A man holding a narrower, classical definition of art will also hold some bias towards those who don’t (many moderns and post-moderns). Hughes’ harsh eye passes over landscapes full of landscapes discussing the Self-as-Landscape.

Dear Reader, forgive the injustice of this crap I found after thirty seconds of searching ‘Self-as-Landscape‘.

When did art become so much about fame, celebrity, and promotion, anyways?:

Hughes on Warhol (paywall):

‘To most of the people who have heard of him, he is a name handed down from a distant museum-culture, stuck to a memorable face: a cashiered Latin teacher in a pale fiber wig, the guy who paints soup cans and knows all the movie stars.‘

I look forward to seeing you at my upcoming One-Man-Show: You will be free to make eye-contact as you process around me. I will be sitting Native-American-style, half-nude on the floor of MoMA, with industrially-made glassware suctioned over my mouth.

Scorn me. Censure me. Make love to me with your gaze.

As I babble incoherently into the vacuum, losing consciousness, I will also regress into the empathetic purity of childhood.

Should you lift my body up the weight of (H)istory becomes clear.

Should you leave me passed-out on the barren, linoleum floor, the shame of inaction implicates you in Oppression.

A little more on Hughes’ on Warhol via The Spectacle of Skill: Selected Writings of Robert Hughes.

Full post here:

‘Its silver-papered walls were a toy theater in which one aspect of the sixties in America, the infantile hope of imposing oneself on the world by terminal self-revelation, was played out. It had a nasty edge, which forced the paranoia of marginal souls into some semblance of style, a reminiscence of art.‘

As someone often looking to take a classical, or ‘outside-the-modern’ perspective, such goring-of-the-sacred-60’s-oxen is refreshing. The pursuit of (S)elf is long-past tiresome. The pose of the too-Self-aware-nihilist haunts many a coffee shop these days.

‘Become an empty vessel, mass-produced on a shelf. Let fame pass through you, empty as the wind itself.’

Maybe the 60’s generation was as much a walling-off from the past, as it was a fruitful opening inwards towards (S)elf-Actualization.

Perish the thought.

In looking for some criticism of Hughes’ on Warhol, unsurprisingly, I found Google’s algorithm suggesting the following piece at the top of the list (freedom is next):

‘The problem is that authentic modern art – of which Warhol is unarguably one of the greatest practitioners, even if you don’t much care for his work – operates according to non-aesthetic narrative principles, and is therefore headed in a quite different direction from the quest for classical, museum-quality ‘beauty’. Modern art is about connecting with the experiential landscapes which some artists are able to conjure up through their artworks, and this connectivity functions according to theatrical and narrative principles rather than aesthetic ones. Modern artists are revealing to the viewer worlds they have discovered, and then, using their artworks and artforms, inviting you to experience them as your own. A Warhol ‘Marilyn’ is not an ersatz Velasquez  – even if Andy thought it was, and wanted it to be: a ‘Marilyn’ – like any or all of his other works – is an invitation to a theatrical extravaganza of transgendered and drug-addled camp nihilism, spiked with glitz and glamour and celebrity, and dialogue reduced to a cultivated vacuity. This performative inversion of normative values – Warhol’s real theatrical ‘art’, in words, pictures and behaviour – is quite other than the kind of cognitive deficiency Hughes though he was dealing with. Truth be told it is Hughes who turned out to the stupid one, wholly unable to recognise the transgressive artistry all around him, and wholly unable to make the transition from an orthodox classicism – the type of lumpen conception of pictorial art any bonehead can come up with –  to the new world order.‘

Egads!

Everyone’s a Self, you see, and every Self deeply wants fame and recognition, or at least to be fresh, new and ahead of the curve in the marketplace.

Or do you?

Don’t set your sights too high, this pickled basketball seems to be saying, for your aspirations, too, may be empty as the liquid void in which this Spalding hovers.  Gaze upon your hoop dreams within the silence of the ideal… hallowed as you temporarily are within this modern secular temple called…MoMA.

The marketplace delivers us that which we want, enriching our lives and fulfilling our desires but that’s not really what we want, is it?

Do you long for the days of unabashed American consumerism? Are you nostalgic for nights lit only by a soft, neon glow on the underbellies of clouds? Return to a time when America broadcast its brash, unironic call to the heavens.