hughes you can use
GELERNTER, DAVID
Hughes You Can Use An Art Critic's American Visions By David Gelernter Robert Hughes of Time magazine, most celebrated art critic of the age, has made an irritating, interesting TV series called...
...But he doesn't mention that the painting is sad, dry, and wistful—and how surprising that is, given that there is nothing in it but a row of buildings...
...art as a vast pompous zero, a region where a devastating explosion seems to have taken place, destroying everything...
...The final artwork is a project by James Turrell—a huge volcanic crater on a ranch in the desert...
...The culture hero [his voice smoothly mounting] was the engineer, the builder of bridges, the creator of machines extolled by [easing us back down] the poet Walt Whitman...
...Evidently this is one high-class wine-and-cheese party of a TV series, the host hard-eyed but amusing, his feelings for art never gushy or embarrassing, in fact nearly always restrained and chaste...
...The Shaker-design segment centers less on Shaker objects than on Hughes's swapping vacancies in a furniture gallery with an actual Shaker...
...They disliked credulous people...
...It happens repeatedly: He sets everything up just right and then, instead of making a pass at the girl, murmurs something about the parking meter and rushes off...
...In eight hours of TV, he doesn't make time for a single Homer watercolor...
...It's as simple as can be...
...An automobile in a cartoonish Grant Wood painting has "Walt Disney wheels...
...His words have tremendous force, because he has just shown us a picture of the sheer emptiness that is passed off nowadays as art...
...He tells us these things in well-made sentences that rise and fall gracefully...
...The mansion-builders of the gilded age dreamed of halls "sheathed in rose alabaster the color of rare steak...
...you would guess that he is carrying a concealed weapon, except that he is in shirt-sleeves and has no obvious place to put it...
...art is largely no good...
...He makes the rather abstract claim that a sense of time is conveyed although no story is implied...
...He doesn't mention that the narrow windows and doorways are blank and black—that you can't see in, which makes for a vaguely ominous effect...
...The images are sometimes confusing or out of kilter...
...Actual Shaker: "No...
...Why are all those flags around the Washington Monument at half mast...
...One of his best segments is about Hoover Dam...
...His flat Austr-eye-lian accent perfectly complements these sharp, firm, Roquefort sentences...
...Georgia O'Keefe's bleached skulls "verge on kitsch surrealism," and her fame "has more to do with legend and gender politics than with her actual achievement as an artist...
...He plans more construction, but his crater for now is a vast empty bowl...
...Nice try, but the Philadelphia river Eakins painted is not pronounced "Shool-kill...
...Turrell has smoothed out the rim by causing 200,000 cubic yards of earth to be bulldozed out of the way...
...They whistled at girls, except if they were girls...
...In the meantime, the impious voice of Robert "Big Scowl" Hughes is music from the past...
...He remarks on the painting's stillness, silence, and air of expectancy...
...He projects, respecting the art he loves, the deep and clear-eyed regard of a potato farmer for a superior spud...
...Yes, he finds Shaker objects beautiful, but he doesn't want to talk about it...
...Hughes standing foursquare atop a monumental, austere, and currently unfashionable American object is Hughes at his best...
...Hughes tells us that modern American culContributing editor David Gelernter, our art critic, last wrote for The Weekly Standard about free speech and the Internet...
...Things were tough all over—and yet, inconveniently, the Neanderthal American culture of 50 years ago was brilliant and ours is a hole in the ground...
...But the most important thing about Hughes is that he is a throwback...
...He has shown us today's U.S...
...But as we depart Turrell's masterpiece and Hughes launches his closing speech, we have those vast-empty-crater images echoing in mind...
...Hughes: "There's no way of improving on the design...
...he brings to art criticism a sensitive, James Dean-ish sullenness it never even knew it was missing...
...Dirty cream" is an unsatisfying description for these color-fields that are more steel-yellow than dirty-warm and are lit by vivid little explosions of yellow and red and blue and lilac...
...They were un-nurturing...
...Hughes tells us that American culture is in deep trouble, that today's U.S...
...Hughes You Can Use An Art Critic's American Visions By David Gelernter Robert Hughes of Time magazine, most celebrated art critic of the age, has made an irritating, interesting TV series called American Visions that is now showing on PBS...
...He refers to the "naive enthusiasm" of industrial designers of the 1930s and shows us (without bothering to identify them) two locomotives designed by Raymond Loewy, who was not naive and whose locomotives are not naive...
...He keeps the audience at a distance, and skeptical reserve is his greatest strength...
...He denounces "narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement...
...Consider Early Sunday Morning, the Edward Hopper masterpiece of 1930: a row of storefronts on New York's Seventh Avenue with apartments above, a barber pole and a hydrant out front...
...as a rule they had no interest in promoting "diversity" or "mul-ticulturalism" or "equality" or anything else, except maybe themselves...
...And the juxtaposition of the art he has just presented and the words he is now speaking redeems the whole project, whatever your doubts and hesitations up to this point...
...In short, American Visions often disappointed me...
...It is here at the close, by the way, that Hughes's non-Americanness tells most, when he convinces us that the crisis is grave but has no ideas about how to fix it...
...They distrusted sincerity and earnestness...
...He shows us a lot of art along the ay, and his taste is good...
