| t h e s a l o n i n t e r v i e w |
why the curator of the Whitney is a "twit" and why painting will never die. + + +
| BY GARY KAMIYA | it's hard to imagine a critic further from Puritanism -- which he sees running through American culture to the present day -- than Robert Hughes. At 58, America's most famous art critic has the ruddy, weather-beaten look of a man who has lived thoroughly. Bluff and hearty in speech, irreverent and penetrating in manner, he exudes wit, erudition and a certain devil-may-care attitude that doesn't conceal his abiding passion for his work and the many things he loves. Let's start by talking about "American Visions," your new book and TV series on the history of American art. What led you to undertake this magisterial endeavor? Magisterial endeavor -- more like biting off more than you can chew! When I finished "Shock of the New" in 1981, I thought the natural next subject would be American art, because there it was. The subject was just lying around on the ground. You know what American broadcasting is like -- nobody had tried it. That's not really surprising, if you consider the way that American television is structured. On the one hand, you have the networks, who don't give a fuck about this stuff, and on the other hand you have PBS, which doesn't have any money, and whose natural reaction to any idea is to set up a committee to investigate its correctness. Anyway, my only hope seemed to be the BBC. I worked up a set of synopses, for what I then thought of as a 10-hour series, and sent it off to the BBC. Well, this being 1982, the first wave of MTV-mania was breaking over the BBC, and all these kids in BBC-2 thought that the didactic miniseries was a dinosaur. So it languished. Then it went to PBS. They said, "Oh great, we think this is a great idea. Just go out and raise the money and we would be happy to produce it." Just go out and come back with a vast sum of money. The sum was large, but not by Hollywood standards. The thing cost about $4 million. Which buys you what, two minutes and 10 seconds of "Waterworld"? So I then had a completely fruitless time kissing ass at a few corporate boardrooms. I got nowhere. The years passed, and finally 'round about 1993 the BBC said, "All right, let's give it a go." But we had to cut down the series somewhat because it was obvious that we weren't going to get enough money from anybody for 10 programs. So we took it down to eight -- not without a bit of loss, but eight was better than nothing, certainly. Where did you feel that loss most? In the postwar area, really. It is crazy to try to do one film that does both abstract expressionism and pop. But we had to. Quite early on in the planning, we decided that there was no point in trying to do a formal history of American art, an encyclopedia. This would be ridiculous. You have to tell a story, and you can't just read the telephone directory, as it were. Therefore the question around which the whole thing was structured was, "What can we say about Americans from the things that they've made? What do these tell us about American fantasies, hopes, fears, aspirations?" So this relieved us from the task of being encyclopedic, which would have been dull anyway. Would you have wanted to have had more of the modern period and less of the earlier work? Because so much early American art floundered in its derivative phases? There always has been this feeling that up to 1950 American art was derivative. I don't agree with this. I don't think that Marsden Hartley was crawling around on the ground so that Jackson Pollock could become a butterfly! I mean, from Copley onwards, from the 1760s onwards, America has fairly consistently produced really interesting artists. Not to mention furniture and stuff like that. The thing is that you just get more artists as the history goes on. You get more activity. I would have preferred the series to reflect this. I would have liked to have had one program which was basically about abstract expressionism and its offshoots, and another one which was going to be about media-based art, pop and various media-based things associated with it in the 1960s and '70s. Would you have included performance art? Only up to a point. You can't spread your fan too wide. Take photography. People expect the series to take on all the burden of omission that American television has committed for the last 10 years. There should long ago have been a proper series on American photography. But what can you do? You would need eight programs to do photography. I've had people, including Garry Wills, say, "Gee, why did you leave film out?" Well, get me couple of zillion dollars and I'll do a series on film, too. But as things stood, we couldn't even quote from films because the production companies wanted so much money. There was one point when there were a few film quotes I wanted. One was John Ford's derivation from Frederick Remington -- Ford would consciously set up and compose shots in terms of Remington's paintings in "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon," and so forth. There were a few things like that which were owned by the Warner side of Time Warner. And Time Warner was the co-producer of this thing. So you had an in? NEXT PAGE: A PRINT ASSHOLE TO THE END |