The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings

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 to 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 flim-flam that permeates the stock market.
[caption id="attachment_67486" align="alignright" width="213"] Robert Hughes[/caption]
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.