ART : COMMENTARY : The Bard of Art’s Decline : Robert Hughes has made a career of savaging recent art--but the renowned critic may be stuck in the cultural web he denounces

No art critic has ever had a larger audience in his own day than Robert Hughes has in ours. And not since the late Lord Kenneth Clark, whose television series, “Civilization,” became a national obsession in the early 1970s, has a writer on art claimed a more substantial place in the public eye.

For 20 years, Hughes has occupied the critic’s chair at Time magazine. In 1980, the already vast public visibility inherent in that post expanded exponentially, as the Australian-born critic hosted a widely followed BBC television series, broadcast the following year on PBS, called “The Shock of the New.” The eight-part sequel to Clark’s “Civilization” chronicled the modern era, and was accompanied by a book of the same name that many schools now use as an introductory text (a revised and updated edition has recently been issued).

Three years ago, Hughes’s elaborate history of the colonial settlement of Australia, “The Fatal Shore,” became a surprise bestseller. While not an art book, its success nonetheless added significantly to the critic’s renown, which will likely aid in drawing considerable attention to a new anthology of his criticism, “Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists,” being published this month by Alfred A. Knopf.

Long before the celebrity profile that graces this month’s Vanity Fair, a reliable barometer of Hughes’s unprecedented public popularity made itself known. The occasion was a May, 1987, lecture he delivered at UCLA. Because tickets sold out almost immediately, the venue had been switched from the comfortable Dickson Auditorium--seating capacity 411--to the lavish, multi-tiered Royce Hall. A good crowd for a lecture by an art critic is more commonly one-tenth the astounding 1,400 people who showed up that night.

Television, of course, is the reason they came. Art and broadcasting have rarely been congenial bedfellows. That Hughes was able to use the medium well in “The Shock of the New” is one measure of his skill. Another is the writer’s oft-remarked felicity as a pungent phrase-maker, a skill honed on tight space and fairly strenuous deadlines at Time, and more than appropriate to the sound-bite brevity of TV.

Timing was important too. “The Shock of the New” had aired just as the updraft of the 1980s art scene was gathering into what would become gale-force. Hughes emerged a familiar and articulate spokesman on a topic in which few Americans receive any serious education; thereafter, he was regularly on hand in the pages of Time to guide them through the coming storms.

Hughes’ remarkable popularity of course begs the question of just how good his critical insights are. He’s clearly among the shrewdest and most entertaining writers around, but is his sharp prose a sustaining diet or a fix of tasty junk-food?

Evidence of the answer to this question was also offered that night at Royce Hall. The passage of time has not diminished the memorable impact of the event. Hughes’ performance--and it was a performance, complete with theatrical ruffles and flourishes, as any satisfying lecture must necessarily be--was greeted with audience hoots and hollers and stompings of the feet, all of which grew in fervor and intensity as the preachment pressed on.

To anyone who had read him with any regularity, there was nothing new in what the critic had to say. He railed against ham-fisted Neo-Expressionist painters and the know-nothing collectors whose sizable bank accounts transformed them from fry-cooks into household names.

He lampooned the egregious “Boonies”--artists represented by quintessential ‘80s Soho dealer Mary Boone, she of the 200 pairs of shoes and countless magazine profiles.

He excoriated the art schools of America, where high value is placed on the bleats of self-expression emanating from ill-read 20-year-olds, but none at all is placed on teaching students how to draw. He flayed the show-biz mentality of museums and the crushing dominance of the marketplace.

Hughes had written all these things many times before--and still does, as the newly penned introduction to “Nothing If Not Critical” attests once again. (It carries the Brechtian title, “The Decline of the City of Mahagonny.”) But, coupled with a stylish delivery in his rumbling Aussie voice--sort of dockyard Shakespeare--it was the very familiarity of what he had to say that contributed to the near-Pavlovian responses of the crowd.

At times, the raucous howling that greeted Hughes’ searing verbal taunts approached the rhythmic pace of call-and-response, with the speaker giving witness and the audience roaring, “A-men!” Had Mary Boone, through some cruel twist of cosmic fate, wandered into the auditorium that evening, the crowd would likely have turned in unison and torn her limb from limb.

Meanwhile, few seemed to notice the implications of what Hughes had to say. His lecture, like most all his criticism, turned on a belief in a precipitous decline in Western art since the 1960s. Three densely interrelated topics were diagnosed as causes of the culture’s illness.

