Robert Hughes is one of my favorite art critics. He’s Australian, and Americans might know him from his American Visions, which was a TV series on American art. In any case, he has written widely and is considered America’s most popular art critic. He has that wonderful trait of combining knowledge, wit, with the ability to turn a phrase. He also is that rare high art voice that sees through the pomposity of the privileged few who have the power to define what is considered important art. Notes Hughes:

The art market we have today did not pop up overnight. It was created by the great liquidity of late-twentieth-century wealth…But liquids do not flow where you want them to unless you dig channels, and this patient hydraulic effort has been, since 1960 at least, one of the wonders of cultural engineering. The big project of the art market [since then] has been to convince everyone that works of art, although they don’t bear interest, offer such dramatic and consistent capital gains along with the intangible pleasures of ownership…that they are worth investing large sums of money in. This creation of confidence…is the cultural artifact of the last half of the twentieth century, far more striking than any given painting or sculpture.

Translation: Very powerful and privileged people have engineered the art world for their own personal private gain and this in turn has required that a special class of art experts control the definition of art and thus keep the tastes and sensibilities of the larger public out of the game. As this class of educators has taught us all, art that might move us at first sight – ie, art that is immediately popular –  can’t possibly be profound or important. Such art is, to use their words, too “accessible.” Art that flat out makes no sense or, better, if it offends, is of a much higher caliber: such art is difficult and challenging and it is investible precisely because it is only knowable by elites. It is easy to see the circularity going on here, but it must be so; if the popular voice were given credence, the all-knowing art expert would be out of a job and the super wealthy would have to content themselves with investing in GE and have no fancy auctions to go to.

I think most people who have ever set sight on Michaelangelo’s David and felt immediately chills running up and down their spine know these pronouncements to be drivel. Or simply think jazz. Or Elvis. Or the Beattles. Ordinary people blew off the experts and got it right. Sadly, but not surprisingly, many young and ambitious artists are so career oriented that they swallow – hook, line, and sinker – the myth that the public is stupid and to be taken seriously they try mightily to make art that pisses people off.  Succès de scandale! It’s really the only true measure of genius. If only, instead, youthful artists were taught a more honest history, namely that the source of innovation often lies in the spirit of resisting top-down direction, as exemplified by the Impressionists, the art world would be a far more congenial place. Certainly sincerity might have value. And the first line in Robert Henri’s book, “Art, when properly understood, is the province of every human being” might find its way emblazoned over the arches of art departments everywhere. I know: perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub.

Here’s a concrete example of top-down engineering that has impacted all of our lives. In 1965, a twenty-year old artist, Joseph Kosuth, made a photograph of a blown-up dictionary definition of the word chair and placed it on a chair. He considered this art piece to be “pure idea.” He also declared “painting to be dead” and argued that putting paint on canvas “would block the ability of any individual artist to really say anything.” Who cares, right? After all, I don’t think it would be too outlandish to suggest that unless you do something seriously for 10,000 hours (a figure that seems to have recently acquired some credibility), you really don’t know a hell of a lot about what you are doing. Now if  Monet or Matisse or Sargent or Picasso had come up with a denunciation of painting in their mature years, we might pause to consider it. But a twenty-year old with practically zero painting hours under his belt? You’ve got to be kidding.

Nope. Such imbecilic pronouncements by malleable young artists provided and provide perfect fodder for the canons of the über rich and powerful who have sought and who continue to seek control over human creativity for their own material ends. Kosuth, along with others of his ilk, were anointed as a prescient avant-garde. Fast forward: the Kosuth chair photo was indeed, as it turned out, the beginning of the death of painting and the displacement of visual art by conceptual art (still considered visual, oddly enough). In higher education, painting is, for all intents and purposes, not taught. Now, the explanation as to why art and money cohered in precisely this way is beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that the disproportionate attention bestowed on Joseph Kosuth and others like him by the moneyed people had the desired result of recasting the art career, at least within visual art. Henceforth, visual artists would have to be Kosuth-rock-star type clones:  pubescent, narcissistic, ambitious, and devoid of any real aptitude for things visual. Eliminated as well was the possibility of popular subversion, ie, beauty, the thrill, or the Wow! that every so often suddenly lifts the public out of its obedient boredom and into a disobedient and joyful mass hysteria. Alas, by the mid-70s, for example, every bodily fluid and disembowelment had been packaged in various ways and marketed as art that was difficult and challenging. You don’t get it, you say? Mission accomplished. The hired cognoscenti got it just fine as their authority melted into a friendly authoritarianism and as the world of visual art slipped irrevocably into the province of a powerful class of global investors and marketing firms. A more graceful coup d’état, with its myriad pillars of non-profits, chic, glitz and adoring intellectuals, would be hard to find.

Therefore, it is with great delight that I draw your attention to a Youtube video where Robert Hughes visits one such powerful art educator in his home, exposes him for the fool that he is and, I hope, helps  everyone to understand the integrity and example of such artists as Cézanne who implored us to “trust our little sensations” and Monet, who said about the cognoscenti of his day: “They are all as stupid as one another. I know my worth.”

Here’s the link: