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The Shock of the New
A beautifully illustrated hundred-year history of modern art, from cubism to pop and avant-garde. More than 250 color photos.
448 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1980
About the author
Robert Hughes
182 books294 followersRobert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO was an Australian art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970. He was educated at St Ignatius' College, Riverview before going on to study arts and then architecture at the University of Sydney. At university, Hughes associated with the Sydney "Push" – a group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. Among the group were Germaine Greer and Clive James. Hughes, an aspiring artist and poet, abandoned his university endeavours to become first a cartoonist and then an art critic for the Sydney periodical The Observer, edited by Donald Horne. Around this time he wrote a history of Australian painting, titled The Art of Australia, which is still considered to be an important work. It was published in 1966. Hughes was also briefly involved in the original Sydney version of Oz magazine, and wrote art criticism for The Nation and The Sunday Mirror.
Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London, England (1965) where he wrote for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Observer, among others, and contributed to the London version of Oz. In 1970 he obtained the position of art critic for TIME magazine and he moved to New York. He quickly established himself in the United States as an influential art critic.In 1975, he and Don Brady provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island.
In 1980, the BBC broadcast The Shock of the New, Hughes's television series on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. In 1987, The Fatal Shore, Hughes's study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, became an international best-seller.
Hughes provided commentary on the work of artist Robert Crumb in parts of the 1994 film Crumb, calling Crumb "the American Breughel". His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. He was again dismissive of much recent art; this time, sculptor Jeff Koons was subjected to criticism. Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000) was a series musing on modern Australia and Hughes's relationship with it. Hughes's 2002 documentary on the painter Francisco Goya, Goya: Crazy Like a Genius, was broadcast on the first night of the BBC's domestic digital service. Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006.
Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London, England (1965) where he wrote for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Observer, among others, and contributed to the London version of Oz. In 1970 he obtained the position of art critic for TIME magazine and he moved to New York. He quickly established himself in the United States as an influential art critic.In 1975, he and Don Brady provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island.
In 1980, the BBC broadcast The Shock of the New, Hughes's television series on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. In 1987, The Fatal Shore, Hughes's study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, became an international best-seller.
Hughes provided commentary on the work of artist Robert Crumb in parts of the 1994 film Crumb, calling Crumb "the American Breughel". His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. He was again dismissive of much recent art; this time, sculptor Jeff Koons was subjected to criticism. Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000) was a series musing on modern Australia and Hughes's relationship with it. Hughes's 2002 documentary on the painter Francisco Goya, Goya: Crazy Like a Genius, was broadcast on the first night of the BBC's domestic digital service. Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006.
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May 3, 2016
Again today I was lost in admiration of this history-with-attitude of 20th century art. I think it’s the best single art book I’ve read. It’s stuffed full of ideas and sentences that refresh like a splash of seaspray. Viewing Paris from the Eiffel Tower in 1889 was “one of the pivots in human consciousness”. The phonograph was “the most radical extension of cultural memory since the photograph”. Cezanne “takes you backstage”. In cubist paintings the world was “a twitching skin of nuances”. “Machines were the ideal metaphor for that central pornographic fantasy of the 19th century, rape followed by gratitude.” “To make ‘socialist’ art, one must stop depicting ownable things: in short, go abstract.” “The idea that fascism always preferred retrograde to advanced art is simply a myth.” “Mass media took away the political speech of art.”
This book is the 1991 expanded version of the 1980 book-of-the-TV-series. He moves the story forward in several broad themes – how art confronts or is absorbed by power; what architecture thinks it’s doing to us; the interior landscapes of art like surrealism and abstraction; and how art has lost any kind of plot it thought it might have had, and if that might be a good thing.
I opened at random and my eye fell on p 382:
Duchamp invented a category he called “infra-mince”, “sub-tiny”; it was occupied, for instance, by the difference in weight between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once.
The only thing wrong with this book is that Mr Hughes didn’t do an even more expanded and updated version before he died in 2012. But you can’t have everything.
This book is the 1991 expanded version of the 1980 book-of-the-TV-series. He moves the story forward in several broad themes – how art confronts or is absorbed by power; what architecture thinks it’s doing to us; the interior landscapes of art like surrealism and abstraction; and how art has lost any kind of plot it thought it might have had, and if that might be a good thing.
I opened at random and my eye fell on p 382:
Duchamp invented a category he called “infra-mince”, “sub-tiny”; it was occupied, for instance, by the difference in weight between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once.
The only thing wrong with this book is that Mr Hughes didn’t do an even more expanded and updated version before he died in 2012. But you can’t have everything.
January 1, 2018
My favorite story about modern art comes from my friend. I’ll let her tell it:
I love this story because it neatly encapsulates how so many of us feel in museums dedicated to modern art. There we are, surrounded by objects and images that are alternately baffling, confusing, random, bizarre, boring, interesting, ugly, beautiful, or any combination of the above. We don’t know what we’re looking at or how to look at it; and yet we are asked to treat it with a great deal of seriousness and respect. Some people get angry and mourn the death of art; some write art criticism, much of it equally incomprehensible; some people genuinely love it; the rich pull out their pocketbooks and make tax deductible investments; and many of us just shrug our shoulders.
For my whole life I was decidedly in the latter camp. But because I wanted to better appreciate the Reina Sofia here in Madrid, I decided that I needed to learn more about visual art in the twentieth century. This documentary—and I only watched the documentary, though I plan to buy the book—proved to be the solution to my ignorance.
The Shock of the New is an eight-part documentary series written and presented by Robert Hughes. Although considerably shorter than Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, an astounding amount of information is packed into this program. Hughes takes us through art nouveau, art deco, cubism, primitivism, futurism, Dadaism, constructivism, fauvism, utopianism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop art, op art, and much more. Permeating this rapid tour is a mixture of Hughes’s acerbic criticism and a sense of 80s gloom. Hughes emphasizes over and over again how the hopes of modern artists to change the world have proven empty, and ends the program by proclaiming the death of the avant-garde.
For Hughes, art (and he means highbrow visual art) has completely failed in its attempt to become socially significant in the modern age. This point is most poignantly made in his episode on modern architecture. An entire school of architectures arose in the twentieth century with dreams of becoming social engineers. They didn’t design buildings for individuals, but planned utopias. They designed housing complexes that were meant to change the way people live their lives; the inhabitants were no more than small, interchangeable pieces of the architect's grand vision.
