HUGHES YOU CAN USE

The final artwork is a project by James Turrell — a huge volcanic crater on a ranch in the desert. Turrell has smoothed out the rim by causing 200,000 cubic yards of earth to be bulldozed out of the way. He plans Contributing editor David Gelernter, our art critic, last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about free speech and the Internet. more construction, but his crater for now is a vast empty bowl. In presenting this work, Hughes never says the word ” vacuous,” and as he tours the crater he chats respectfully with the artist, or volcano architect, or whatever you want to call him. But as we depart Turrell’s masterpiece and Hughes launches his closing speech, we have those vast-empty-crater images echoing in mind. Hughes tells us that modern American culture is at sea and adrift. His words have tremendous force, because he has just shown us a picture of the sheer emptiness that is passed off nowadays as art. He has shown us today’s U.S. art as a vast pompous zero, a region where a devastating explosion seems to have taken place, destroying everything.

Hughes is opposed to the pious, pose-striking elite that manages culture in modern America, and has managed it into the ground. He denounces “narrow, preachy, singleissue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement.” He shows us a piece of modern self-infatuated nonsense-art, explains the thinking behind it, and adds, “but, so what?” He tells us that artistic inventiveness “is flagging badly in America now.” He lays down acid denunciation as naturally as a thrush warbles. He keeps the audience at a distance, and skeptical reserve is his greatest strength. It is also his greatest weakness. Blame is his medium, but on the other hand he is awkward at praise. He crosses three centuries of American culture with the nervous intensity and allover scowl of a scavenging coyote.

He shows us a lot of art along the way, and his taste is good. He pauses at nearly all the right places — at Jefferson’s architecture and L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, at Homer and Eakins and Saint-Gaudens, Hopper and Stuart Davis, de Kooning and Joseph Cornell. He makes clever and interesting comments. The domed library at Jefferson’s University of Virginia is “the round cranium of the university, literally its brain.” The mansion-builders of the gilded age dreamed of halls “sheathed in rose alabaster the color of rare steak.” Georgia O’Keefe’s bleached skulls “verge on kitsch surrealism,” and her fame “has more to do with legend and gender politics than with her actual achievement as an artist.” An automobile in a cartoonish Grant Wood painting has “Walt Disney wheels.” He tells us these things in well-made sentences that rise and fall gracefully. “The culture hero [his voice smoothly mounting] was the engineer, the builder of bridges, the creator of machines extolled by [easing us back down] the poet Walt Whitman.” His flat Austr-eye-lian accent perfectly complements these sharp, firm, Roquefort sentences.

Evidently this is one high-class wine-and-cheese party of a TV series, the host hard-eyed but amusing, his feelings for art never gushy or embarrassing, in fact nearly always restrained and chaste. Naturally he is good on such restrained, chaste achievements as New England colonial folk-architecture and Amish quilts. He says of Amish quilts that no one would ever call them cute, a mighty compliment as Hughes figures it. When he says of Edward Hopper that ” he is a painter I trust absolutely,” you know that Hopper must indeed mean a lot to him, and that he wishes a painter to be as rocksolid as a Hartford insurance company. One of his best segments is about Hoover Dam. Hughes standing foursquare atop a monumental, austere, and currently unfashionable American object is Hughes at his best. He projects, respecting the art he loves, the deep and clear-eyed regard of a potato farmer for a superior sI)ud.

It is no surprise that, in consequence, words sometimes fail him. Consider Early Sunday Morning, the Edward Hopper masterpiece of 1930: a row of storefronts on New York’s Seventh Avenue with apartments above, a barber pole and a hydrant out front. Hughes begins his spiel standing next to the painting as it rests on an easel, a fine idea because it allows us to grasp the picture’s scale. But the spiel itself conveys little. He remarks on the painting’s stillness, silence, and air of expectancy. He makes the rather abstract claim that a sense of time is conveyed although no story is implied.

But he doesn’t mention that the painting is sad, dry, and wistful — and how surprising that is, given that there is nothing in it but a row of buildings. He doesn’t mention that the narrow windows and doorways are blank and black — that you can’t see in, which makes for a vaguely ominous effect; that the gold lettering on the shop-windows turns out to be unreadable, vaguely ominous again; that the continuous, gap-free row of buildings seems to wall you out and crowd in on you simultaneously; that the barber pole slouches as wearily as you picture Hopper himself slouching. (He was a tall, dry man who worked hard.) Hughes tells us that Hopper has lingered over the details but not that the brick facade, which is painted more or less without detail, feels warm and dull and exactly like brick.

