The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes

by Robert Hughes, Adam Gopnik (Introduction)

Overview

“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 . . . 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.”

Robert Hughes wrote with brutal honesty about art, architecture, culture, religion, and himself. He translated his passions—of which there were many, both positive and negative—brilliantly, convincingly, and with vitality and immediacy, always holding himself to the same rigorous standards of skill, authenticity, and significance that he did his subjects. There never was, and never will be again, a voice like this. In this volume, that voice rings clear through a gathering of some of his most unforgettable writings, culled from nine of his most widely read and important books. This selection shows his enormous range and gives us a uniquely cohesive view of both the critic and the man.

Most revealing, and most thrilling for Hughes’s legions of fans, are the never-before-published pages from his unfinished second volume of memoirs. These last writings show Robert Hughes at the height of his powers and can be read only with pleasure and a tinge of sadness that his extraordinary voice is no longer here to educate us as well as to clarify and define our world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101875919
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/17/2015
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	688
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

ROBERT HUGHES was born in Australia in 1938. In 1970, he moved to the United States to become chief art critic for Time, a position he held until 2001. His books include The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore, Nothing if Not Critical, The Culture of Complaint, Barcelona, American Visions, A Jerk on One End, Goya, Things I Didn’t Know, and Rome.  He is a New York Public Library Literary Lion and was the recipient of a number of literary awards and prizes, including two Frank Jewell-Mather Awards. He is widely held as the most respected art critic of our time.

Table of Contents

The Shock of the New 
  The Mechanical Paradise 
  The Faces of Power 

The Fatal Shore
  The Harbor and the Exiles 
  A Horse Foaled by an Acorn 
  The Geographical Unconscious

Nothing if Not Critical
  The Decline of the City of Mahagonny 
  John Singer Sargent 
  James Whistler 
  Thomas Eakins 
  Jackson Pollock 
  Mark Rothko in Babylon 
  Andy Warhol 
  Julian Schnabel 
  Art and Money

Barcelona
  The Color of a Dog Running Away 
  “If Not, Not” 
  Going to the Fair 
  The Hermit in the Cave of Making 

American Visions
  The 1913 Armory Show 
  Frank Lloyd Wright 
  Edward Hopper
 
A Jerk on One End 

Goya
  Driving into Goya 
  The Caprichos 
  War with Napoleon 

Things I Didn’t Know
  A Bloody Expat 
  A Sydney Childhood 
  Among the Cadets of Christ 
  Uni and After 
  Wading in Florence
 
Rome
  Prologue 
  Renaissance 
  Epilogue 

From the Unfinished Memoir
  Coming to Time 
  SoHo 
  Graft—Things You Didn’t Know 
  My Friend Robert Rauschenberg 
  20/20 
  The Shock of the New 
  High Trash 
  Tuna Surprise 
  Long Island 
  Helga 
  Danton—I Hardly Knew You

Editorial Reviews

Robert Hughes, who died in 2012 at the age of seventy-four, was perhaps best known as Time magazine's art critic for over three decades, as co-producer of the BBC series (and subsequent book), The Shock of the New, and for The Fatal Shore, his history of Australia's settlement as a penal colony. He was also the author of a dozen other books, among them a personal memoir, as well as works on Barcelona, Rome, fishing, various artists, and the cultural malaise of late-twentieth-century America. He was a champion of the past, a plain speaker who wrote elegantly and epigrammatically, a master of vituperation, and a fount of effervescent vitriol. All of this is on display in The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes, a beautifully produced 667-page monster that includes 155 pages of an unfinished and, until now, unpublished memoir.

Foremost among the people upon whom Hughes bestows his gaudy brand of invective are two gargantuan publicity seekers, Andy Warhol and Julian Schabel. Each receives his own coruscating essay taken from an earlier compilation, The Spectacle of Skill (1990), itself a selection drawn, apparently, from Hughes's columns for Time. The pieces do not include the dates of their original appearance — a fact both annoying and strange given their author's regard for history. The essay on Warhol was published, it would seem, in 1981, and is decidedly dated. ("To most people who have heard of him, he is a name handed down from a distant museum culture . . . ") Still, the writing remains fresh and penetrating on the cultural moment that early Warhol represented, on his posture of affectlessness as well as his relentless pursuit of celebrity, "climbing from face to face in a silent delirium of snobbery."