Many governments put these ideas into practice in the hopes of curing poverty. The result was places like Pruitt-Igoe, the famous housing project of St. Louis. The project won awards when it was first contructed; but in a short time the place was famous for the high levels of poverty and crime (not to mention the racial segregation) suffered by their inhabitants. Finally, it got so bad that the buildings were destroyed. In Hugh's words:
Hughes makes a similar point about government architecture. State building design has taken on similar forms in fascist, communist, and capitalist countries. Indeed, when you see the actual buildings side by side, there is no denying this. It is the architecture of power, pure and simple. I’ve been to Albany, and I can attest to Hughes’s point that it is the ultimate expression of the centralization of power. Walking through the city center, you feel crushed by the square forms and the monumental concrete spaces. It all seems like it was designed for a creature bigger and tougher than a human. At any rate, it is certainly not the architecture of democracy; it is the architecture of bureaucracy:
Thus we see the utopian dreams of elite architects create misery in the lives of the poor; and all state ideologies are reduced to expressions of brute power. Meanwhile, we see the progress of visual art, from a religion of the future, to an act of protest, to a commodity to be bought and sold by rich investors and institutions.
With the decline of traditional religion, many artists thought that they could fill the gap left in society. They would create the values and the society of the future. The group that most perfectly embodies this hope were the futurists, who thought that machines would transform society for the better. But looking back now, having seen what modern warfare can do, the futurists’ worship of the machine seems strange and even perverse.
After that, artists were not as optimistic, but there still existed the idea of an avant-garde who could see more clearly, feel more keenly, think more honestly, who could act as the conscience of society. But even that idea fizzled, and it died when art became a commodity. How can art make a countercultural statement when any image can be turned into an advertisement? How can you pretend that you’re challenging the status quo when your works are being bought and sold by the opulent rich?
Finally, art degenerated into gestures about art. Hang a cardboard box on a wall in a museum. The art is not the box itself but the gesture of the box, and the gesture asks questions about the limits and the nature of art. But this gesture is the final act of art’s attempt to be a source of social values. After attempting to supply values, then to ask fundamental questions about values, the avant-garde ends by asking questions about its own value. Well the art does have a value, and it’s how much someone will pay for it at auction.
But Hughes ends on a positive note, and I think this is entirely justified. First, blanket condemnations of so-called “modern art” are more intellectually dishonest than the worst of modern art’s excesses. By any standard, there have been a huge number of brilliant artists in the last century. Besides, there is always a kind of historical myopia that goes on when you try to judge recent history. There has been a lot of bad art created in every century, and the twentieth was no exception; we just see it more clearly.
So I was in the Museum of Modern Art one day, you know, walking around and stuff. I walked in one room and I saw this thing on the wall, and it looked really weird. So I bent down and started to look at it. There was this other visitor, who started looking at it too. Then all of the sudden the wall opened and a man walked out. Me and the other visitor looked at each other and laughed. It was a doorknob.
I love this story because it neatly encapsulates how so many of us feel in museums dedicated to modern art. There we are, surrounded by objects and images that are alternately baffling, confusing, random, bizarre, boring, interesting, ugly, beautiful, or any combination of the above. We don’t know what we’re looking at or how to look at it; and yet we are asked to treat it with a great deal of seriousness and respect. Some people get angry and mourn the death of art; some write art criticism, much of it equally incomprehensible; some people genuinely love it; the rich pull out their pocketbooks and make tax deductible investments; and many of us just shrug our shoulders.
For my whole life I was decidedly in the latter camp. But because I wanted to better appreciate the Reina Sofia here in Madrid, I decided that I needed to learn more about visual art in the twentieth century. This documentary—and I only watched the documentary, though I plan to buy the book—proved to be the solution to my ignorance.
The Shock of the New is an eight-part documentary series written and presented by Robert Hughes. Although considerably shorter than Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, an astounding amount of information is packed into this program. Hughes takes us through art nouveau, art deco, cubism, primitivism, futurism, Dadaism, constructivism, fauvism, utopianism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop art, op art, and much more. Permeating this rapid tour is a mixture of Hughes’s acerbic criticism and a sense of 80s gloom. Hughes emphasizes over and over again how the hopes of modern artists to change the world have proven empty, and ends the program by proclaiming the death of the avant-garde.
For Hughes, art (and he means highbrow visual art) has completely failed in its attempt to become socially significant in the modern age. This point is most poignantly made in his episode on modern architecture. An entire school of architectures arose in the twentieth century with dreams of becoming social engineers. They didn’t design buildings for individuals, but planned utopias. They designed housing complexes that were meant to change the way people live their lives; the inhabitants were no more than small, interchangeable pieces of the architect's grand vision.
Many governments put these ideas into practice in the hopes of curing poverty. The result was places like Pruitt-Igoe, the famous housing project of St. Louis. The project won awards when it was first contructed; but in a short time the place was famous for the high levels of poverty and crime (not to mention the racial segregation) suffered by their inhabitants. Finally, it got so bad that the buildings were destroyed. In Hugh's words:
Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future. This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent, and talented men start thinking in terms of space rather than place, and about single rather than multiple meanings. It’s what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. You get miles of jerrybuilt Platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.
Hughes makes a similar point about government architecture. State building design has taken on similar forms in fascist, communist, and capitalist countries. Indeed, when you see the actual buildings side by side, there is no denying this. It is the architecture of power, pure and simple. I’ve been to Albany, and I can attest to Hughes’s point that it is the ultimate expression of the centralization of power. Walking through the city center, you feel crushed by the square forms and the monumental concrete spaces. It all seems like it was designed for a creature bigger and tougher than a human. At any rate, it is certainly not the architecture of democracy; it is the architecture of bureaucracy:
As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.
Thus we see the utopian dreams of elite architects create misery in the lives of the poor; and all state ideologies are reduced to expressions of brute power. Meanwhile, we see the progress of visual art, from a religion of the future, to an act of protest, to a commodity to be bought and sold by rich investors and institutions.
With the decline of traditional religion, many artists thought that they could fill the gap left in society. They would create the values and the society of the future. The group that most perfectly embodies this hope were the futurists, who thought that machines would transform society for the better. But looking back now, having seen what modern warfare can do, the futurists’ worship of the machine seems strange and even perverse.
After that, artists were not as optimistic, but there still existed the idea of an avant-garde who could see more clearly, feel more keenly, think more honestly, who could act as the conscience of society. But even that idea fizzled, and it died when art became a commodity. How can art make a countercultural statement when any image can be turned into an advertisement? How can you pretend that you’re challenging the status quo when your works are being bought and sold by the opulent rich?
Finally, art degenerated into gestures about art. Hang a cardboard box on a wall in a museum. The art is not the box itself but the gesture of the box, and the gesture asks questions about the limits and the nature of art. But this gesture is the final act of art’s attempt to be a source of social values. After attempting to supply values, then to ask fundamental questions about values, the avant-garde ends by asking questions about its own value. Well the art does have a value, and it’s how much someone will pay for it at auction.
But Hughes ends on a positive note, and I think this is entirely justified. First, blanket condemnations of so-called “modern art” are more intellectually dishonest than the worst of modern art’s excesses. By any standard, there have been a huge number of brilliant artists in the last century. Besides, there is always a kind of historical myopia that goes on when you try to judge recent history. There has been a lot of bad art created in every century, and the twentieth was no exception; we just see it more clearly.
