The people's critic

A review of American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America by Robert Hughes.

By Gary Kamiya

May 23, 1997 | Robert Hughes may not be the best art critic writing today, but he has certainly been the most necessary. For 27 years, he has used his mass-culture bully pulpit at Time magazine to remind Americans that, beneath the din and hammer of our jacked-up culture, quieter objects are worth regarding. It wasn't until the '80s, however, that the Australian expat really earned his adopted country's thanks. During that decade his writing -- accessible yet authoritative, boisterous yet refined -- cut like a scalpel through the mystification, hysteria and general gobbledygook that hung over the art world like a footnoted, greenback-stuffed cloud. Hughes wasn't responsible for the collapse of the wildly inflated '80s art scene -- the random movements of the aesthetic stock market saw to that -- but his astringency offered some blessed relief from the prevailing hype.

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