such as those of Jean - Michel Basquiat or - parody of parodies - Jeff Koons held up before them , are less disposed to accept any ideal of slow ...
... architectural history . Trends can be condensed at will , and young artists , with careers such as those of Jean - Michel Basquiat or - parody of parodies - Jeff Koons held up before them , are less disposed to accept any ideal of slow ...
Page 1735
... architecture , the roots of its meaning . What altered this regional ecology of the arts in Italy , and throughout Europe , was the rebirth of ancient Rome . The bones of the empire rose from the soil and reconstituted themselves as an ...
... architecture , the roots of its meaning . What altered this regional ecology of the arts in Italy , and throughout Europe , was the rebirth of ancient Rome . The bones of the empire rose from the soil and reconstituted themselves as an ...
Page 1736
... architectural projects like Bernini's colonnades. Perhaps the outstanding work of visual art produced in Rome in the eighteenth century was the huge corpus of etchings by Venetian architect Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778), whose ...
... architectural projects like Bernini's colonnades. Perhaps the outstanding work of visual art produced in Rome in the eighteenth century was the huge corpus of etchings by Venetian architect Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778), whose ...
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