April 14, 2013
The first few episodes of this – I watched this, by the way, but will need to get hold of the book now – are nearly entirely a rip off of Walter Benjamin’s work, particularly his Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The modern has been so dominated by machines and the question of how machines relate to humans is an open question that continues to haunt our nightmares. The Matrix movies are a particularly interesting example of this. But the history of this nightmare is much older than that and is not restricted to drama or even artistic representation. That I can respond to images I have witnessed over a couple of weeks, intermittently watched from YouTube, and then to type this on a screen on my laptop projected onto a larger screen I decided recently I needed to work from and to do this all while listening to Mozart’s Requiem is almost too bizarre for words. Our relationships with machines today is perhaps too difficult for us too fully understand. And machines are no longer the lumbering and crashing things that gave strict pulse rhythmic or metronomic structure to our working lives in factories. No, today the difference between human and machine is becoming harder to recognise, harder to understand, harder to remove ourselves from.
In this work, as in Ways of Seeing, we are told that cheap mechanical reproduction of works of art – such as that which is made available by the camera, the printing press, the television image, the computer screen – all devalue art, all are like zombies on the true work of art. They devalue art not merely for the obvious reason that art today comes to us, rather than requiring us to go on pilgrimages to co-locate our bodies with the very corporality of the artwork, but rather that the sheer abundance of the images available to us, the multiplicity of the reproductions everywhere around us, turns these images into virtual viruses. Is it possible to imagine a single person today in the developed world who has never seen the Mona Lisa? But a mere 250 years ago even a pilgrimage would not have been enough to guarantee getting to see most of the works of art we today ‘know to look at’, even if we know almost nothing else about them. Art has lost its connection with space –and it has always had a problematic relationship with time.
Some of the most interesting parts of this work are where Hughes discusses issues associated with advertising and how art has found ways to relate to it (think Andy Warhol here for starters) or how space and the construction of ‘human’ spaces in architecture, for example, has been achieved and expressed under modernism. There is little that is comforting in this history. Much of the architecture really isn’t human at all, but rather a song of praise to humanity as worker ants. There is a lovely part of this where we are shown some chairs that no human bum was ever supposed to sit in. Sharp and impractical, the chair stands as a Platonic form, as a monument to clean lines, if also sore backs.
But where this series is at its best is in the very last episode. Many of the others are more or less quick introductions to the works and thoughts of various artists and schools of art. But in the last episode Hughes makes much the observation that art today is fully embedded in capitalism. Embedded in the sense that art is the ultimate investment strategy. And if we know anything it is that everything has its price, including the aesthetic experience.
(I’m up to the Lacrimosa in the Requiem by the way)
To what expect can a work of art have a price, though? Sure, it has rarity and it has desire (the two qualities that Hughes says capitalism manipulates to make art appropriately valuable as an object for investment and accumulation), but what is the relationship between art and money and value? Hughes makes the troubling observation that it is almost impossible to look at a work of art today without wondering what someone like Gina Rinehart might be able to pay for it. Of course, the idea of Gina Rinehart buying any sort of art is troubling, but it is also that such people are buying art, not for its own sake, but rather because it makes good financial sense, that shifts too how we view art.
But isn’t this a contradiction in terms? Didn’t we start off by saying that the thing that is most obvious about the world now we have mechanical reproduction is the devaluing of art works? Didn’t we say that we now have an almost communism of images – virtually freely available and overly-abundant? How can images be both valueless and objects of near infinite value?
There is no contradiction, though. The problems is the one that I experienced when I went to hear Mozart’s Requiem, a month or so ago, live for the first time. Look, the sound that is coming out of my speakers at the moment is lovely, it is also quite moving in parts – for God’s sake, this is Mozart’s Requiem, after all. But in another sense it just isn’t his Requiem. Instead, it is a surface level expression of something that, when experienced in a concert hall, suddenly becomes three dimensional and loud in ways that I’m not even sure is possible from speakers. This isn’t a matter of volume, per se, but a richness of sound in a large volume of air that simply isn’t possible in a room in a suburban house.
And the same is true of paintings. Last year I went to see Infinite Horizons – an exhibition of the landscapes and other paintings of Fred Williams. Some of his paintings suck the air out of the room. They simply aren’t the same as the photographs of them in art books. And not just because of the materials used and only really visible when you are beside them, or of the scale of some of the paintings. It is also, and equally importantly, how we approach a work of art in an art gallery which is quite different to how we approach one in a book of photographs. It is exactly like the difference between going to church, and watching Songs of Praise on television.
Artists have tried to fight back. Rather than create artworks on canvases – convenient for buying and selling and transporting, for example – they have (at least at the time of the recording of this documentary) focused on art events and performance art. But this too often resulted in narcissism. The twin poses of art, likewise all too often, are either that of Narcissus or Medusa – the artist on self-display or the artwork that is supposed to turn us to stone, turn us into a gapping statue. It seems to me that the attitude of high art in all its attempts to shock, is meant as the selling point for the kinds of people who wish to turn art into an object of capital accumulation. The elite in the sense of bankers or CEOs.
Is it possible that the only kinds of art available to us are either high art that makes a mockery of itself by constantly seeking new ways to shock, or the crass ‘popular’ art of television that is so mind-numbingly repetitious that to spend five minutes watching it is to feel like you have awoken in a hall of mirrors? Is there nothing else available to us but this?
I think there is. I think that how this series ends is our true hope. We need art as a way to understand the world we live in, as a way to come to terms with the human condition – and this, the real feeling that comes from trying to honestly engage with the real questions that confront us as humans is what makes it inevitable that art will go on. Art helps us understand our world and our place in the world. It presents us with images of that world meant to confront and disturb and reassure and frighten and comfort us. Only a fool would think that art could somehow stop because bankers want to express its value as a price sticker.
You know, the real shock of the new has less to do with how artists respond to advertising, or to corporate bureaucracy, but rather how too often art today is recruited to justify the unjustifiable. There was a time when we were horrified by genocide. But look at the cover of Mitchell’s Seeing Through Race and tell me that is not a artist’s vision of a Palestinian town without Palestinians – tell me that is not art in praise of a certain kind of genocide. When our images make such claims, soon our hearts follow down the same path.
Hughes doesn’t believe that art is capable of changing the world – he is certainly right about it not being able to make us more moral – but while it can be the greatest expression of our individuality, it can also be a call of the herd, a call of the mob, it can become our best means of dehumanising The Other.
Mozart has started his Requiem again. I should stop writing this. But even if Hughes’s clothes and hairstyles have dated enough for even me to notice – this is still a series well worth watching.