The same piece also develops into a briskly scathing consideration of the increasing scramble for big money that led New York artists, among them Warhol, to court, first, the shah of Iran ("Not since the death of Tamerlane had there been so much kissing of Persian arse") and, subsequently, the Reagans, paying obeisance to Ronald as "Caesar Augustus Americanus and Nancy a blend of Evita and the Virgin Mary, though in red." Warhol gets a further going-over in a section of the unfinished memoir, where Hughes portrays him as wandering "like a Polish whore pretending to be Mary Magdalene," through his crowd of "gibbering rubber-lipped starlets, and coarse masochists."

Julian Schnabel doesn't get off so lightly. If brown-nosing, publicity seeking, and general bad faith are Warhol's chief sins, Schnabel represents for Hughes nothing less than all that went wrong in art from the 1970s on. That may be summed up as his never having learned to draw ("The cack-handedness is not feigned, but real"), a failing trivial only on first glance. "With scarcely an exception," Hughes writes,

every significant artist of the last hundred years, from Seurat to Matisse, from Picasso to Modrian, from Beckman to de Kooning, drilled (or drilled himself) in 'academic' drawing — the long tussle with the unforgiving and real motif which, in the end, proved to be the only basis on which the great formal achievements of modernism could be raised. Only in this way was the right to radical distortion within a continuing tradition earned, and its results raised above the level of improvisory play.

Hughes's impatience with this turning away from tradition — a cavalier rejection as opposed to critical engagement — comes up again and again. Hughes saw art (as opposed to "improvisory play") as deriving its impulse from the present, its implications from the past, and its excellence from craft as much as from genius. This is pretty much his main theme — that, and the corruption of the art world by money and the increasing tendency to treat works of art as financial instruments. "The flight of speculative capital to the art market," he wrote in what seems to have been 1978, "has done more to alter and distort the way we experience painting and sculpture in the last twenty years than any style, movement, or polemic." It has conflated greatness with monetary outlay, leading to the same sort of flimflam that permeates the stock market.

The unfinished memoir includes a section called "Graft: Things You Didn't Know," a potent, fact-filled jeremiad on the ethics of dealers, critics, and curators. The art world has, he says, "always been a sinkhole of corruption and conflict of interest." The critic is meant to be the "truffle hound . . . as well as the validator," both sniffing out and endorsing great talent. At the same time, the critic is "judged in terms of his or her discoveries." Unsurprisingly, there is a good deal of the confidence game in this circularity — and a large opening for corruption. Clement Greenberg, according to Hughes (who bears a special animus toward this once revered critic), expected "gifts" from the artists whose works he praised and "hardly bothered with disguises. He didn't believe in buying art, but he liked receiving it. He thought he had a perfect right to be compensated by artists for his recommendations of their work and by art dealers who sold it with the help of his opinion." This form of extortion is practiced, in varying degrees, by most critics and curators, according to Hughes, who is not shy about naming culprits.

There is much more than eloquent denunciation in the this volume, including brilliant essays on artists he admires, on Goya and Edward Hopper, and on the architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet. Also present are sections on Australia, Barcelona, Rome, and Florence; on fishing and eating; on the death by suicide of his son; and on his own childhood and schooling by Jesuits — one of whom, spotting a cow out the window eating his roses, rushed from the classroom and shot it dead. (Jesuits, as we know, do not mess around.) Episodes like this, as well as Hughes's puncturing intelligence, his knowledge of art and insights into cultural climate, and his spurning of euphemism make this volume a bracing tonic.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers

The pleasures of reading Robert Hughes are threefold: First, he has a great gift for storytelling…Second, Hughes's buoyant, stinging sentences serve as an edifying contrast to the flaccid and dull or grotesquely overwritten prose that comes my way daily…And third, he was a master of a form that is in decline: satire. What the satirist requires (and what Hughes had) is moral urgency, a faith that he truly knows what is good and what is bad and that the fools and nitwits and dunderheads skewered in his paragraphs are getting their just deserts. Indeed, he is at his howling best when he is coolly splenetic…Robert Hughes was not a philosopher, psychologist or poet. He was an art writer and popular historian. His work sings when his eye is not on his own soul but on the world beyond him, both in the past and in the present. He was a shrewd, incisive, if occasionally rash, commentator, not only on the spectacle of skill but on that mad, motley, yet also wondrous circus we call "culture."