The first was the unprecedented arrival of a mass audience for art, which arose from a complex of factors that came together in postwar American social life. In this vastly expanded marketplace, all manner of worthless art could now find at least some acceptance, thus dragging down the general level of cultural taste.

Second, the visual world itself had been irreversibly polluted, thanks to the all-pervasive and consumption-oriented drivel spewed out by the ubiquitous television set. The tube made perceptual idiots of the new audiences for art and, worse, of the new artists themselves.

And third, the simultaneously diminished expectations of both the new mass audience and the mass of new artists meant that, in our time, art had degenerated into nothing but a vainglorious species of mass theater. Unlike any previous epoch in history, the primary purpose of art had now become merely the seamless delivery of entertainment.

Something of grave importance was indeed to be learned from what Hughes was saying, but you had to listen between the lines to find it. For here was a stunning damnation of the debilitating effects of mass culture being delivered by a critic who, for nearly two decades, had plied his trade in the mass-est of mass culture publications (Henry Luce, the founder of Time, practically invented mass media).

Here was a vitriolic assault on television being spoken by the only art critic in history who had ever been a television star, and who owed his audience that night to the fact. And here was a critical lament for the decline of cultural discourse into a species of raucous entertainment being offered by a masterful stand-up comic, who held his boisterous audience in theatrical thrall.

Disingenuous? Or undiscerning?

Maybe a bit of both. As a critic, Hughes frequently assumes the role of gadfly, attempting to rouse his readers from a perceived complacency that allows the art world follies to thrive and even escalate. Ironically, this is his greatest failing. It leads him to write as if he’s standing on a golden perch somewhere outside the tawdry culture he is criticizing--when, like everyone else, he is deeply entangled in its murky web, both contributor to and beneficiary of its glories and its sins, its foibles and its charms. The failure speaks of a certain blindness, and blindness is something of a liability for a critic of the visual arts.

Perhaps this blind spot is an accident of birth. Born in Australia in 1938, Hughes was literally an outsider to the European and American culture that sequentially colonized his native land, and about which he was subsequently to commentate after extended sojourns in France, Italy and England. (The critic was initially trained as a painter, too, but once insisted to an interviewer that his failure in the discipline did not color his critical demeanor.)

Whatever the cause or explanation, the newly published anthology makes one thing clear: Without the ugly national mood of cynicism that came to dominate the 1980s, Hughes would have been bereft of a large and receptive audience for his liveliest topic. (Although he has written about art since 1966, all but eight of the 94 essays chosen for reprint in the anthology date from the 1980s.)

His criticism can be roughly split into two big chunks--views on art before 1960 and art after--and the principal difference between them is that art before 1960 is treated with deferential seriousness, even when the ultimate judgment is negative, while art after 1960 is regarded with glum suspicion, thus infecting any positive judgment with an Old Testament glow of moral triumph over worldly degradation.

This trajectory was first laid out in “The Shock of the New,” which weekly chronicled the downhill slide of modern life. Rather than the standard chronological survey, from 1880 to 1980, Hughes had devised an illuminating structure for his history of modern art. He traced several tenacious artistic themes--the unconscious, the utopian future, earthly paradise, etc.--as they metamorphosed through the century. And in each chapter, art seemed to get worse as our own time approached.

Yet, Hughes principally consulted acclaimed art and artists for his view of history, while art since the 1960s was shown as a full array of the good, the bad and the ugly. History thus seemed populated by giants--some larger than others, it’s true, but all grandly mythologized--while the present had to suffer fools. The hoariest populist-canard of modernism--namely, that modern art is a hoax, with artists out to fool a gullible public--was selectively updated to fit our own time. Offering the inside skinny, only the critic could be trusted as faithful guide through the underbrush.

The unfortunate result, repeated in almost every essay addressing recent art that Hughes chooses to write, is an exaggerated self-importance. The 1980s represent the climactic descent, the big drop at the end of a roller-coaster’s teaser-dips--”Decline in the City of Mahagonny”--and Hughes is its bard. Our problems are “big” now, because so much more is at stake than ever before. As the analyst and judge of those “bigger” problems, Hughes’ stature is commensurately aggrandized.