In this work, as in Ways of Seeing, we are told that cheap mechanical reproduction of works of art – such as that which is made available by the camera, the printing press, the television image, the computer screen – all devalue art, all are like zombies on the true work of art. They devalue art not merely for the obvious reason that art today comes to us, rather than requiring us to go on pilgrimages to co-locate our bodies with the very corporality of the artwork, but rather that the sheer abundance of the images available to us, the multiplicity of the reproductions everywhere around us, turns these images into virtual viruses. Is it possible to imagine a single person today in the developed world who has never seen the Mona Lisa? But a mere 250 years ago even a pilgrimage would not have been enough to guarantee getting to see most of the works of art we today ‘know to look at’, even if we know almost nothing else about them. Art has lost its connection with space –and it has always had a problematic relationship with time.
Some of the most interesting parts of this work are where Hughes discusses issues associated with advertising and how art has found ways to relate to it (think Andy Warhol here for starters) or how space and the construction of ‘human’ spaces in architecture, for example, has been achieved and expressed under modernism. There is little that is comforting in this history. Much of the architecture really isn’t human at all, but rather a song of praise to humanity as worker ants. There is a lovely part of this where we are shown some chairs that no human bum was ever supposed to sit in. Sharp and impractical, the chair stands as a Platonic form, as a monument to clean lines, if also sore backs.
But where this series is at its best is in the very last episode. Many of the others are more or less quick introductions to the works and thoughts of various artists and schools of art. But in the last episode Hughes makes much the observation that art today is fully embedded in capitalism. Embedded in the sense that art is the ultimate investment strategy. And if we know anything it is that everything has its price, including the aesthetic experience.
(I’m up to the Lacrimosa in the Requiem by the way)
To what expect can a work of art have a price, though? Sure, it has rarity and it has desire (the two qualities that Hughes says capitalism manipulates to make art appropriately valuable as an object for investment and accumulation), but what is the relationship between art and money and value? Hughes makes the troubling observation that it is almost impossible to look at a work of art today without wondering what someone like Gina Rinehart might be able to pay for it. Of course, the idea of Gina Rinehart buying any sort of art is troubling, but it is also that such people are buying art, not for its own sake, but rather because it makes good financial sense, that shifts too how we view art.
But isn’t this a contradiction in terms? Didn’t we start off by saying that the thing that is most obvious about the world now we have mechanical reproduction is the devaluing of art works? Didn’t we say that we now have an almost communism of images – virtually freely available and overly-abundant? How can images be both valueless and objects of near infinite value?
There is no contradiction, though. The problems is the one that I experienced when I went to hear Mozart’s Requiem, a month or so ago, live for the first time. Look, the sound that is coming out of my speakers at the moment is lovely, it is also quite moving in parts – for God’s sake, this is Mozart’s Requiem, after all. But in another sense it just isn’t his Requiem. Instead, it is a surface level expression of something that, when experienced in a concert hall, suddenly becomes three dimensional and loud in ways that I’m not even sure is possible from speakers. This isn’t a matter of volume, per se, but a richness of sound in a large volume of air that simply isn’t possible in a room in a suburban house.
And the same is true of paintings. Last year I went to see Infinite Horizons – an exhibition of the landscapes and other paintings of Fred Williams. Some of his paintings suck the air out of the room. They simply aren’t the same as the photographs of them in art books. And not just because of the materials used and only really visible when you are beside them, or of the scale of some of the paintings. It is also, and equally importantly, how we approach a work of art in an art gallery which is quite different to how we approach one in a book of photographs. It is exactly like the difference between going to church, and watching Songs of Praise on television.
Artists have tried to fight back. Rather than create artworks on canvases – convenient for buying and selling and transporting, for example – they have (at least at the time of the recording of this documentary) focused on art events and performance art. But this too often resulted in narcissism. The twin poses of art, likewise all too often, are either that of Narcissus or Medusa – the artist on self-display or the artwork that is supposed to turn us to stone, turn us into a gapping statue. It seems to me that the attitude of high art in all its attempts to shock, is meant as the selling point for the kinds of people who wish to turn art into an object of capital accumulation. The elite in the sense of bankers or CEOs.
Is it possible that the only kinds of art available to us are either high art that makes a mockery of itself by constantly seeking new ways to shock, or the crass ‘popular’ art of television that is so mind-numbingly repetitious that to spend five minutes watching it is to feel like you have awoken in a hall of mirrors? Is there nothing else available to us but this?
I think there is. I think that how this series ends is our true hope. We need art as a way to understand the world we live in, as a way to come to terms with the human condition – and this, the real feeling that comes from trying to honestly engage with the real questions that confront us as humans is what makes it inevitable that art will go on. Art helps us understand our world and our place in the world. It presents us with images of that world meant to confront and disturb and reassure and frighten and comfort us. Only a fool would think that art could somehow stop because bankers want to express its value as a price sticker.
You know, the real shock of the new has less to do with how artists respond to advertising, or to corporate bureaucracy, but rather how too often art today is recruited to justify the unjustifiable. There was a time when we were horrified by genocide. But look at the cover of Mitchell’s Seeing Through Race and tell me that is not a artist’s vision of a Palestinian town without Palestinians – tell me that is not art in praise of a certain kind of genocide. When our images make such claims, soon our hearts follow down the same path.
Hughes doesn’t believe that art is capable of changing the world – he is certainly right about it not being able to make us more moral – but while it can be the greatest expression of our individuality, it can also be a call of the herd, a call of the mob, it can become our best means of dehumanising The Other.
Mozart has started his Requiem again. I should stop writing this. But even if Hughes’s clothes and hairstyles have dated enough for even me to notice – this is still a series well worth watching.
October 30, 2009
I bought this book after a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I left the museum confused and annoyed by Modern art. I could not find anything to explain Modern art. Nothing that wasn't complete unreadable, unwatchable or incomprehensible. Then I picked up this book. I read about 30 pages in the book store and couldn't put it down. Robert Hughes' prose flows, clear and crisp. I like that he could explain an artist's work in a way that lets you know he doesn't like it, but is open to your liking it. I think watching or reading any of Hughes' work, is like a conversation with a your really smart and excentric uncle. After reading this book and watching the series, I now understand Modern art and feel justified by being annoyed by it.
March 8, 2010
Most of the other reviews say it all - this weighty and expensive book was the main text of my college class on Modern Art but but boy was it worth it. Hughes is such a succinct, perceptive historian and critic - he takes complicated topics and doesn't simply examine then, but unpacks and illuminates. Probably best seen in conjunction with the original BBC series, you will almost certainly learn something you didn't know, find something you weren't aware you loved, finally be able to put your finger on why you hated something else, and be dazzled and somewhat saddened by how important art used to be in the lives of people. An amazing book - they should make every high school student read it!
