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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 71
Page 1713
... art world there is far more of it, and thanks to the lack of discrimination on the market-museum axis it is, if anything, somewhat worse. The future cannot be relied on to value what is most fashionable in one's own day, and the ...
... art world there is far more of it, and thanks to the lack of discrimination on the market-museum axis it is, if anything, somewhat worse. The future cannot be relied on to value what is most fashionable in one's own day, and the ...
Page 1715
... world through universal brotherhood . They may have been wrong , but at least they were decently wrong . They did not have the flippant , reamed - out cynicism that passes for " radicality " in the art industry's embrace of Jean ...
... world through universal brotherhood . They may have been wrong , but at least they were decently wrong . They did not have the flippant , reamed - out cynicism that passes for " radicality " in the art industry's embrace of Jean ...
Page 1721
... world of meaning ; it makes reality seem dull , slow and avoidable . It is our " floating world . " It tends to ... Art ) arose about art and media . Nature is dead , culture is all , everything is mediated to the point where nothing can ...
... world of meaning ; it makes reality seem dull , slow and avoidable . It is our " floating world . " It tends to ... Art ) arose about art and media . Nature is dead , culture is all , everything is mediated to the point where nothing can ...
Page 1722
... art " can engage with general perception is to step out of its old " elitist " traditions and follow the Yellow ... world . Its images do not pass . They can be contemplated , returned to , examined in the light of their own history . The ...
... art " can engage with general perception is to step out of its old " elitist " traditions and follow the Yellow ... world . Its images do not pass . They can be contemplated , returned to , examined in the light of their own history . The ...
Page 1727
... world cultural activity has made the very idea of the single , imperial center obsolete . New York , in other words , remains a center but not , as its art world used to imagine , the center . Moreover , its centrality is based mainly ...
... world cultural activity has made the very idea of the single , imperial center obsolete . New York , in other words , remains a center but not , as its art world used to imagine , the center . Moreover , its centrality is based mainly ...
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abstract Abstract Expressionism aesthetic American art American artist Andy Warhol architecture art history art market art world avant-garde Basquiat Baudrillard Bauhaus become Berenson blue canvas Caravaggio career catalogue century Cézanne Chirico collectors color Courbet critics Cubist cultural dealers death Degas drawing early Édouard Manet eighties English exhibition expressionist face fantasy feeling figure flat Frank Auerbach French Gallery Gauguin Gogh Goya Goya's hero Hockney idea imagery imagine Italian Jackson Pollock Jean-Michel Basquiat Kiefer kind Kooning landscape late light living look Manet mass media Matisse matter modern art modernist Motherwell motif Museum Neo-Expressionism never nude obsessed painter painting Paris parody Picasso pictorial picture Pollock portraits Poussin R. B. Kitaj Renaissance retrospective Rome Rothko scene Schnabel sculpture seems seen sense sixties social Steinberg studio style surface Susan Rothenberg things Titian turned visual wanted Warhol watercolors Whistler York Zurbarán