The New York Times Book Review - Siri Hustvedt

…an eye-opener. It contains some of the most nakedly emotional prose this stinging and insolent writer ever committed to paper…

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

★ 08/17/2015
The staggering erudition of Time art critic Hughes (1938–2012) is on full and glorious display in this impressive collection. Excerpts from his two best-loved books—The Fatal Shore, about his native Australia’s history, and The Shock of the New, about modern art—are included, along with portions of his books on Goya, Rome, and Barcelona; essays on American modernists; and autobiographical material that includes previously unpublished essays. A sublime pleasure awaits readers: Hughes’s use of language and description is lush and pointed, his wit incisive and ever-present, his particularity of detail enthralling. Those who relished The Fatal Shore (the excerpts from which will make readers hunger for the complete book) will find much to admire in his assessments of the art world, and those who knew only his art criticism will be beguiled by his autobiographical tales, which cover such varied topics as his catastrophic, near-fatal car accident in 1999 and his love of fishing. Whether he’s taking down critic Clement Greenberg, expounding on the art market, describing the joys of Rome on a fine spring morning, or revisiting his childhood in Sydney, Hughes’s voice remains distinctive, opinionated, and engrossing. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik provides an insightful and eloquent introduction. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

An eye-opener. [The Spectacle of Skill] contains some of the most nakedly emotional prose [Hughes] ever committed to paper.” —The New York Times

“Hughes wrote many kinds of things in a career that spanned four decades . . . but his primary goal was always the same: to entertain, especially while he was educating. The Spectacle of Skill will serve as a generous reminder to all those familiar with Hughes’s prose of just how dazzlingly he succeeded at that goal, and it will introduce newcomers to one of the great critical voices of the late 20th century.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“[The Spectacle of Skill] echo[es] with an erudite authority that would seem impossible to obtain in our day, and a bombast that would be unbearably rude. The combination, conveyed in a clear and entertaining prose, will feel nostalgic even to those who come to know [Hughes] only by this book.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Art writing is rarely readable and hardly ever done well. Few did it better than Robert Hughes.” —Chicago Tribune

“For anyone who wishes emphatically to know what is what in the here and now.” —The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

2015-06-30
Trenchant reflections on life and art from an award-winning critic and historian. Hughes (1938-2012) is represented in this collection by chapters from 8 of his 13 books, along with 125 pages from his second, unfinished memoir. Outspoken and fiercely opinionated, the author had capacious interests and uncompromising standards. "What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890?" he asked in The Shock of the New (1980). "Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art" could offer insights into a "radically changing culture." In Nothing If Not Critical (1990), a collection of his reviews for Time magazine, for which he served as chief art critic for more than 30 years, Hughes praises John Singer Sargent ("there is virtue in virtuosity"); acknowledges Whistler's many faults (he was "an egomaniac, a fop, and a publicity-crazed liar") but finds his work impressive; extols Pollock's brilliance; and offers a long piece on the "voracious" publicity-seeker Warhol, who, he believed, pandered to "the age of supply-side aesthetics." Chapters from Barcelona (1992) and Rome (2011) show Hughes engaging an expansive physical and cultural landscape. In his first memoir, Things I Didn't Know (2006), he gives a harrowing account of a car accident that he barely survived. For more than five weeks, he was in a "semiconscious delirium," experiencing "narrative phantasms of extreme clarity and unshakeable, Dalíesque vividness." Hughes recalls his childhood in Sydney, Australia, where he reveled in the family library without the distraction of "that jabbering moronic babysitter," the TV. The author's unfinished chapters include an homage to his friend Robert Rauschenberg, recollections of living on Shelter Island, a satirical report of his tryout for the ABC news show 20/20, and a moving essay on the suicide of his son and his failures as a father. The collection serves as a fine introduction to—and commemoration of—an incisive cultural critic.

Kirkus Reviews