Slow art

With the death of the critic and historian Robert Hughes, a great beacon has gone out in the art world of the West. I take his absence personally, not because I knew the man (I met him only once), but because he was such an invigorating and perceptive guide to excellence. Of course I didn’t agree with everything he said, but he wrote like an angel (possibly a fallen one) and he certainly made you think and even revise your opinions. Although I was aware that he’d been unwell for a long time, I was unprepared for his death at the age of 74, and feel robbed of the books he didn’t write. What happened to the second volume of his memoirs, and what else might he have got around to writing?

Among the various tributes and obituaries I’ve read, the only one to come near the truth of the man was Adam Gopnik’s in the New Yorker. Other commentators stressed Hughes’s combative street-fighter stance, his memorable put-downs, his witty TV persona, his bikes and leather jackets. Only Gopnik talked about his ‘enormous vulnerability’. I witnessed that when I interviewed him in 1996, and I don’t think it was just because he had a hangover. (He probably didn’t.) He was erudite, opinionated, funny and immensely sympathetic. I wanted to talk to him all day, because he didn’t just hold forth but also listened, though I was mostly asking questions. It was this sensitivity, to people and places but especially to art, that made him the brilliant writer he was. I’ll miss that, but at least we have the dozen or so books he did write. And the TV programmes.

One of Hughes’s later crusades was for ‘slow art’, for ‘art that holds time as a vase holds water; art that grows out of modes of perception and making, whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; an art that isn’t merely sensational or that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely ironic, that hooks into something deep-running in our natures.