It happens repeatedly: He sets everything up just right and then, instead of making a pass at the girl, murmurs something about the parking meter and rushes off. Face to face with an object of affection, he has a tendency to go Prufrocky. He explains the symbolism in Homer’s Veteran in a New Field but tells us almost nothing about the aesthetic value of the painting. (In eight hours of TV, he doesn’t make time for a single Homer watercolor.) He leads us to the brilliant 1950 de Kooning painting called Excavation and delivers a clinical bedside commentary that reaches a climax on some scratchy black lines that look like floating teeth, and don’t matter very much. “Dirty cream” is an unsatisfying description for these color-fields that are more steel-yellow than dirtywarm and are lit by vivid little explosions of yellow and red and blue and lilac. (In eight hours of TV there is no time to discuss de Kooning’s achievement as a colorist.) The Shaker-design segment centers less on Shaker objects than on Hughes’s swapping vacancies in a furniture gallery with an actual Shaker. (Hughes: “There’s no way of improving on the design.” Actual Shaker: “No. It’s as simple as can be.”) Elsewhere, Hughes informs us that “everyone wants Shaker objects, but very few want to lead the Shaker life.” Astonishing. Yes, he finds Shaker objects beautiful, but he doesn’t want to talk about it; he brings to art criticism a sensitive, James Dean-ish sullenness it never even knew it was missing.

On second thought, what kind of party is this, anyway? The host’s mind seems to wander. He says things he couldn’t really mean. He refers to the ” naive enthusiasm” of industrial designers of the 1930s and shows us (without bothering to identify them) two locomotives designed by Raymond Loewy, who was not naive and whose locomotives are not naive. The occasional platitude skitters across the lawn like trash someone forgot to pick up. The musical interludes are ominous, histrionic, Orffish. The images are sometimes confusing or out of kilter. Why are all those flags around the Washington Monument at half mast? How come lower Manhattan, in the black-andwhite footage that kicks off the 1930s segment (to the accompaniment of mood- enhancing radio reports of the Crash), is conspicuously dominated by the 1972 World Trade Center? Nice try, but the Philadelphia river Eakins painted is not pronounced “Shool-kill.” Great art critics shouldn’t have to worry about details like that, but their editors should.

You hear the same troubling, lackadaisical note as the series closes. Hughes tells us that American culture is in deep trouble, that today’s U.S. art is largely no good. But he doesn’t mention how astonishing these facts are, and how nearly paradoxical-America’s being wealthier and more powerful than ever before, fitted out with technology that brings art vividly before the public, and with a public that is mad for art in turn, that jam-packs the museums, goes wild in the souvenir shops, stands patiently on the endless lines leading to the big-deal shows, and buys Robert Hughes books by the cartload. You cannot shrug it all off with the banal observation that “all cultures decay” and that America “may be no exception to that as we move towards the year 2000.” It is here at the close, by the way, that Hughes’s non-Americanness tells most, when he convinces us that the crisis is grave but has no ideas about how to fix it.

In short, American Visions often disappointed me. Even the brilliant conclusion is not as brilliant as it might have been. But I recommend it anyway and am glad I watched it.

Every now and then, Hughes pauses to give “nostalgia” a swift kick in the ribs, as if it were a poodle trailing him home. But the most important thing about Hughes is that he is a throwback.

It used to be that art journalists (like reporters in general) approached the world as skeptics and not true believers; as a rule they had no interest in promoting “diversity” or “multiculturalism” or “equality” or anything else, except maybe themselves. They wasted lots of time worrying about good prose and very occasionally got themselves worked up over such topics as patriotism or justice, but that would pass. They disdained the sappy and the humorless. They distrusted sincerity and earnestness. They disliked credulous people. They were un-nurturing. They laughed outright at stupid art, and (not infrequently) at good art, too. They smoked, they drank, they ate fried eggs for breakfast. They whistled at girls, except if they were girls.

In an uncaring society such as theirs, being an artist was no easy task. Many artists went around with bruised feelings, and some suffered bouts of dangerously low self-esteem. Things were tough all over — and yet, inconveniently, the Neanderthal American culture of 50 years ago was brilliant and ours is a hole in the ground. This is terribly unfair; perhaps the New York Times could propose corrective legislation. In the meantime, the impious voice of Robert “Big Scowl” Hughes is music from the past. Watching him work is like switching on your car radio and finding that you are accidentally tuned to 1946. You might not like all the words — I certainly didn’t — but it does a person good just to listen and hum along.

Contributing editor David Gelernter, our art critic, last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about free speech and the Internet.