December 12, 2017
A brilliant book to finish off my challenge for this year, Hughes has a way of explaining complex cultural issues that just sticks with me and makes so much sense. He does though have a tendency to use phrases and turns of phrase in French or Italian or Latin and just expect readers to know them, I had to use Google Translate, and they still often made absolutely no sense at all. Oh, and it's quite obvious when he doesn't personally like an artist, as his analysis tends towards the "I suppose this artist has some merit, if you're mad" end of the spectrum. But those are the only criticisms I can make of a wonderful wonderful book. I'm going to quote a long section from the end of Chapter Two now because it's so beautiful:
"It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must be in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates "value" and becomes, ipso facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. If the Third Reich had lasted until now [ the late eighties as Hughes writes ], the young bloods of the Inner Party would not be interested in old fogeys like Albert Speer or Arno Breker, Hitler's monumental sculptor; they would be queuing up to have their portraits silkscreened by Andy Warhol. It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say, This saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian. Specific books perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920s is that they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot."
"It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must be in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates "value" and becomes, ipso facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. If the Third Reich had lasted until now [ the late eighties as Hughes writes ], the young bloods of the Inner Party would not be interested in old fogeys like Albert Speer or Arno Breker, Hitler's monumental sculptor; they would be queuing up to have their portraits silkscreened by Andy Warhol. It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say, This saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian. Specific books perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920s is that they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot."
October 26, 2013
Hughes' opinionated and politically charged biography of modern art and its dialogue with a culture in turmoil is always on the side of the radical against the status quo. He is harshly critical of the academy and establishment, and of regressive regimes, movements and critiques. He hates oppression, elitism, and frivolous self-indulgence, which is his general opinion of postmodernism.
The Shock of the New was a hugely important part of my education, helping me to become conversant in the movements of modernism and the work and perspectives of many of its protagonists. It gave me the confidence to look at a Rothko without fear and to talk about the experience passionately. The pleasure I have subsequently experienced in seeing, sharing and discussing art is in large part owed to Hughes.
The Shock of the New was a hugely important part of my education, helping me to become conversant in the movements of modernism and the work and perspectives of many of its protagonists. It gave me the confidence to look at a Rothko without fear and to talk about the experience passionately. The pleasure I have subsequently experienced in seeing, sharing and discussing art is in large part owed to Hughes.
August 20, 2022
"Between the years 1900 and 1914 the world changed more than in the 1,400 years preceding 1914."---Robert Hughes. Imagine a generation that experiences the first airplane, submarine, mass-produced cars and even the wide usage of the bicycle, and all on the eve of the greatest mass carnage in history, the First World War. How did the upheaval that marked the start of the twentieth century translate into art? "The modern" shocked the world by simultaneously closing off the planet---there were literally no new worlds to explore, much less conquer---and open up new vistas. Even before Einstein old notions of stable space and time had been erased. While most American artists mourned this "loss of innocence" Europeans embraced it with a passion. Australian art critic Robert Hughes traces the dislocated and dislocating visions of Picasso and Braque, The Surrealists and the Futurists, just for starters, to a world where no center existed any longer: not God, not utopia, not nation, and not heroes. Only the lonely artists in his studio---the new basilica. Here too were planted the seeds of the "aesthetics of politics", Communism for the Surrealists (except Dali) and Fascism for Marinetti. One troubling questions: did these new art forms, by showing that everything is possible, in some way inspire the horrors to come? The two world wars and the Holocaust?
June 17, 2019
A hyper-competent but slogging look at the last century or so of modern and postmodern art. Similar in complexity and scope to a 300 level undergrad Art History course.
March 31, 2024
4.5 stars. Having encountered Hughes’ television series The Shock of the New in a grad course on Surrealism, Dada, and Oulipo years ago, I had been wanting to read this book for quite a while, and Hughes didn’t disappoint. He takes us through the entire scope of modern art, from the experimentation of 19th-century "isms" (which Hughes cleverly claims became “wasms” within 100 years) through high modernism and the years of abstract expressionism, and ending with his contemporary moment, circa 1980, when “the appalling commercialization of the art world” ended modernism as the vanguard, thus ending modernism as a movement.
The book is generously illustrated, including just about every major work of art one could hope to see in such an extensive study. The biggest revelation for me was Hughes’ voice, which is razor sharp, insightful, vigorous, pointed, and most surprisingly: funny as hell. I simply didn’t catch that last part in his documentary style (I’ve seen The Shock of the New and Goya so far), which made him come across as rather stiff and wooden. Clearly tv is not his medium of choice for communication (although he really is a wonderful presenter), as his writing contains more flourishes than can be contained in bite-sized voiceovers in 50-minute spaces. I found myself laughing out loud at some lines, the funniest of which he reserves for 1970s American television culture: “The medium is the message here,” he deadpans, in reference to Marshall McLuhan’s famous declaration, “and it turns the brain to cornflakes.” And my favorite line in the book: television is “a cornucopia of dung.” I will now use that expression for the rest of my life.
This was a fun and enlightening read, and I’ve already bought and read half of Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, which is just as witty and acerbic. Recommended for anyone interested in modernism or art history.
The book is generously illustrated, including just about every major work of art one could hope to see in such an extensive study. The biggest revelation for me was Hughes’ voice, which is razor sharp, insightful, vigorous, pointed, and most surprisingly: funny as hell. I simply didn’t catch that last part in his documentary style (I’ve seen The Shock of the New and Goya so far), which made him come across as rather stiff and wooden. Clearly tv is not his medium of choice for communication (although he really is a wonderful presenter), as his writing contains more flourishes than can be contained in bite-sized voiceovers in 50-minute spaces. I found myself laughing out loud at some lines, the funniest of which he reserves for 1970s American television culture: “The medium is the message here,” he deadpans, in reference to Marshall McLuhan’s famous declaration, “and it turns the brain to cornflakes.” And my favorite line in the book: television is “a cornucopia of dung.” I will now use that expression for the rest of my life.
This was a fun and enlightening read, and I’ve already bought and read half of Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, which is just as witty and acerbic. Recommended for anyone interested in modernism or art history.
September 12, 2019
Това е една от най-компетентно написаните книги за модерно изкуство, архитектура и изобщо съзидателните творчески импулси, които се простират от началото на 19-ти век до края на 20-ти.
Робърт Хюз има огромен капацитет. Ако обичате да влизате в дълбокото и не се страхувате да се нагълтате със "солена вода", ще излезете пълни с нови знания и разбиране за нещата.
Искам такива книги да се пишат, издават и четат.
Робърт Хюз има огромен капацитет. Ако обичате да влизате в дълбокото и не се страхувате да се нагълтате със "солена вода", ще излезете пълни с нови знания и разбиране за нещата.
Искам такива книги да се пишат, издават и четат.
March 14, 2016
This book was okay. I didn't know much about modern art before reading it and am not sure I learned what I wanted to learn: I suppose I was looking for a more singular / less disjointed narrative, and one that spent less time on the obvious. (The relationship between early modern art and machinery, or the manifestos of various movements, are not as interesting to me as, say, the artists themselves and why their ideas were influential - while others were not.)
Hughes makes the case that art and the avant-garde are, essentially, dead. (Actually, he only says the latter is dead, but implies the former has outlived its usefulness.) Certainly, this is true to the extent that paintings no longer have the same cultural significance they did in an untelevised era, but when one considers the artistic possibilities of new media, my guess is that the jury is out on the End of Art question.
