American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. - book reviews

"A [i]billet-doux[/i] to America" is how Robert Hughes describes "American Visions," his history of the nation's art which appeared last spring as a television series and in work form. Indeed, the John Donne -- derived opening chapter title -- "O My America, My novel Founde Land" -- makes it uninjured like a lovesick paean. on the other hand O, he is an ambivalent lover! In the true first sentence -- "I have lived and worked in the United States of America for a little more than a quarter of a hundred now, without becoming an American citizen" -- Hughes prominently asserts his independence from his have affection for object. In ensuing episodes and chapters of "American Visions," this Australian who in 1970 came to the United States from Britain to be Time magazine's art critic shares the one and the other his enthusiasm for what the book's subtitle calls "the Epic History of Art in America" and his disapproval of its popular state. And the closer this vision of American art achieves to the present, the narrower it becomes and the more Hughes's commentary, oftentimes caustic, turns corrosive.

If sole for the monumental achievement of creating eight one-hour television programs and then a 635-page volume the author, his producers, publishers and sponsors be worthy of the appreciation of anyone who cares about having American art reach a wide audience. Following his 1981 television series upon modernism, "The Shock of the New" Hughes for years sought support for a history of American art. It wasn't until 1993 that he received funding, ironically from a foreign source, the BBC whose initiative eventually l to Time Warner's participation. The fresh York City public television station Thirteen/WNet was also a partner in the production.(1) Like The concussion of the New before it, the companion work was published by the prestigious literary house Alfred A. Knopf (in an initial race of 100,000 copies). Containing abundant lush reproductions, and printed upon heavy coated paper, it's a substantial tome. Considering the step of corporate support, it's no surprise that one as well as the other series and book were given a replete PR rollout. By mid-May, single could hardly flip open a periodical or make go round on a public television or radio station without encountering a profile, commentary or review of Hughes and his "American Visions."

And the throw is presented very much as Hughes's vision. Not alone was he its conceptualizer, writer, entertainer and narrator, but at the beginning of the couple the series and the work he prominently asserts his possess subjectivity -- claiming a perspective that is not sole an outsider's, but one that is, as the title of his 1990 collection of art writing lay it, "nothing if not critical." We already know that Hughes considers a great deal of of contemporary American culture to be decadent -- it's a viewpoint he's been promulgating for years in forms as various as the devilish "satire in heroic couplets" of his 1984 "Sohoiad" in the novel York Review of Books ("The qualify of the age decrees at once/That none may count the Dancer from the Dunce") to the grave polemic of the three essays published in 1993 as agriculture of Complaint: The Fraying of America. In the latter, which addressed broad social issues, he complained about by what means the politicization of the arts and a preoccupation with sexed racial and ethnic identities has debared America's rich "diversity of its tribes" from discovering a cohesive "vast belonging to all ground." When, that same year, the BBC committed its support to "American Visions," they were signing upon with a writer who had mov from the limelight of a ready art critic to the spotlight of a humanist "public intellectual."

While he clearly has an ax to grind, Hughes is canny enough to garment it in entertainment television's format of imaginative visual and aural editing. The series appears designed to seduce the indifferent viewer who at any point of time might be tempted to flip the channel. Within the first sum of two units minutes of the initial episode, "The Republic of Virtue," we are immersed in the whirring slot machines and spinning roulette wheels of Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, where Hughes seizes the opportunity to point on the outside how the pseudo-classical columns supporting this "popular palace of middle class sin" belong to an American tradition of adopting classical forms in order to materialize republican ideals.

From the entrance Hughes avoids a lecturer's stance. His liking for declarative bluntnes his passionate confidence and fiendish putdowns ("[Jeff] Koon couldn't carve his name in a tree") display a showmanship natural to TV To counteract the immobility of art facts the series takes advantage of the television camera's portability. for a like reason when, in the first episode, Hughes discusses early British and Spanish colonists we hit the road in his render free of access convertible and get a house tour from the popular resident of a 17th-century southwestern adobe, lay out too much time trouping around living simulacra of colonial villages for excessive details upon their lifestyles then (Puritan) and now (Shaker), and diocese late 20th-century Quakers flee the camera. In between, our entertainer expounds on present-day America's unusual religiosity in comparison to other Western nations. (This is an aspect of what historians call "American `exceptionalism,'" and individual of the underlying themes of the series.) We also hear reminiscences by means of Amish quilters and attend an auction of their creations while Hughes praises them for "refuting the idea that folk art is just innocent social bird song"