Was Robert Hughes Right About Basquiat?

Yesterday it was announced that former Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes passed away at 74. His perch at Time and a television series that sought to explain the development and history of modern art all served to make him better known than most art critics. L.A. Times writer Mike Boehm called him "a sometimes lacerating reviewer who may have commanded a larger audience than any other art critic in history."

Boehm's obituary tribute is packed with insight and a fitting summary of his life.

The critic rose to star status by introducing television audiences to the development of 20th century modernism in "The Shock of the New: A Personal View," an eight-hour series that ran in Britain in 1980 and the United States in 1981. Hughes became known for blasting new art-world luminaries such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and Jeff Koons, artists he felt exemplified the triumph of the marketplace and celebrity over the modernist creative standards he cherished.

His primary complaint: popularity shouldn’t be equated with quality. Boehm's piece goes on to say...

After Basquiat, who helped spearhead the entrance of graffiti-influenced painting into the museum world, died in 1988 of a heroin overdose, Hughes' critique ran in the New Republic under the headline, "Requiem for a Featherweight." Basquiat, he wrote, was "a small, untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of artworld promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, and no doubt to their future embarrassment, by critics."

Of this I will say more in a minute.

Hughes’ series, when I watched it this spring, stimulated a whole range of thoughts that coupled with other inputs including this one from Ken Burns’ Jazz when telling Artie Shaw's story.

The basic truth, Artie Shaw concluded, is that popular music has little or nothing to do with musical values at all. “I still wanted to play music and the audience was saying, ‘Play what you’re playing. Over and over. We like that.’ They never could understand that what they liked was something I did on my way to getting better. That record that they liked… became a millstone, became an albatross around my neck.”

So one question I have is this: was Jean-Michel Basquiat doing graffiti art on the way to getting better at developing and expressing a vision? Or was it a means to another end: more cash for stash? As Basquiat biographer Phoebe Hoban demonstrates, Basquiat was exploited, and others became millionaires from that exploitation.

Hoban begins one of her chapters with a pointed Robert Hughes remark. “What strip mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.” Quantity is what made people rich, and fast. When Picasso died in 1973 a journalist declared that Picasso had produced 4,000 masterpieces in his lifetime. Warhol retorted, “I can produce 4,000 masterpieces in a day.” Indeed, the formula was a good one for both Warhol and Basquiat, the veteran cynic and the fresh face from the streets.

The art world isn’t the only scene that got bent in the Eighties by the influx of capital. Sports had become equally corrupted. In his last book before passing Howard Cosell stated that sports gambling was a 250 billion dollar a year business. Losers get exploited to line the pockets of bookies and gaming houses.

Even collegiate sports has been stained by it. College football is big business and the schools know it. A primary reason the Penn State scandal failed to come to light sooner than it did was because so much was at stake. Penn State's reputation had to be preserved in order for the golden milk to keep flowing.

It has frequently been noted that art can often be a mirror of the times. H.R. Rookmaaker takes this premise as a given in his Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. For Hughes, the whole art scene itself served as a mirror of something bigger than itself, and his magnification lens explored every detail of it.

On the other hand, what if Hughes was wrong about Basquiat? I find his paintings fascinating, liberated, original. How important is the training Hughes references in his critique? Can training override instinct and ruin originality by firming up the lines that we’re not permitted the color outside of?

I really don’t have answers, just more questions, some of which might never have occurred to me had it not been for Robert Hughes.