![]() ![]() It was as if the BBC had commissioned the 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift to make a documentary about modern life. Well, he didn't have much time for Beuys. ![]() For him, Andy Warhol was an emotionally thin artist bleached by celebrity, and Joseph Beuys. But Hughes would not tolerate any glib pretensions that art in 1980 (when The Shock of the New aired) lived up to that original starburst of modern energy. ![]() I remember, watching the television series as a teenager, how excitingly he described the Paris in the 1900s, when motor cars and the Eiffel Tower were young and Picasso was painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. He believed he lived after the end of the great creative age of modernism. The first is the book of his great BBC television series about the story of modern art. That larger sense of purpose can best be seen in his two classic books on art, The Shock of the New and Nothing If Not Critical. There was purpose to his lightning bolts of condemnation. Hughes could be savage, but he was never petty. He lent a nobility to what can often seem a petty way to spend your life. Robert Hughes, who has died aged 74, was simply the greatest art critic of our time and it will be a long while before we see his like again. ![]()
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