What can I say? Somewhere in the book, Hughes rags on Le Corbusier, calling him a failure because his ideologically-charged architecture was out of touch with human needs. But couldn't the same be said of all modern art?
Hughes makes the case that art and the avant-garde are, essentially, dead. (Actually, he only says the latter is dead, but implies the former has outlived its usefulness.) Certainly, this is true to the extent that paintings no longer have the same cultural significance they did in an untelevised era, but when one considers the artistic possibilities of new media, my guess is that the jury is out on the End of Art question.
What can I say? Somewhere in the book, Hughes rags on Le Corbusier, calling him a failure because his ideologically-charged architecture was out of touch with human needs. But couldn't the same be said of all modern art?
April 12, 2013
This was an epic read for me. I saw Hughes give an interview on Charlie Rose and kept his book in mind until I ran across it at my favorite book store in LA.
I've read a few art history books before, and this one stands out. Artists and movements flush together as Hughes never takes a break. What this torrent of information provides is an incredible sense of interconnectedness across art, as well as a clever narrative ploy to always keep me engaged. Few artists are treated with more than a page or so (which is incredible, seeing as the book is over 400 pages long). And Hughes does not stick to a chronological order or even organize by medium. What we do get is the main movements broken into chapters, but those are loose rules and I still found some chapters spanning half a century in content.
And like any good art critic, Hughes can pen a pretty paragraph. There were a few that I directly transcribed into emails to friends. My book has probably 100 post-it bookmarks for passages I want to return to.
I've read a few art history books before, and this one stands out. Artists and movements flush together as Hughes never takes a break. What this torrent of information provides is an incredible sense of interconnectedness across art, as well as a clever narrative ploy to always keep me engaged. Few artists are treated with more than a page or so (which is incredible, seeing as the book is over 400 pages long). And Hughes does not stick to a chronological order or even organize by medium. What we do get is the main movements broken into chapters, but those are loose rules and I still found some chapters spanning half a century in content.
And like any good art critic, Hughes can pen a pretty paragraph. There were a few that I directly transcribed into emails to friends. My book has probably 100 post-it bookmarks for passages I want to return to.
August 27, 2007
Hughes possesses all the essential traits of a brilliant art critic: he's not a snob, he's perceptive about the difference between shyte and wank, he's enthusiastic about playfulness and populism, and he's willing to admit he's wrong (in this book, it's Philip Guston). The fact that his career was centered upon TIME Magazine is a testament to his sense of populist principle, and evidence that there really are no other brilliant art critics out there. (I had my hopes for Dave Hickey way back when, but...) Most normal people -- especially those of the "you call that art?!?" school of thought -- should give this book a go. You'll be smarter and happier strolling the museums, and you'll also be more cynical.
August 5, 2007
Robert Hughes does an excellent job at connecting several political movements, wars, and philosophical theories to several modern art movements. The book flows naturally through the major art movements of the the 20th century. Hughes ultimately attributes all modern art to the construction of the Eiffel Tower. A must read for modern art enthusiasts.
March 13, 2008
Great text about the history of modern art, from the influence of the impressionists forward. It is fun to read, and does a good job of correlating the history of a given time to the ideology of a movement in art. If you think you don't like modern art, read this book!
August 6, 2011
I was introduced to this book by my Art History professor. For anyone who has ever looked at modern art and said 'I don't get it', this book is for you. Hughes explains the cultural, political and societal factors that caused the modern art movement and why it matters.
September 1, 2021
Robert Hughes makes writing about art an art in itself. His passion for visual arts is clearly communicated to the reader and, though the book sacrifices depth in favour of breadth, his intimate knowledge of the vast majority of the artists he discusses is unquestionable. This book is similar to Ken Clark’s Civilisation in a number of ways, but mainly in the way it surveys a specific period of art history and describes the work of some of the most influential artists of the time, in order to address an over-arching theme. For Clark, it was the idea of art as the great civiliser; for Hughes, it is an exploration of the departure of modern art from the romanticism and realism which preceded it.
This is not a very accessible book. Hughes expects a lot of his readers, and he frequently touches on matters of cultural import, historical events and social concepts which one might not be too familiar with. This is a good thing - it is enriching to follow these corollaries - though it had an impact on the book’s pacing in my readthrough (though this is definitely dependent on your knowledge of these concepts).
Hughes also captures the timelessness of art which is ironic given the modern avant-garde which, he describes, has done so much to call this into question. This timelessness is different to the timelessness of scientific inquiry however. In his own words:
After reading the book, I was struck by impact that sex has had on modern art. Maybe I was naive to not have considered this before, but Hughes lays this bare (pun intended). The relationship with sex is, predictably, not straightforward; from Picasso’s seemingly contradictory infatuation with, and fear of, women (of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, “…the stares of the five girls are concentrated on whoever is looking at the painting...by putting the viewer in the client’s sofa, Picasso transmits, with overwhelming force, the sexual anxiety which is the real subject of Les Demoiselles. The gaze of the women is interrogatory, indifferent, or as remote as stone...nothing about their expressions could be construed as welcoming, let along coquettish. They are more judges than houris”) to Munch’s warped beliefs about sex as being “in all senses but that of procreation, inherently destructive.” Hughes describes works of art which, on the surface at least, have less complicated relationships with sex, like Meret Oppenheim’s metaphor for lesbian sex Le Déjeuner en fourrure (Luncheon in fur), where “the action it describes, the artist bringing her lips to a hairy receptacle full of warm fluid [makes it] the most intense and abrupt image of lesbian sex in the history of art."
This information is steadily fed to the reader throughout the book, with some of it being more accessible than in other passages. The effect of totalitarianism and communism on art, the effect of Toulouse-Lautrec’s “extreme self-consciousness” on his art, Van Gogh as being “the hinge on which nineteenth century Romanticism finally swung into twentieth-century Expression” - these are all topics which Hughes describes in a fluid and direct manner.
The book was published in 1980, and Hughes’ anxiety about the future of art is plain to see. What comes next? I will leave it to Hughes to address that question.
This is not a very accessible book. Hughes expects a lot of his readers, and he frequently touches on matters of cultural import, historical events and social concepts which one might not be too familiar with. This is a good thing - it is enriching to follow these corollaries - though it had an impact on the book’s pacing in my readthrough (though this is definitely dependent on your knowledge of these concepts).