Save for some notable exceptions--which include, inexplicably, such flimsy talents as the decorative salon artists Jennifer Bartlett and Donald Sultan, the pale realist painters Antonio Lopez Garcia and Avigdor Arikha, and the society Expressionist John Alexander--art, for Hughes, has today largely gone to seed. This discomfort with the present is matched by great reassurance in thinking about the past.

Hughes’ true strength as a critic is paradoxically to be found in his writing about artists long dead and buried--or, interestingly enough, living in Britain. (He’s a great fan of Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, and for some his enthusiasm came in the face of general critical silence in the United States.) Perhaps the pantheon (and Britain) appeals to his sense of hierarchy.

Whatever, he writes with admirable clarity and wit. His range is exceptional, and he’s enormously well-read. In the anthology, his take on Holbein’s drawings goes to the core of their compelling mystery, while the essay on Nicholas Poussin is a model of the short review. And he regularly invokes history as a contemporary guide, as in an insightful commentary on the sudden collapse of the reputation of the early-17th Century’s Guido Reni at the hands of 19th Century critic John Ruskin, designed to make the overnight art-stars of the 1980s feel a chill.

Hughes would love nothing more than to play Ruskin to Julian Schnabel or David Salle today. But, the critic’s glib dismissals of so much contemporary culture tend toward the feeble--ad hominem insults, amusing if typically unargued (the curse of the facile stand-up comic). The classic example is his recurrent plaint that our artists simply cannot measure up, because rare is the painter today who knows how to draw. (Hughes is, incidentally, partial to painters, whose work accounts for 75 of the 94 essays in the anthology. As a result, he’s pleased to go on for endless fulminating pages about how decrepit a painter is Schnabel, while he can barely scrape together a paragraph in passing on Germany’s Joseph Beuys and has nothing at all to say about other crucial artists of the period, such as Bruce Nauman.) Drawing is Hughes’ litmus test.

And an oddly immutable test it is, as if a timeless appeal to masterful draftsmanship could keep any culture, at any time and place, afloat on the seas of artistic glory. Hughes can grossly overpraise a less than minor painter (such as Sultan) simply because he finds his drawings “unequivocally successful.” He can reserve the highest accolades from a major painter (such as Eric Fischl) because of the artist’s wobbly draftsmanship. Yet he can be unreserved in extolling the grandeur of a dead artist (Jackson Pollock), while remaining silent about his notorious inability, in the classical sense meant by Hughes, to draw.

The Fischl case is revealing. Hughes remains lukewarm because Fischl has, in effect, been learning to draw even as his figurative paintings have been receiving broad acclaim. (A student at CalArts in the 1970s, when graphite had been traded in for video cameras, Fischl was never trained in the manual skill.)

The critic is right when he observes that Fischl’s handling of paint “will slide from a passage of assured colloquialism to one of smearing and prodding.” But then he’ll bizarrely separate out this pressing visual fact to conclude that “whatever awkwardness his work harbors, he is up to something worthwhile--at least on the plane of psychic narrative.”

It never occurs to Hughes that Fischl’s telling psychic narrative--a story of monstrousness and innocence in modern suburbia--is in part carried by the wrenching mix of determined sincerity, smooth facility and embarrassed awkwardness in his painting style, rather than in spite of it.

Because the modern invention of the camera and of mechanical and electronic reproduction have obviously played a role in altering the traditional relationship between drawing and art, it is odd that neither photography nor a single photographer is addressed in the anthology. (The closest Hughes comes is a mixed-review of a retrospective of video artist Nam June Paik.) He may have a highly developed working knowledge of the mass mediums of television and magazines, but Hughes’ understanding of the modern “image haze” is surprisingly thin.

A 1987 ode to Degas’ friend, the British painter Walter Sickert, is telling in this regard. Hughes attempts to undercut the post-Warhol school of artists who “appropriate” from mass-media sources, by claiming Sickert did it first, and long ago: “Sickert’s huge but obviously unofficial 1936 portrait of Edward VIII stepping from a car and about to don his busby was based, like Warhol’s Jackie 30 years later, on a news photograph.” Close, but not quite. For Warhol’s Jackie wasn’t based on a news photograph at all; it was a news photograph, mechanically reproduced on canvas in a sly masquerade of painting.

The distinction is narrow, but it harbors a wide gulf in which contemporary life is actually lived. That Hughes cannot perceive the difference explains why the critic is repeatedly at a loss, whenever he leaves the more settled precincts of the history of art.