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Reading art criticism can feel like plowing through an annual report. How can those tortured words have come from an experience of art? What is really being said here? Where's the bottom line? In this regard the criticism of Robert Hughes, art critic for Time magazine from 1971 to 2002, is distinctive for its life and blood. The life comes from his keen sense of what art looks and feels like. The blood comes from those who offend Hughes. Part of the pleasure of reading his criticism is found in the quick evisceration of troubling art or ideas. His essays are literate, informative, and thought provoking.
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The Australian–born Hughes has published several books on art, and made two popular PBS series: The Shock of the New in 1980 and American Visions in 1997. In addition Hughes has written about the founding of Australia (The Fatal Shore), the city of Barcelona (Barcelona), the plague of political correctness (The Culture of Complaint), and fishing (A Jerk on One End). The quality and popularity of his work have given Hughes prominence in cultural affairs. A 1997 New Yorker profile suggested that he was a successor to the British critic Kenneth Tynan, and went on to describe his popularity in Australia, where there was talk of a political career for the outspokenly republican, anti–crown expatriate.
But things have not gone so well for Hughes in the decade since the New Yorker profile was published. In 1993 Hughes created a ruckus by announcing at an MIT conference on government funding of the arts that "the job of democracy, in the field of art, is to make the world safe for elitism." This is not the critical sentiment multiculturalists want to hear, and Hughes has been increasingly excoriated by the cultural Left for being mean–spirited and out of touch. At the same time, while his aesthetic standards are seemingly related to conservative values, Hughes has repeatedly attacked conservatism for a coarsening of political thought, which he believes began with Ronald Regan. Moreover, as he has aged, Hughes has exhibited distaste for Christian fundamentalists, and seems to go out of his way to bait them. What nourished such a union of high–minded aesthetics and general cultural spleen?
A good place to find out is Things I Didn't Know, Hughes' new memoir. The book opens with a long chapter about his nearly fatal car wreck in Western Australia in 1999, which entailed a harrowing convalescence, disabilities he'll bear for the remainder of his life, and an increasingly nasty series of legal battles. The latter were fueled in part by Hughes' inflammatory remarks after his first trial ended with a "no case" judgment. These remarks precipitated more trials and a rapid fall from grace with the Australian press and public.
According to Hughes, writing is like fishing because it is solitary, and there is no certainty about what might be caught. Thus the memoir is a troll in the dark waters of his past, seeking to fathom meaning from whatever is hooked. His catch of the day is often interesting, but not everything was worth keeping. This book lacks the taut structure of Hughes' best work, and would have benefited from editorial liposuction.
Things I Didn't Know has been widely reviewed, but no review I've seen has more than glancingly noticed the place of Christianity in Hughes' life. Perhaps that is because so many of his references are gratuitous swipes. But Christianity is present in Things I Didn't Know from the first pages—where, in a delirium after the accident, Hughes, thinking he was about to receive extreme unction, kept calling his doctor "Father"—until the last, where he is hired to be the art critic for Time on the strength of his second book, Heaven and Hell in Western Art.
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