Hughes also captures the timelessness of art which is ironic given the modern avant-garde which, he describes, has done so much to call this into question. This timelessness is different to the timelessness of scientific inquiry however. In his own words:
“Value rises from deep in the work itself - from its vitality, its intrinsic qualities, its address to the senses, intellect and imagination; from the uses it makes of the concrete body of tradition. In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity. Not even the greatest doctor in Bologna in the seventeenth century knew as much about the human body as today’s third-year medical student. But nobody alive today can draw as well as Rembrandt or Goya”
After reading the book, I was struck by impact that sex has had on modern art. Maybe I was naive to not have considered this before, but Hughes lays this bare (pun intended). The relationship with sex is, predictably, not straightforward; from Picasso’s seemingly contradictory infatuation with, and fear of, women (of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, “…the stares of the five girls are concentrated on whoever is looking at the painting...by putting the viewer in the client’s sofa, Picasso transmits, with overwhelming force, the sexual anxiety which is the real subject of Les Demoiselles. The gaze of the women is interrogatory, indifferent, or as remote as stone...nothing about their expressions could be construed as welcoming, let along coquettish. They are more judges than houris”) to Munch’s warped beliefs about sex as being “in all senses but that of procreation, inherently destructive.” Hughes describes works of art which, on the surface at least, have less complicated relationships with sex, like Meret Oppenheim’s metaphor for lesbian sex Le Déjeuner en fourrure (Luncheon in fur), where “the action it describes, the artist bringing her lips to a hairy receptacle full of warm fluid [makes it] the most intense and abrupt image of lesbian sex in the history of art."
Le Déjeuner en fourrure, 1936
This information is steadily fed to the reader throughout the book, with some of it being more accessible than in other passages. The effect of totalitarianism and communism on art, the effect of Toulouse-Lautrec’s “extreme self-consciousness” on his art, Van Gogh as being “the hinge on which nineteenth century Romanticism finally swung into twentieth-century Expression” - these are all topics which Hughes describes in a fluid and direct manner.
The book was published in 1980, and Hughes’ anxiety about the future of art is plain to see. What comes next? I will leave it to Hughes to address that question.
December 22, 2022
Untranslated French phrases, occasional poetry excerpts, piles of adjectives, slender connections, lucid insights, wonderful illustrations, and swipes at Warhol and Koons (the latter dismissed in half a sentence): what's not to love? I actually learned a lot, because it goes much deeper into the late 19th through late 20th century Western art history narrative than what I was familiar with from a couple of classes in college. This copy is a keeper, for reference or coffee table flipping. And someday I look forward to watching the television series on which it's based, because word is Hughes can be just as snarky in front of the camera as he is on the page.
July 19, 2011
A wonderful, and relatively brief history of European and American Modernism. As Hughes admits in the Introduction, the scope of his narrative is limited. Originally conceived of as a BBC documentary, he mostly sticks to names you know. However, he brings an attention and a reverence to each that creates a vivid impression of these artists' individual and collective contributions to the movement. Rather than monolithic, this history and its figures are very consciously human in scale.
Where in his criticism, Hughes is often overly snarky, here he seems genuinely excited by his material and the feeling is often contagious. This is not to say that he cannot be snide or dismissive here (he is particularly so in the chapter on Modernist architecture), but more so that he often seems more measured and principled in his judgments. Wherever he has an agenda, he is candid about it, and in several places persuades.
Where in his criticism, Hughes is often overly snarky, here he seems genuinely excited by his material and the feeling is often contagious. This is not to say that he cannot be snide or dismissive here (he is particularly so in the chapter on Modernist architecture), but more so that he often seems more measured and principled in his judgments. Wherever he has an agenda, he is candid about it, and in several places persuades.
September 17, 2007
the best introduction to modern art i know of. down-to-earth, witty and opinionated writing that manages to survey the main currents of modernism without the dumbing-down that surveys often resort to.
June 2, 2008
Hughes is a great writer! He makes art history enjoyable and undestandable...I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in modern art movements and their origins.
November 25, 2008
If you can pair this with the DVD of the 1980s PBS show, do it. You will soon be hearing Hughes' voice with every cranky insight.
February 10, 2013
Great, apart from his assertion that the last true work of political art was Picasso's Guernica.
October 9, 2012
Educated, loving, pithy and aggressive description of aspects of the history of Modern Art. Great read.
July 26, 2016
Wonderfully opinionated! Even if you can't always agree with Hughes, his writing pulses with energy and the ability to make you see the world differently.
July 25, 2020
Gratia artis: anyone who was commissioned to write an eight hour TV series about the evolution of modernism with accompanying book and refers to artists suckled by “television...the nipple of electronic kitsch” wins the Mercury Prize for biting the hand that, hands down. Thus Robert Hughes’s breezy, clever and occasionally explosively funny tie-in sets the pace, and it’s exhilarating.
Ever been frightened by modern art? You needn’t be, for here in eight BBC episodes and with a book that was no doubt described as ‘sumptuously illustrated’ at the time, Hughes cuts through the mythology and the crap. Literally, in one or two instances.
The scope is crisply set out - 1900 to the late 20th century, with a reminder of how old - and this book is of course no spring chicken itself - some of this art is: “You have to pinch yourself to remember that when the paint was fresh on the Delaunays and the Cubist Picassos, women wore hobble skirts and rode around in Panhards”. The continued fuss and irritation caused by stuff people really should have adjusted to by now, would be a more accurate title but give one a headache to read from the spine. As if to underline, Hughes grimly describes the evolving of modernism to postmodernism as “Cézanne and Seurat to Gilbert and George in under a hundred years” - a perhaps unfair swipe at the taciturn twins, particularly as he’d previously spoken favourably of Piero Manzoni, and he made art with his own shit too.
Much of the history and analysis that make up the preceding chapters of The Shock of the New seem to be leading inexorably to Hughes’s witty and angry deconstruction in the last section/episode of the art world as a whole since 1970. Artists have always had patrons and money which once talked now shrieks like a siren, but it’s the whole ecology of taste, galleries, art experts and the machine-like production of creators (including “the worst generation of draughtsmen in American history” thanks to art schools where life drawing lessons consist of students rolling around on the studio floor, flicking each other with paint). This has, he theorised, produced a stasis, and may lead to a fresh flowering of talent as the millennium approaches - but oddly, considering the positive and optimistic tone of much of the preceding text, he doesn’t seem to hold out much hope. What did he make of animals in formaldehyde, paintings with elephant dung, a tent and an unmade bed? Sadly, Hughes is no longer with us to say, and there was no further update to this after the 1991 revision, but his commentary on Carl André’s Exposition VIII, the Tate’s notorious pile of bricks, is worth noting.
I don’t know. So much of the cultural world now seems in thrall to stateless oligarchs with cash to burn and favours to buy, yet at the same time the recoil from sponsors like oil-squirters BP, or that family who’ve got millions of Americans hooked on deadly narcotics, suggests there’s hope, although accusations of elitism and snobbery don’t rest entirely in privately funded activity: I cringed a little at the two from Tate on the news yesterday trumpeting the reopening - “we didn’t want it to be like Tesco”; well, no dear, but I’d like to have seen you eating a Francis Bacon during lockdown. Sometimes they don’t help themselves, do they?
