Learning to weep in a museum

It is reasonable to assume that this is the first instalment of Robert Hughes’s autobiography. After 400 pages he takes us to his appointment as Time Magazine’s chief art critic in 1970, so The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore and Goya lie in the future. Some might think that his choice of title gives a hostage to fortune. Australians are notoriously members of the Quiz Kid Fraternity — Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and the rest of us who have much smaller claims to fame. But Hughes plays fair throughout: he modifies his assured assertions on art and society with humiliating instances of his ignorance, over- confidence and poor judgment. His renunciations are epiphanies in reverse. Memories of writing for Richard Neville’s Oz are pure mea culpa. The price he paid for involvement in the excesses of play power in the Sixties was his first marriage, to a middle-class Australian hippy with a destructive taste for sex and drugs, who tormented him just when he was making his name in journalism and television. This misery, however, set him on his life’s quest to esteem artists for their accomplishments and complications, and to challenge the claims of any of the simple-minded avant-gardes.

The book begins with his description of a near-fatal accident in West Australia in the late Nineties. A fierce ambivalence about his native land goes on throughout his account of his childhood and early maturity. After the crash he told the authorities that the occupants of the car he collided with were ‘low-life scum’ (they had agreed to give false testimony for money). Soon he became an object of hate — ‘rich East Coast prick’, ‘elitist’, ‘Tall Poppy’ — the usual epithets were applied to him. The Australian press can be merciless. He was so badly injured that he spent months in hospital and was finally forced to answer criminal charges.