The Influences on Our Taste : ROBERT HUGHES : Art and the Alien Social Picture

This is Calendar’s third annual listing of Taste Makers, individuals who have brought a distinct focus to 1987 and who we feel will continue to influence the world of arts and entertainment long after this year passes. They were selected not so much for specific contributions in their respective fields but because they are clearly creative forces who move and shape taste. They were interviewed to find out what kinds of influences have moved and shaped them.

We’ve selected these eight individuals to reflect a broad range of creative work, though each year we try to vary the disciplines. For instance, in 1985 we interviewed architect Arata Isozaki, composer Philip Glass and restaurateur Alice Waters, among others. Last December, the group included choreographer Mark Morris, jazz musician Wynton Marsalis and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown.

What follows, we hope, is a look at the thinking behind some of this year’s brightest creators and commentators . . . 1987’s Taste Makers.

This project was edited by David Fox, assistant Calendar editor.

Art critic and historian. Author of “The Shock of the New,” based on his eight-part BBC/Time-Life series on the history of modernism. Most recently wrote “The Fatal Shore,” the epic history of Australia’s founding. He’s been Time magazine’s controversial art critic since 1970.

It’s unusual for a critic’s reputation to transcend his specialty, but Robert Hughes’ arresting combination of scholarship, spikey independence and a brilliant prose style have edged him into a position where his general observations are taking on greater cultural weight--largely because he is deeply informed while remaining refreshingly free of cant.

As a descendant of a family of lawyers, he is at home with the intellectually combative. A Jesuit Catholic upbringing--though he now considers himself an atheist--gave him an added sense of logic and a feel for the spiritual resonance of the icon. He left the University of Sydney early, before his mind could be polluted with academic jargon, and spent a three-year sabbatical in Italy, touring Tuscany and Umbria on a Lambretta, during that singular and crucial period in one’s life when, as he puts it, “your mind receives impressions like wax and retains them like marble.”

Australian-born Hughes is one of those rare individuals whose prose style is echoed in his everyday speech, which is rapid and precise, and impatient with the slippery intractability of catching the right word on the fly. At 49, he has the burly charm of a military officer at ease both in the field and at the state dinner.

Of the unanticipated, best-selling success of “The Fatal Shore” (which was published in 1986) he reflected, “Perhaps it’s because American historians have gone against narrative writing. The new school of thought has history as something determined by economics, where the Victorians thought of it as being determined by character.

“I wanted to recapture a society whose history is created by people; your average sensual man does like a story. The novelists have given up on on writing how a society actually operates. The Victorians were wonderful at this. You can read Dickens or Trollope and you’re immersed in society ticking away at all levels, from banking to the price of fish. The Americans now have such a ghastly preoccupation with inner workings that they can’t look at the larger social picture.

“I imagine it was the novelists’ failure that led to the boom in New Journalism. What will we get to know of the late-20th Century for as long as we consider the individual as the matrix of society? Mute alien people describing each other. The global village has turned out to be a bloody nightmare. Its tendency towards the homogenization of experience has overrun everything. I feel nostalgia for a world of differences.”

Hughes’ SoHo loft, which he shares with his wife, Victoria, and a large Australian sheep dog, commands a view of the western skyline of lower Manhattan, which on a clear day gradually darkens from pale yellow to mango to lava as the night sky rolls over it. As you’d expect, the loft is generously endowed with objets d’art, which range from a large Lee Krassner on one wall to small sculptural artifacts (such as an Oriental vase) on the window sills. One formal 19th-Century poster of a barrister hangs improbably, like something you’d find in a men’s club or a judicial chamber. “An ancestor of mine,” Hughes says, with a slight grin. As a youth he wrestled with the career options of architecture or the law, eventually choosing neither. “I’m an auto-didact,” he said. “I don’t have degrees.”

An adjacent room houses his floor-to-ceiling library, complete with ladder. The living room is otherwise uncluttered, with what seems slightly oversized, though comfortable, furniture. Like its restless masculine host, it has a large, unsettled aspect. An Australian bushranger’s hat rests on a shelf near the entrance (he hunts and fishes as much as he can during the year).

Hughes is chary of the relationship between art and the mass media. “It’s become evident that art has to defend itself against mass-media fixation. All the media do is replicate the language of signs. Painting slows down the eye. It’s a marvelous rebuker of unfelt experience. It’s semantic; it links the body with the eye. In America, TV--the wet-nurse of the culture--has been a disaster for the visual arts. The idea that painting has to demonstrate its up-to-dateness is willingly repeated by too many artists. The whole purpose of art is to bridge alienation. The rank egotism of a (David) La Salle is slimy, creepy. The market wants stars. (Julian) Schnabel’s work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting.

“I think by and large American art is not in good taste; it reflects the decay of rigid humanistic teaching in the universities. You’ve had two generations of artists grow up without training in the atelier system, the drawing of the human figure. You’ve had the enormous expansion of art schools encouraging the impulse to do your own thing. In the early ‘80s you had a figure-making revival by the worst draftsmen around. That coincided with an enormous expansion of a consuming public which doesn’t have an elementary level of connoisseurship. Degas said: ‘There are some forms of success indistinguishable from panic.’ ”

Of the role of the critic, Hughes said, “You can’t blow bad art out of the skies, but you can punch a small leak. When it comes down to that much-maligned faculty called taste, which can’t be quantified, all you can do is argue the coherence of your reaction and hope for the same for your reader. If criticism survives, it’s as literature. Most of it wraps tomorrow’s fish. Art criticism has changed since the days of Greenberg and Rosenberg. Now you have entrepreneurs beating the cultural bushes. The critic is given the menu. You don’t have that apostolic function anymore. But that does leave you free to explore the questions of taste and write about what you want.”

Hughes remains an enthusiast, not just of Balthus, De Kooning and Motherwell, but of R. B. Kitaj, Francis Bacon (“the Grand Old Man, of course”), Lucian Freud (“incontestably the best realist painter at work anywhere in the world today”), Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews (“These artists have restored to figurative painting an intelligence, a pictorial intensity, and a degree of stubborn probity rare in art elsewhere, and is almost extinct in America.”). He also admires Howard Hodgkin.

Abroad, Hughes considers Germany’s Anselm Kiefer “a potentially great painter,” and admires Spain’s Antonio Lopez Garcia. He’s high on three Australians: Arthur Boyd, Colin Lancely, and landscapist Fred Williams, who “died at the age of 52 a few years ago, but I am convinced he will eventually be seen (by those who have eyes) as an artist of world stature.”

“In America? Frank Stella, obviously. Susan Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Eric Fischl (with reservations), Robert Moskowitz. Sculptors: Joel Shapiro, William Turnbull, Martin Puryear, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra, James Surls.”

He had written these names on a list and concluded, “this list . . . must not be taken as exclusive, which is why I hate making lists and have always avoided doing so: treat it as a temporary record of shifting likes and dislikes rather than as a tip-sheet for the Parnassus sweepstakes.”