...You cannot shrug it all off with the banal observation that "all cultures decay" and that America "may be no exception to that as we move towards the year 2000...
...They laughed outright at stupid art, and (not infrequently) at good art, too...
...Great art critics 32 / The Weekly Standard June 9, 1997 shouldn't have to worry about details like that, but their editors should...
...Hughes tells us that Hopper has lingered over the details but not that the brick facade, which is painted more or less without detail, feels warm and dull and exactly like brick...
...It is no surprise that, in consequence, words sometimes fail him...
...His voice is grudging and suspicious, his hands hang uneasily at his sides...
...He crosses three centuries of American culture with the nervous intensity and all-over scowl of a scavenging coyote...
...that the continuous, gap-free row of buildings seems to wall you out and crowd in on you simultaneously...
...He was a tall, dry man who worked hard...
...The occasional platitude skitters across the lawn like trash someone forgot to pick up...
...In presenting this work, Hughes never says the word "vacuous," and as he tours the crater he chats respectfully with the artist, or volcano architect, or whatever you want to call him...
...The domed library at Jefferson's University of Virginia is "the round cranium of the university, literally its brain...
...Hughes begins his spiel standing next to the painting as it rests on an easel, a fine idea because it allows us to grasp the picture's scale...
...They disdained the sappy and the humorless...
...that the barber pole slouches -B&HUGHES PAUSES TO GIVE "NOSTALGIA" A KICK IN THE RIBS, but he is, most IMPORTANTLy, a throwback...
...He has just polished off the final artwork of the series and is summing up...
...They smoked, they drank, they ate fried eggs for breakfast...
...He explains the symbolism in Homer's Veteran in a New Field but tells us almost nothing about the aesthetic value of the painting...
...You hear the same troubling, lackadaisical note as the series closes...
...Hughes is opposed to the pious, pose-striking elite that manages culture in modern America, and has managed it into the ground...
...The host's mind seems to wander...
...He makes clever and interesting comments...
...Naturally he is good on such restrained, chaste achievements as New England colonial folk-architecture and Amish quilts...
...But the spiel itself conveys little...
...You might not like all the words—I certainly didn't—but it does a person good just to listen and hum along...
...Elsewhere, Hughes informs us that "everyone wants Shaker objects, but very few want to lead the Shaker life...
...It is also his greatest weakness...
...But he doesn't mention how astonishing these facts are, and how nearly paradoxical—America's being wealthier and more powerful than ever before, fitted out with technology that brings art vividly before the public, and with a public that is mad for art in turn, that jam-packs the museums, goes wild in the souvenir shops, stands patiently on the endless lines leading to the big-deal shows, and buys Robert Hughes books by the cartload...
...In eight hours of TV there is no time to discuss de Kooning's achievement as a colorist...
...ture is at sea and adrift...
...as wearily as you picture Hopper himself slouching...
...Even the brilliant conclusion is not as brilliant as it might have been...
...It used to be that art journalists (like reporters in general) approached the world as skeptics and not true believers...
...He tells us that artistic inventiveness "is flagging badly in America now...
...On second thought, what kind of party is this, anyway...
...He pauses at nearly all the right places—at Jefferson's architecture and EEnfant's plan for Washington, at Homer and Eakins and Saint-Gaudens, Hopper and Stuart Davis, de Kooning and Joseph Cornell...
...Face to face with an object of affection, he has a tendency to go Prufrocky...
...In an uncaring society such as theirs, being an artist was no easy task...
...He says things he couldn't really mean...
...The close of the last episode finds Hughes in a desert looking at his TV audience as if it were about to jump him...
...He leads us to the brilliant 1950 de Kooning painting called Excavation and delivers a clinical bedside commentary that reaches a climax on some scratchy black lines that look like floating teeth, and don't matter very much...
...When he says of Edward Hopper that "he is a painter I trust absolutely," you know that Hopper must indeed mean a lot to him, and that he wishes a painter to be as rock-solid as a Hartford insurance company...
...Many artists went around with bruised feelings, and some suffered bouts of dangerously low self-esteem...
...Blame is his medium, but on the other hand he is awkward at praise...
...He lays down acid denunciation as naturally as a thrush warbles...
...perhaps the New York Times could propose corrective legislation...
...They wasted lots of time worrying about good prose and very occasionally got themselves worked up over such topics as patriotism or justice, but that would pass...
...The musical interludes are ominous, histrionic, Orffish...
...How come lower Manhattan, in the black-and-white footage that kicks off the 1930s segment (to the accompaniment of mood-enhancing radio reports of the Crash), is conspicuously dominated by the 1972 World Trade Center...
...Every now and then, Hughes pauses to give "nostalgia" a swift kick in the ribs, as if it were a poodle trailing him home...
...This is terribly unfair...
...Astonishing...
...He says of Amish quilts that no one would ever call them cute, a mighty compliment as Hughes figures it...
...But I recommend it anyway and am glad I watched it...
...Eight hour-long segments cover the history of American art from colonial times to the present...
...He shows us a piece of modern self-infatuated nonsense-art, explains the thinking behind it, and adds, "but, so what...
...Watching him work is like switching on your car radio and finding that you are accidentally tuned to 1946...
...that the gold lettering on the shop-windows turns out to be unreadable, vaguely ominous again...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 38
