Robert Hughes was a favorite writer of my mother's. She loved his mind, the series on PBS - The Shock of the New. I found his "Nothing if Not Critical - Selected Essays on Art and Artists," published in 1990 on her bookshelves. The introduction resonated with my sense of decay (cultural, societal, personal). Hughes regarding art:
"In the eighties the scale of cultural feeding became gross, and its aliment coarse; bulimia, that neurotic cycle of gorge and puke, the driven consumption and regurgitation of images and reputations, became our main cultural metaphor...The inflation of the [art] market, the victory of promotion over connoisseurship, the manufacture of art-related glamour, the poverty of art training, the embattled state of museums - these will not vanish...slumps do happen, and we are in one now." pages 6-7
Seventeen years later we're still slumping. Then this a page later:
"New York's loss of vitality as an art center runs parallel to events in the larger culter of politics, economics and mass media. It is part of a general aging of the
Unargued persuasion - as the with Petraeus and Crocker continue about
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