Robert Hughes & Damien Hirst: BFF
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Art critic Robert Hughes hasn’t been this happy since the late 1980s, when minor painting talents like Julian Schnabel and David Salle were surfing the inflated, soon-to-collapse art market to international fame and immense fortune, and he was verbally slicing and dicing their mostly hollow work in any publication that would give him some ink. Saturday it was Britain’s Guardian, which published a lengthy Hughes diatribe on no-longer-quite-so Young British artist Damien Hirst, 43. Monday and today Hirst brings a slew of new work straight from the studio to the auction house, bypassing the normal gallery and dealer route.
Hughes’ weekend lexicon of Hirst-induced bilious epithets includes pseudo-art, simple-minded, sensationalist, pirate, dullness of taste, decadence, Victorian decor, bluff, skill at manipulation, connoisseurship-challenged, resonance-free, feeble and empty. And that’s just in the first three paragraphs. Rotten, obscenity and ashamed come later.
All of which is extremely good for Hirst’s bad-boy reputation. What could be better than having Robert
more after the jump...
Hughes huff and puff and try to blow your house down, poking at the mythical monster of ‘controversy’ with a paint-stick loaded up with purple prose? If Hirst’s sale is a bust, Hughes becomes a dragon-slayer. If it’s not, he’s Prince Valiant, upholding artistic standards against the slide. (Monday’s sale was a success, with the hammer total just below the high end of the pre-sale estimate.)
At the start, I described Hughes as ‘happy’ because there is a plain symbiosis at work here. The critic made his reputation in the pages of Time magazine (with subsequent help from the New York Review of Books) penning florid high dudgeon like this, also at a time when the art market was at nosebleed altitudes. Without Hirst now — and without Schnabel, Salle and the rest of the 1980s crew then — he would just be a smart guy, terrific writer and excellent guide to the work of artists with long-established reputations, most of them dead. Goya, say, whose marvelous critical biography is probably Hughes’ best work.
What’s disappointing about his contemporary art criticism — a failing shared by former New York Times critic Hilton Kramer, starting in the 1970s — is that a lame screed like the one in the Guardian simply exploits a vulgar cliché that artists are charlatans, Modern art is a hoax and the public is being made a fool. Is Hirst any good? Not much. But Hughes (attacking from the left, as Kramer used to do from the right) gives permission to the philistines to puff up in petty, pietistic indignation. No good comes from that — except perhaps for the writer’s own Hirst-ian style bubble of lucrative celebrity.
Ask yourself: Can you name one important artist born in the last 50 years whose work Hughes has uniquely illuminated and whose reputation he has worked hard to secure? I can’t think of one either. Erase the word ‘important’ from the query, and mostly you’re left with the likes of Schnabel, Salle, Hirst and others of their ilk. If there’s any justice, I hope that they’re paying a commission.
— Christopher Knight
Photo: Damien Hirst, ‘The Golden Calf,’ Sotheby’s
