The Australian has run the best article so far on Robert Hughes' Agustinian-sounding memoir, Things I Didn't Know:Five years later, the rest of New York continues to wallow in pained debate about how the victims of the attacks should be memorialised and what kind of buildings should be erected next to the void at ground zero. Not Hughes, though.UPDATE: Someone I know found this link to an excerpt in the Times of London, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2320105.html
He is happy that what he calls that "great ugly scaleless box of a thing" no longer disfigures the New York skyline.
He never liked the twin towers, and he likes even less the endless "dickering" over 9/11 monuments and memorials. "Can you imagine how little would have happened to London after the Blitz if the same obsessive concentration on loss and sacrifice were placed upon every building that the Luftwaffe flattened?" Hughes asks.
He concedes that the initial shock of the towers' collapse was "deeply discombobulating". The post-9/11 view from his window was like "looking into a familiar face with a piece bashed out by some maniac with a baseball bat, which of course was the case". "But do I miss it aesthetically? Obviously not."
This was fighting talk from a New York resident on the day most of the city was weepily observing the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on the US. Yet Hughes has made a career out of the unflinching honesty of his opinions, as several prominent British artists know to their cost. As the vastly influential art critic for Time magazine for more than 30 years, Hughes was never much impressed with Brit Art celebrities such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and he is not about to change his mind now he is ageing and injured.
Full disclosure: I have met Hughes, around the time he wrote about my work on the NEA and PBS issues rather critically, so I can't say he's exactly a friend--but he's a very good writer. I assigned his American Visions to my students in the American Culture course that I taught in Moscow. So I imagine this book is pretty interesting, too...You can buy a copy from Amazon by clicking here:
