Robert Hughes Art and Money
Sunday, March 22, 2009 at 09:20PM Lately, I have had the feeling of coming full circle, and have been re-visiting my teenage years in New York City (had strong interests then,as now, in UnSchooling and people like John Holt,Paul Goodman) and later years back in the City, studying Social History of the Arts (in the academy I resisted and came to resist again. ) My study and focus then was on radicalism and alternative arts communities,artist self-portraiture, Joseph Cornell and New York.
While I was a musician from a young age and obsessed with music/performance/poetry ,I spent almost every Saturday either at MOMA or the Metropolitan Museum,lost in paintings.
I had,all along, followed Robert Hughes’ critical writing,mainly in the New York Review of Books,as his deep,erudite love of painting resonated and he was one of the few eminently readable critics.
His responses to the debacle marketplace the New York City art world became in the 1980s tightly corresponded with my own experiences, although I had left the City at this point and was doing a lot of arts organizing, writing, and building in Vancouver.
I encourage all with an interest in Fine Art to read or re-read his introduction to Nothing If Not Critical, a collection of essays published in 1990,just pre-dating the explosion of the interwebs. His comments are as timely now as they were then.
I plan to respond here with some further thoughts about painting in the digital age and other strands he touched on and plan to reprint some of my writing from the same period in Canada (a series called The Neiman Marxists in particular).
I just caught an exchange on Twitter between two people I follow with great interest : @pareidoliac and @RebeccaTaylorLA and this prompted me to
clip this Robert Hughes piece on Art and Money (1984). Their discussion was about Damien Hirst and if he or his work would be remembered farther down the line.He was not the “protypical” art marketer…He simply represents the tail end of the decline and , frankly, the hollowed out (by money) world of art today. This has been going on for a long,long time.
Chordata’s interest is how to deepen the humanity (the feeling) part of tech and this is why the direct experience of painting and what that does for your own thought process, is one of the areas we are interested in…that and the direct experience of anything beyond the surface ! So here, for the moment , for Rebecca and Leon is Art and Money in pdf form.
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