The impact art can have on politics and the world more generally is widely contested - Robert Morris’s closing of his exhibition in New York “until Nixon and Kissinger stop bombing Vietnam” is easy to mock, as Hughes sardonically notes: “[they] did not ground the B-52s”, and similar artists’ ‘interventions’ in the cruel world have gone derided, or worse, unnoticed. We shall continue to have these debates so far from being dated, Hughes seems on the money if you’ll allow. Forty years on, the broad scope and accessibility of The Shock of the New retains its value and we await the next renaissance in hope and trepidation.
Ever been frightened by modern art? You needn’t be, for here in eight BBC episodes and with a book that was no doubt described as ‘sumptuously illustrated’ at the time, Hughes cuts through the mythology and the crap. Literally, in one or two instances.
The scope is crisply set out - 1900 to the late 20th century, with a reminder of how old - and this book is of course no spring chicken itself - some of this art is: “You have to pinch yourself to remember that when the paint was fresh on the Delaunays and the Cubist Picassos, women wore hobble skirts and rode around in Panhards”. The continued fuss and irritation caused by stuff people really should have adjusted to by now, would be a more accurate title but give one a headache to read from the spine. As if to underline, Hughes grimly describes the evolving of modernism to postmodernism as “Cézanne and Seurat to Gilbert and George in under a hundred years” - a perhaps unfair swipe at the taciturn twins, particularly as he’d previously spoken favourably of Piero Manzoni, and he made art with his own shit too.
Much of the history and analysis that make up the preceding chapters of The Shock of the New seem to be leading inexorably to Hughes’s witty and angry deconstruction in the last section/episode of the art world as a whole since 1970. Artists have always had patrons and money which once talked now shrieks like a siren, but it’s the whole ecology of taste, galleries, art experts and the machine-like production of creators (including “the worst generation of draughtsmen in American history” thanks to art schools where life drawing lessons consist of students rolling around on the studio floor, flicking each other with paint). This has, he theorised, produced a stasis, and may lead to a fresh flowering of talent as the millennium approaches - but oddly, considering the positive and optimistic tone of much of the preceding text, he doesn’t seem to hold out much hope. What did he make of animals in formaldehyde, paintings with elephant dung, a tent and an unmade bed? Sadly, Hughes is no longer with us to say, and there was no further update to this after the 1991 revision, but his commentary on Carl André’s Exposition VIII, the Tate’s notorious pile of bricks, is worth noting.
I don’t know. So much of the cultural world now seems in thrall to stateless oligarchs with cash to burn and favours to buy, yet at the same time the recoil from sponsors like oil-squirters BP, or that family who’ve got millions of Americans hooked on deadly narcotics, suggests there’s hope, although accusations of elitism and snobbery don’t rest entirely in privately funded activity: I cringed a little at the two from Tate on the news yesterday trumpeting the reopening - “we didn’t want it to be like Tesco”; well, no dear, but I’d like to have seen you eating a Francis Bacon during lockdown. Sometimes they don’t help themselves, do they?
The impact art can have on politics and the world more generally is widely contested - Robert Morris’s closing of his exhibition in New York “until Nixon and Kissinger stop bombing Vietnam” is easy to mock, as Hughes sardonically notes: “[they] did not ground the B-52s”, and similar artists’ ‘interventions’ in the cruel world have gone derided, or worse, unnoticed. We shall continue to have these debates so far from being dated, Hughes seems on the money if you’ll allow. Forty years on, the broad scope and accessibility of The Shock of the New retains its value and we await the next renaissance in hope and trepidation.
April 16, 2022
A brilliant tour of 20th century art. Hughes treats his subject with respect, exploring and explaining, while also making demands of it, to justify and demonstrate its contribution. Cubism and the Impressionists are given their due as efforts to respond to their environment, while there mere innovation is never treated as sufficient. You'll find a fine guide to understanding and making sense of modern art, while also a deep and powerful critique of many of its more indulgent, detached nonsense.
Hughes is an intellectual pugilist in the way Australia used to regularly produce. He seems to have read and seen it all, but -and this is essential - he still has a deep passion for the subject. His arguments rarely feel like efforts at cleverness, and instead are attempts to better grapple with the subject at hand, looking at it from this way and that, setting it in context and stripping it out, in order to properly seize it up. This is a deeply elitist book in the very best sense of the term, it always demands the best of its subjects, and invites you to celebrate it when it finds it.
It is eminently readable and astute. I filled at least a dozen pages of my reading notebook with quotes from this book. Many about the social world as much as about the art and artists who are his focus.
Strongly recommended.
Hughes is an intellectual pugilist in the way Australia used to regularly produce. He seems to have read and seen it all, but -and this is essential - he still has a deep passion for the subject. His arguments rarely feel like efforts at cleverness, and instead are attempts to better grapple with the subject at hand, looking at it from this way and that, setting it in context and stripping it out, in order to properly seize it up. This is a deeply elitist book in the very best sense of the term, it always demands the best of its subjects, and invites you to celebrate it when it finds it.
It is eminently readable and astute. I filled at least a dozen pages of my reading notebook with quotes from this book. Many about the social world as much as about the art and artists who are his focus.
Strongly recommended.
May 27, 2022
This is an excellent summary of the evolution of the modern art movement between the late 1800s and late 1900s. I think Hughes did an amazing job in bringing together all the different schools of thought across the world, linking art concepts to other important contemporary thinkers in various fields (philosophy, music etc). I also felt that the chronology was well-handled, and I never felt lost as the accounts were always contemporaneous and followed chronologically, which is no mean feat when trying to introduce various ideas across the world in a single chapter.
The writing was also extremely clear, and Hughes avoided the use of jargon whenever necessary, to make it more accessible for readers. I thought this was an excellent book, and would go so far as to say it's canonical in the scholarship of modern art. Definitely read this if you want to learn more about modern art, as it's so accessible and clear!
The writing was also extremely clear, and Hughes avoided the use of jargon whenever necessary, to make it more accessible for readers. I thought this was an excellent book, and would go so far as to say it's canonical in the scholarship of modern art. Definitely read this if you want to learn more about modern art, as it's so accessible and clear!
January 21, 2024
The BBC introduced, with Kenneth Clarke's "Civilization", the idea of giving one person an opportunity to speak their mind on a given subject which mattered greatly to them over a series of TV episodes. This gave us "Civilization", Bronowski's "Ascent of Man", Attenborough's "Life on Earth", and Hughes' "The Shock of the New." These were personal testaments. People today seem to want these things to be synoptic and bona fide "true". Instead, they are idiosyncratic and in some measure subjective. Each is one person telling you what they think and believe about a subject with a weird honesty that in the more self-conscious age in which we live is difficult to find. That doesn't make all the opinions expressed here by Hughes "correct", but it does make those opinions interesting and compelling. Hughes never gave a damn about the "general consensus" on artist X or Y. He looked for himself, and drew his own conclusions. When it comes to art, so should we all.
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