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Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists

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This collection of magazine reviews and essays, first published in 1990, serves as a short course in the development of American and European art over the last few centuries. The eye is keen, the mind is thoroughly grounded in art history and tradition, and the writing is lucid and provocative. Hughes wrote the magazine pieces while working as the art critic for Time Magazine. They tend to be triggered by major exhibitions of modern artists or major retrospectives of dead ones. Hughes always starts from the work, and deals with the constricted space of the magazine format by isolating something essential about an artist: DeKooning's draftsmanship; Hopper's despair held in abeyance; Pisarro's decency; Pollock as aesthete instead of wild cowboy; the mismatch between Rothko's intellectual aims and artistic strategies. Sandwiched between whiskey ads and the pimping of NBC's new sitcom, Hughes' magazine reviews demonstrate an admirable ability to dissect major paintings and analyze artists without talking down to Time's mass audience.

The longer essays first appeared in venues such as The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. In these pieces, Hughes lets his critical and rhetorical capabilities off the leash. The opening essay gives us Hughes' take on the 1980s New York art scene, which Hughes saw as a "low, dishonest decade," for several interrelated reasons. First, the art being produced did not serve or surpass the modernist tradition that preceded it; for Hughes, all serious art must grapple with what came before it, and figure out how to move beyond it. ("An artist's every action is judged by an unwearying tribunal of the dead.") Intelligent evaluation of the work produced by emerging artists became supplanted by hype. And it's easier to hype a work - and charge outrageous prices for it - if you unmoor it from any serious critical evaluation of what the work is actually achieving. He's right; it does seem like a very far way from Pollock and deKooning to Basquiat and Koons, and not necessarily progress.

Some of the more memorable longer pieces include his take on Warhol's affectless self-promotion, and his dismantling of Baudrillard's bombastic drivel on the essence of America. There's an informative essay on art and money that shows how escalating art prices remove art from the public because museums can't afford to bid against private collectors for major pieces, and because the insurance costs on major works make comprehensive retrospectives fiendishly difficult to assemble. Denied access to visceral experience of a sculpture or painting, aesthetic consensus is increasingly derived from reproduced rather than actual objects. This makes the art world more vulnerable to brilliant promoters like Warhol or clever packagers like Hirsch. As Hughes puts it, "the art world looks more like the fashion industry than itself. . ."

There's a wonderful essay on Goya that traces the connection between Goya's artistic output and his life experiences. Goya's career was in essence a long grapple with one of our central conundrums: do the failings of humankind derive from bad laws and bad rulers, or is there something fundamentally flawed at the core of human nature? To which Goya, having made his way up through the realms of craft, ambition, political maneuvering, fame, liberal ideals, illness and dashed dreams, would have replied, and did reply, yes. Over two centuries later, we haven't moved past where he was, which is why Goya's work still retains its immediacy and power to move us.

Hughes is an entertaining writer and a discerning critic. Some of his takes on the "contemporary" scene have been dated by events of the past three decades, but his grasp of the past is powerful and sure. His trained eye and sense of history help to ground an art world prone to drift skyward propelled only by its own hot air.

I don't know much about art and I'm not even sure I know what I like. But it's obvious that this book is intelligently - and honestly - written, and I'm writing this review mainly to recommend the book to other people who aren't terribly interested in the visual arts. Hughes has made me think more highly of painting in general and made me re-evaluate much of what I thought about the twentieth century. (Don't worry: he also confirmed much of it.) He isn't at all afraid to announce that the emperor has no clothes - so on those occasions when he confirms that the emperor is, in fact, fully dressed, I am much more inclined to believe him.

Wittily written, too.

Either you love Robert Hughes or you hate Robert Hughes. I consider him the greatest art critic alive and his insights on XX century art are irreplaceable pieces of wit and culture.

This book is a sum of most of the author's articles published in Time Magazine and other medias and covers old masters as well as modern and contemporary artists.The articles on Warhol and Basquiat, as well as the one on the NY art scene, are brilliant. I bought this book when it came out and rereading it recently I saw how utterly modern it still is, considering today's art world.

An exceedingly thorough, yet entertaining, historical account of great painters of the past as well as of contemporary artists.
Hughes is candid and not influenced by traditional art critique; thus in many cases he offers a new way of looking at painters and paintings.

Short essays, most of them published in Time magazine. Hughes'keen and witty look at several artists - from great masters to contemporary ones. We don't have to agree with everything he says, but he's always objective, concise and inteligent.

I've read many of Hughes' books and have followed his television programs closely (especially "The Shock of the New", "The New Shock of the New", "The Curse of the Mona Lisa", and "Visions of Space") and this book of essays ranks near the top.

Hughes' sagacity and eclectic, boundless vocabulary coupled with his singular determination--one might argue "need"--to properly, concisely and _constructively_ argue the value and merit of art is perhaps best encapsulated in these pages.

As a composer, the study of visual art and criticism of it is as much a revelation about the processes and outcomes of drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture as it is about the craft of music. (Hughes wisely and correctly points out that late 20th Century American art became more about the theory of it than of the practice of it--of getting down to the task of being a maker-of-art and not just one who theorizes about it.)

To the uninitiated his tone might sometimes translate as pompous, but with some perseverance one begins to form a big-picture perspective of art and artists that only a collection of independently-composed criticisms like this can evoke.