I mostly agree with you – it naturally concerns Hughes because he’s a also a great historian.
(Funny, I got into Hughes via his history of Australia’s founding, The Fatal Shore.)
But I think artists are (or should be) concerned about the nature & quality of the art of their own times, too – especially if an artist’s work is to be a reaction to (or dialogue with) their times. To put it another way – if artists are to “transcend the orthodoxies of their times,” as Hughes says above, they’ve got to know what those social and cultural orthodoxies are, form judgments about them, and communicate them in their art. (I understand, of course, that doing so isn’t the only important objective of serious art, nor its only important process.)
Bookmarks