Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New and The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings

Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New and The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings

“I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense,” Robert Hughes, who was an art critic for Time magazine for 30 years, wrote in The Spectacle of Skill, answering to accusations of snobbery by his fellow Aussies. “I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails, or someone tying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones … Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate.”

This brand of brutal honesty runs throughout this compilation of Hughes’ writings on art, architecture, religion, and culture. The Shock of the New, illustrated with 250 color photos, is a hundred-year history of modern art, spanning from cubism to pop art to avant-garde, that accompanied the BBC documentary series Hughes hosted of the same name.