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Midweek Miscellany

A few remembrances of art critic Robert Hughes, author of The Shock of the New, Nothing If Not Critical and Things I Didn’t Know among others, who died earlier this week aged 74…

Maria Bustillos for The Awl:

“The Shock of the New”… brought him fame, and no wonder. It’s a marvel: a solid education in post-Impressionist modern art of the 20th century in the form of a luscious entertainment stretching over hours and hours; awareness, scholarship, wit, and a visual sensitivity matched for once by an equally sensitive sense of language, all delivered in a brisk, whip-smart, slightly clipped Anglo-Australian voice of enormous power and beauty.

Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker:

Hughes believed in modern art with something close to innocence. Although “The Shock of the New” is in many ways an account of the tragedy of modernism—the tragedy of Utopias unachieved, historical triumphs made hollow, evasions of market values that ended by serving them—that tragedy is more than set off by the triumph of modern artists.

Jonathan Jones for The Guardian:

Hughes believed in modern art, whose story he told more eloquently than anyone else ever has. He was not some stick-in-the-mud. But he compared art in the 1900s with the art of today and observed that even our best do not deserve comparison with the pioneers of modernism. This is a truth that is hard to refute. The words of Robert Hughes have cost me a lot of sleep.

I’m sure there are many more… What a loss…

See also: obituaries in The Guardian,  New York Times, and The Telegraph.

Fertilizer — The always fascinating Jeet Heer reviews Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See by Françoise Mouly, for the LA Review of Books:

the deeper value of Blown Covers is the insight it gives us into Mouly’s editing process. Editing is a very difficult art to write about, being by its very nature invisible, and based on thousands of tacit, unstated backstage decisions. Blown Covers shows that every idea that makes the page requires an editorial environment where new concepts are constantly being generated. Since the rejection rate is high, this can be frustrating for artists, but Mouly gets around this problem in part by allowing her artists to go all out during the brainstorming sessions, so that even if the idea doesn’t make the cover there is still the pleasure of daring to think of something new and fresh. The failed ideas are the necessary fertilizers of successful covers.

And finally…

Collective Unintelligence — James Gleick, author of The Information, on Autocorrect, for the New York Times:

In the past, we were responsible for our own typographical errors. Now Autocorrect has taken charge. This is no small matter. It is a step in our evolution — the grafting of silicon into our formerly carbon-based species, in the name of collective intelligence. Or unintelligence as the case may be.

 

2 Comments

    • Dan

      Hi Antoine. Thanks for you comment. I have it on good authority (thanks Peter!) that the cover is by the brilliant Jamie Keenan.

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