NOTHING IF NOT CRITICAL <i> by Robert Hughes (Penguin: $13).</i>

Although Hughes writes eloquently about the Old Masters in this collection of articles, his most striking essays describe the ‘80s art scene and the grisly spectacle of art being reduced to just one more commodity that can be bought and sold by the nouveaux riches. Hughes maintains that the real break in 20th-Century art came not with Cubism or Abstract Expressionism, but with the arrival of the post-Warhol generation of artists who never really learned how to draw. Their failure to acquire the basic vocabulary of the discipline represented a profound rupture with the artistic traditions that extended from classical Greece to the work of Picasso. Hughes argues that Julian Schnabel embodies this contemporary juxtaposition of financial success and aesthetic failure, and, in a devastating profile of Schnabel, declares that the Emperor’s canvas has no paint.