Robert Hughes and Andy Warhol’s ‘stupidity’

Robert Hughes — the Australian art critic — described Warhol as ‘as one of the stupidest people I’d ever met in my life. Because he had nothing to say.’ Hughes was dismissive of much of modern art because, like many other old school aesthetes, he never managed to understand it. And over the course of the ‘my life’ in question, Robert Hughes (1938–2012) established himself as perhaps the foremost art critic in the western world; a not insignificant achievement, though something of a let-down when you realise that he wasn’t exactly slugging it out with hundreds of other critical titans; and that other than the presence of his own lumbering hulk in the foreground, the pond he was waddling around in was almost empty. And the idea of Hughes as an ‘art interlocutor’ — interpreting all things artistic for those who don’t know what’s going on — is also considerably less than it seems, because if you stop to examine his torrents of confident non-sequiturs it soon becomes apparent that much of what he had to say was hardly ever about the art itself, but more about art’s place in culture and society. They are not one and the same. <a href="https://jakob-zaaiman.medium.com/robert-hughes-and-andy-warhols-stupidity-e9fd8404f71f">Visit Now</a>