From Publishers Weekly
Euphemism, evasion and propaganda are woven into the fabric of American public discourse, declares Time art critic Hughes. In a withering, salubrious jeremiad, he lashes our "culture of complaint" in which seemingly everyone claims victim status and a "cult of the abused Inner Child" flourishes. Hughes rebukes anti-abortionists, unmasks Reaganism as a sham, and scores as regressive the politics of Patrick Buchanan and Pat Robertson. He also ridicules "political correctness," pokes fun at nonsexist language and attacks the academic left for its infatuation with jargon and marginal issues and its clinging to Marxist tenets. Multiculturalism, Hughes charges, has turned into a worthless symbolic program that tends toward cultural separatism and reverse racism. He blasts Afrocentrists for their "propagandistic" rewriting of history. Turning to the arts, Hughes argues that the controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe's work indicates the bankruptcy of the view that art should be morally and spiritually uplifting.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Hughes, Time magazine's art critic and author of The Fatal Shore ( LJ 11/1/86) and Barcelona ( LJ 1/92), here takes on three subjects: the current state of American culture and politics; the arguments for and against multiculturalism in schools and colleges; and what he regards as the declining standards of American art and museums. On the first topic, he attacks Americans for having become a culture of complainers, symbolized by their growing claims to be victims of this or that injustice and their demands for the expansion of rights without concern for duties and obligations. On the second issue, he argues for a sound multiculturalism but rejects Afrocentrism and political correctness that rules out dead, white European males such as Plato and Dante. On the third subject, he sees the decline of American art symbolized by the Mapplethorpe controversy, which elevated a minor photographer into the limelight, and politicaly correct art that believes expressiveness, not quality, is enough. Of primary interest to academic and larger public libraries.
- Jeffrey R. Herold, Bucyrus P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
It's hard not to be stirred up and entertained by the three jeremiad-essays Hughes (Barcelona, 1992, etc.) offers here. He goes scatter-shooting at cows with very broad sides: the American talent for ``the twin fetishes of victimhood and redemption''; the PC academy (`` `The Canon,' that oppressive Big Bertha whose muzzle is trained...at the black, the gay, and the female. The Canon, we're told, is a list of books by dead Europeans--Shakespeare and Dante and Tolstoy...you know them, the pale patriarchal penis people''); postmodern architects (``the pediment-quoting Ralph Laurens of their profession''); Jean-Michel Basquiat (``the black Chatterton of the 80's''). Hughes deplores the ``multi-culti'' scam of a cultural establishment unwilling to stand up to the Jesse Helms-types and thus retreating into an homogenization that doles out quality to all so that none will rise too high to be chopped down. But real European- or Australian-style multiculturalism, he argues, is of great benefit--a haunting of one culture by another, an enrichening. So far so good (if glitzy: for Time's art-critic, there's no idea whose subtlety can't be sacrificed for a clever line). But the swaggering postures Hughes assumes all over the room are convincing only in the brightest-lit corners. He does a little historical background for his best point--that art for Americans has always been a therapeutic activity--but elsewhere hardly a background is shaded in. The problematics behind our melding of cultures, behind a moral issue such as abortion, or underlying formalism and shock-aesthetics--these Hughes avoids drilling into deeply. Mostly, it seems, he's writing to the small, disenchanted section of the same go-go cultural guild he bewails; in such tight company, he has to do little more than press journalistic hot buttons cleverly. Not since John Gardner's On Moral Fiction (1978) have we had such a pellet-gun shower of right-wing leftism, back-to-basics positivism--and like Gardner's, it settles down more as vanitas than veritas. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Perhaps the most sensible book that has been written on the vexed subjects of multiculturalism and 'political correctness.'....Culture of Complaint is a wonderful handheld-camera tour of the Dumb Zones of American life, and as such provides more than enough intelligent pleasure."--Artforum"Focusing on the contemporary art world, university censorship controversies, the politics of grants, pop culture, and the mostly contrived and contradictory uproar about the Western canon, Hughes--in language free of theory and academic duckspeak--not only criticises and condemns, but offers solutions as well....In his independence of mind he reminds one of other writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Stanley Crouch, Christopher Lasch and Henry Louis Gates, Jr."--The Portland Alliance"Hughes has the ability to antagonize everyone while bringing fresh angles of vision to the discussion."--Christian Century"Hughes has proven himself a remarkably thorough historian and cosmopolitan social analyst....Hughes here offers a prickly, sarcastic precis of the country where he's happily resided for the last 22 years."--The Philadelphia Inquirer"Hughes brings to the currently white-hot topic of U.S. cultural values an outsider's appprehension of what is distinctly American and a domestic reporter's knowledge of U.S. cultural particulars....Never deserted by his rapier wit, Hughes delivers the most enjoyable, most sensible contribution to date of the American cultural debate."--Booklist"It's hard not to be stirred up and entertained by the three jeremiad-essays Hughs offers here."--Kirkus Reviews"Thoughtful, passionate, witty, closely argued attack on American extremism and its consequences....A provocative and compelling piece of social commentary."--Newport News Daily Press"An inescapably quotable bible of intellectual common sense."--David Denby in The New Republic"Robert Hughes is mad as hell. And as anyone remotely familiar with his art reviews in Time magazine knows, when Hughes gets angry he is at his best....He is characteristically eloquent in Culture of Complaint."--The San Diego Union"Hughes deftly illustrates the inadequacy of our current responses to perceived social and political problems."--The Los Angeles Times Book Review"Have you ever gotten so enthusiastic about a book that you wanted to go around reading parts of it to people? That's the way I feel about Robert Hughes's Culture of Complaint."