Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New

[r.e.]

Turns out the whole series is on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Aivdd#p/u/8/ByIlGYQxUMY

[Heroique]

A great critic, a super writer, a charismatic personality, and a good person.

A favorite excerpt from his companion book:

“Look at an object: your eye is never still. It flickers, involuntarily restless, from side to side. Nor is your head still in relation to the object; every movement brings a fractional shift in its position, which results in a miniscule difference of aspect. The more you move, the bigger the shifts and differences become. If asked to, the brain can isolate a given view, frozen in time; but its experience of the world outside the eye is more like a mosaic than a perspective set-up, a mosaic of multiple relationships, none of them (as far as vision is concerned) wholly fixed. Any sight is a sum of glimpses.”

Robert Hughes helps us see better.

[Nathan Potter]

Excellent Heroique. The intelligence from a scene can come from only one tiny spot in the retina and it's mirror in the scene. Oh, the rest of the scene is there and vaguely visible but not really available for critical evaluation. Hence as Hughes suggests, our eyes dart around the whole in glimpses, each glimpse then stored in our memory which finally reassembles it into a whole. All results in an image that is part scene and part photographer's mind. Really a most marvelous process, eh.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[Brian C. Miller]

I watched the entire series after you posted the link.

I thought that what Hughes said at the end of the last segment was particularly poignant. Where is art now? Nowhere, which is what I've been saying for a long time. "I don't think there's been such a rush towards insignificance in the name of the historical future as we've seen in the last fifteen years." And it was Hughes who showed me how and why, and now I have so much more understanding of it. What once was the realm of art, communication, has been surplanted by other forms. Art lost its voice to communicate, and it also has lost its shock value. And so what is left to it? "The famous radicalism of 60's and 70's art turns out to be a kind of 'dumb show.' A charade of toughness. A way of avoiding feeling." And he's right, that's not art. It isn't what art should be, or seek to be. "It's done by individuals, each mediating in some way, between history, and a sense of the world. This task is literally endless."

So we all load up the camera, and go photograph!

[paulr]

Where is art now? Nowhere, which is what I've been saying for a long time. "I don't think there's been such a rush towards insignificance in the name of the historical future as we've seen in the last fifteen years."

Yawn. That's the stock answer of someone who's given up looking and retreats into their prejudices. The real answer is that art is almost everywhere. There's probably never been a more heterogenous period, with more people doing more things, looking forward, backward, inward, or joining forces with other mediums or modes of inquiry.

[Heroique]

That’s the stock answer of someone who’s given up looking and retreats into their prejudices. The real answer is that art is almost everywhere...

I think Hughes would agree w/ you that art is “everywhere.”

He might disagree about how much of it is significant.

Yet as pessimistic as he can be about the state of serious art, I don’t think he’s “given up and retreated into his own prejudices.” Even if he sometimes seems conservative in his tastes, he is, of course, nothing of the sort.

Here’s what I mean. At the end of The Shock of the New (the book), he says:

“Perhaps (or so one devoutly hopes) artists are waiting in the wings now as they were a century ago, slowly maturing and testing the imaginative visions that will enable them to transcend the stagnant orthodoxies of their time, the endgame rhetoric of deconstructionism, the crust of late modernist assumptions about the limits of art.”

He goes on to add:

“It is a curious fact of art history, perhaps only a coincidence but perhaps not, that its entries upon fresh creative cycles after periods of exhaustion so often fall between the years '90 and '30. ...In each case, the first rush of creative ebullience was followed by winding-down, academization, and a sense of stagnancy which fostered doubts about the role, the necessity, and even the survival of art. So, too, with our own [20th] century.”

He wrote that around 1990 – the beginning of this so-called “90-to-30” creative cycle.

Here we are in 2012 – halfway through the period.

I don’t remember Hughes sharing any exciting updates. But even if he hasn’t, I can guarantee you that he’s watching for culturally transformative art to be born again. He’ll never go blind, or give up his ever-intelligent, broad-minded & history-informed search.

[Brian C. Miller]

YouTube: The New Shock of the New segment, with David Hockney, also, The Business of Art.

"The New Shock of the New" is his update, but I can't find it available for sale or full-length viewing.

[paulr]

I think Hughes would agree w/ you that art is “everywhere.”

He might disagree about how much of it is significant.

How much is significant in any era?

I'm not suggesting that all eras are equal, but I think it's an almost pointless exercise to worry about the quality of the era you're in. Each era produces great art and insignificant art. Probably the only thing that distinguishes a great era is the quality of the average art. How awesome are songs #50 to 200 on the pop charts?

This kind of question may be interesting for sociological reasons, but can it really be useful to artists? Or art lovers? Great art, interesting art, relevant art, is all out there to be seen. In fact there's more of it than you'll ever see, no matter how badly it's outweighed by the forgetable.

I grow weary of generalizations about eras in art / music / literature because they inevitably collapse when confronted by examples of actual work by actual people.

[r.e.]

As Brian Miller points out, Hughes did do an update.

I'm currently reading his new book about Rome. There are some criticisms that he is a bit fast and loose in the first couple of chapters, where he indulges the mythology of Rome's beginnings a good deal, but the book is wonderful.

A must read for anyone thinking of going to Italy or, for that matter, interested in Rome.

One can quibble with Hughes, but he is a very good writer with a talent for making one think. If you wind up disagreeing with him, having thought through whatever the disagreement is, well I think that that would sit with him just fine.

Here is what the Sunday New York Times Book Review had to say, a few weeks ago, about his new book: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/bo...pagewanted=all

[Heroique]

”The New Shock of the New” is his update, but I can't find it available for sale or full-length viewing.

That’s great news. It seems that his companion books usually follow the television series – after a certain period – in greatly expanded form. At least, that was the case for both The Shock of the New from the early 1980s, and American Visions from the later 1990s. So the book version for this probably hasn’t appeared yet, but I’ll be eager to read it when it shows up.

And someday Hughes might treat us to “The New New Shock of the New”!