Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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``Things I Didn't Know'' by Robert Hughes; Knopf ($27.95)
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Robert Hughes was the chief art critic for Time magazine for 30 years. He has written several acclaimed books on art, including "The Shock of the New" (1980), a near-textbook on the state of modern art, and, in 2003, a revelatory biography of Goya.
Strange, then, that in almost 400 pages of his autobiography, Hughes gives us only snippets of insight into works of art - perhaps 40 pages worth in total.
And these snippets often are tossed off as interesting asides while he's busy making another point.
While describing, for instance, the life-changing experience of seeing great works of art buried in mud after a devastating flood in Florence in 1966, Hughes observes off-handedly, "Some new works of art have value of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value."
A depressing and provocative claim, surely, to any lover of new works, and worse news to any collector of them.
But anyone reading "Things I Didn't Know" hoping for a primer on how to see art through a master critic's eyes will be as disappointed as that unfortunate collector.
What the reader finds instead is a masterful critique of one man's circuitous, at times bumbling, route to artistic success.
Hughes isn't interested in telling us how he looks at art or why his insights might be better than the next art critic's - which they are. Indeed, he abhors such pretensions.
Rather, Hughes recognizes his own story as singular and personal - and he's often struck by the irony that he, with virtually no credentials outside of an enthusiastic amateur's interest, wound up in a job of such power and fame.
(Time magazine, Hughes reminds us, "mattered a lot more in those days than it does now," before it embarked on its current "policy of cretinous impressionism.")
That he happens to tell this story in laconic prose coated with humor as dry as a fine Soave makes for a reading experience to be savored just as one would relish seeing the "Laocoon" at the Vatican or Michelangelo's "David" for the first time.
From his boyhood in a charmless Jesuit school in art-starved Australia to his vicarious encounters with London's swingin' '60s subculture by way of his "deranged alley cat" of a wife, Danne, Hughes has led an interesting and not always enviable life.
Hughes survived a near-fatal car crash in western Australia, followed by a just-as-lethal onslaught of damning Australian media coverage, from which he emerged a scarred but wiser man.
He took languorous and professionally unproductive treks through Italy, signed contracts for books he couldn't finish and blew off Time's original offer of employment in a hashish-induced stupor.
Luckily for him, Time called back.
And luckily for us, Hughes never lost sight of his ambitions to write it all down.
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(c) 2006, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.