--The Milwaukee Journal"Hughes is generally on target and always an effective polemicist."--The Star Ledger"A lacerating study of the decline in American values that will surely raise amens among many people, as well as hackles among others."--Time magazine"[A] brilliant book of essays....Mr. Hughes exposes both poltical correctness on the left and what he calls patriotic correctness on the right."-- The New York Times"Concise and stimulating."--The Cleveland Plain Dealer"Deplores the poltically correct and intellectually dishonest who have fragmented our educational system and social compact."--New York magazine"A brilliantly mocking cultural criticism."--The New York Review of Books"I've always admired Robert Hughes' high-testosterone prose style, his independence of mind, and the eagerness with which he stomps on the toes of those with whom he disagrees."--USA Today"A curmudgeonly rebuke to the current politics of victimhood. Hughes is a wonderful prose stylist, and once you get past his irritability he has complex and provocative things to say about American history and culture."--Mirabella"Thoughtful and diverting, progressive and classically conservative....Mr. Hughes can display with precision and clarity what a multicultural intellectual work ought to sound like, and he can put the great canon debate on campuses in its place."--The New York Times Book Review"His tone is sober and concerned, as his arguments are measured and concrete. Many of his most provocative remarks are plainly put but gain in force as you reflect on them."--The San Francisco Chronicle"Hughes's clearsightedness, fair-mindedness and plain spokenness make the grimmest (and most familiar) diagnoses exhilerating."--Newsweek"Hughes' small book is a lesson in balanced commentary. Neither right nor left, liberals nor conservatives come away untarnished by Hughes' scouring observations, the sting of his analysis, which is to say his views have the fresh tone of being biased by experience and intelligence, not by poltics, careerism and the will to power."--The Boston Globe"Robert Hughest still stands out as the most astute and most readable critic of American culture today."--Greensboro news and Record"For those bored or worn out by the incessant conflicts in visual arts and literature about political correctness and multiculturalism, as well as for the blissfully unaware, this is a wickedly funny series of essays. Hughes's blistering critique of academia, the sanctimonious right, left, and center, is one of those rare books that emerge at the right moment to satirize, describe, and clarify. It may not sound like your normal page-turner but it is!"--Fodder: News from the Mind"Mr. Hughes turns a cruel eye on the political-cultural debates of the 1980s, the pressure to recognize cultural diversity and the politicization of the contemporary art scene."--New York Times Book Review"[A] brilliant book of essays....Mr. Hughes exposes both pol tical coriectness on the left and what he calls patriotic correctness on the right."-- The New York Times"Deplores the politically correct and intellectually dishonest who have fragmented our educational system and social compact."--New York magazine"It's hard not to be stirred up and entertained by the three jeremiad-essays Hughes offers here."--Kirkus Reviews"[A] brilliant book of essays....Mr. Hughes exposes both political correctness on the left and what he calls patriotic correctness on the right."-- The New York Times"Robert Hughest still stands out as the most astute and most readable critic of American culture today."--Greensboro News and Record
From the Back Cover
The best-selling author of The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore, and Barcelona here delivers a withering polemic aimed at the heart of recent American politics and culture. Culture of Complaint is a call for the reknitting of a fragmented and over-tribalized America - a deeply passionate book, filled with barbed wit and devastating takes on public life, both left and right of center. To the right, Hughes fires broadsides at the populist demagogy of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms and especially Ronald Reagan ("with somnambulistic efficiency, Reagan educated America down to his level. He left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980, and a lot more tolerant of lies"). To the left, he skewers political correctness ("political etiquette, not politics itself"), Afrocentrism, and academic obsessions with theory ("The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in Dickens' portrayal of Little Nell"). PC censoriousness and "family-values" rhetoric, he argues, are only two sides of the same character, extrusions of America's puritan heritage into the present - and, at root, signs of America's difficulty in seeing past the end of the Us-versus-Them mentality implanted by four decades of the Cold War. In the long retreat from public responsibility beaten by America in the 80s, Hughes sees "a hollowness at the cultural core" - a nation "obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; skeptical of authority and prey to superstition; its language corroded by fake pity and euphemism". It resembles "lateRome...in the corruption and verbosity of its senators, in its reliance on sacred geese (those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin-doctors) and in its submission to senile, deified emperors controlled by astrologers and extravagant wives". Culture of Complaint is fired by a deep concern for the way Hughes sees his adopted country heading. But it is not a relentless diatribe. If Hughes lambastes some aspects of American politics, he applauds Vaclav Havel's vision of politics "not as the art of the useful, but politics as practical morality, as service to the truth". And if he denounces PC, he offers a brilliant and heartfelt defense of non-ideological multiculturalism as an antidote to Americans' difficulty in imagining the rest of the world - and other Americans. Here, then, is an extraordinary cri de coeur, an outspoken call for the reconstruction of America's ideas about its recent self. It is a book that everyone interested in American culture will want to read.
About the Author
Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1938, Robert Hughes has been the art critic of Time since he moved from Europe to the United States in 1970. His books--The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore, Nothing if Not Critical, Barcelona--have won many awards in Australia, America, and Europe, most recently (1992) the international El Brusi prize for literature and communications given by the Olimpiada Cultural in Barcelona.
