Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists

Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists

From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.
Â Â Â As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps Americaâ‚¬s most widely read and admired writer on art.Â In this book:Â nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject.
Â Â Â For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughesâ‚¬"astute, vivid and uninhibitedâ‚¬"on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists.Â He observes that Caravaggio was â‚¬Å“one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the sameâ‚¬Â; he remarks that Julian Schnabelâ‚¬s â‚¬Å“work is to painting what Stalloneâ‚¬s is to actingâ‚¬Â; he calls John Constableâ‚¬s Wivenhoe Park â‚¬Å“almost the last word on Eden-as-Propertyâ‚¬Â; he notes how â‚¬Å“distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.â‚¬ÂÂ He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic).
Â Â Â Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded.Â His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art marketâ‚¬"its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture.Â There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate.Â And as a finale, Hughes gives us â‚¬Å“The SoHoiad,â‚¬Â the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s.
Â Â Â A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains.
Country USA
Brand Penguin Books
Manufacturer Penguin (Non-Classics)
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9780140165241
Color Silver
ReleaseDate 1992-02-01
UnitCount 1
Format Bargain Price
EANs 9780140165241

Country	USA
Brand	Penguin Books
Manufacturer	Penguin (Non-Classics)
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	9780140165241
Color	Silver
ReleaseDate	1992-02-01
UnitCount	1
Format	Bargain Price
EANs	9780140165241

Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists

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