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Title: Culture of Complaint : The Fraying of America by Robert Hughes ISBN: 0-446-67034-0 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.71 (14 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Good cultural critique from a smart outsider
Comment: It's strange that, during the 1990s, the two people who have thought most clearly about American culture and politics aren't American. One is the British journalist Christopher Hitchens; the other is the Australian art critic Robert Hughes.
Why should a Hughes have such an advantage over the native literati? In a sentence, he comes from a culture that is brutally direct. Australians, in print and otherwise, don't care much for euphemism. Hughes writes without the stream of caveats, pre-emptive apologies, and other bad-faith gestures that fill most books on the "culture wars." This most un-American way of writing sheds considerable light on this overdone subject, and at his best Hughes verges on Tocquevillean.
It's a shame that some clown at a publishing house rewrote the subtitle as "A Passionate Look into the Ailing Heart of America." The new subtitle represents just the type of therapeutic pap Hughes is out to squash. The original ("The Fraying of America") said it much better, and with fewer words.
Rating: 4
Summary: Hughes delivers again
Comment: Robert Hughes is one of my favorite writers on history and art, and I also enjoyed his book, The Fatal Shore, a history of the Botany Bay colony in Australia. Hughes has always had an interest in modern art (many of you may recall his great TV series, "The Shock of the New," back in the 80's), and since much of modern art has come out of America, perhaps it's no surprise he wrote this book, which takes a broader look at American culture.
Hughes's devastating critique of the foibles of modern American politics, political correctness, racial and gender issues, pop culture, post-modern criticism, and graduate liberal arts education, to name a few of the things he takes aim at, is articulate, entertaining, and deadly accurate. Unlike the post-modern critics whose obscure and turgid prose he skewers, Hughes knows how to write, and he puts that to good effect in this book. Cultural ideas, icons, and events, both high- and lowbrow, don't fail to escape his purview and his petard. (He even has an entertaining discussion of religion and masturbation on pages 56-57).
Hughes's book reminds me of another important work, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, by sociologist Daniel Bell, in which he noted America is a country where seemingly paradoxical cultural traits often find happy marriages and perhaps even happier divorces. And as Hughes points out, our increasingly politically correct Zeitgeist threatens to underwhelm us all with the ever more blanched and bloodless cornucopia of American pop culture.
Overall, this is a fun romp through the cultural minefield of modern America, and I'd actually give it 4.5 stars if I could. If we listen to Hughes, perhaps it won't become the sterile, cultural necropolis full of the "stuffed and hollow" men that T.S. Elliot wrote about in his famous poem, "The Wasteland."
Rating: 5
Summary: A call for skilled, complex, and eclectic thought
Comment: Granted, attacking contemporary America's cultural love for the debased, the self-indulgent extreme, the hapless and unskilled mediocrity as well as the insipid cults that have risen around exhalting the helpless victim, nurturing the stunted "inner child" and bandaging the wounded self-esteem seems too obvious.
Fortunately TIME Magazine Art Critic and writer extraordinaire Robert Hughes laces his acid-dripping pen with adroit observations and incredible verbal acrobatics in an all-out attack that provides hints of solutions and actual celebrations of all that is good in America.
Hughes pulls no punches and spares no prisoners as he lambasts (always with great aplomb and wit) extremism from both sides. Liberals and Conservatives receive broadsword swashes and pin-point snipes in equal measures. Hughes calls ultimately calls for true eclectism as opposed to multi-culturalism- a movement in his mind that wrongly excludes other cultures in favor of often fictious historical revisionism.
The rich bounty of American Culture, Hughes claims-the very culture that inspired him to leave Australia and settle in New York- lies in her melting pot of culture. America, in Hughes' expert eye, is a beautiful amalgamation of many cultures: European, Native, African, Spanish, Asian and so forth. He sees history as a complex organism made up of many diverse parts. Effective scholarship, debate and production must incorperate all while eschewing the demagoguery and finger pointing that tragically seems to prevail in so much public discourse.
Make no mistake,like any good critic or thinker, Hughes is out to pick a fight and he certainly challenges all comers. One may not agree with all of his points or supports, but that isn't the point. Hughes' number one objective is to confront American apathy with an electo-shock to the system.
In short, Hughes does indeed call for a certain brand of elitism in both art and public life. An elitism bred not of social class, race or economics but rather an hierarchy based upon skill, intelligence and vision.
THE CULTURE OF COMPLAINT will challenge the reader as well as entertain. A magnificent read.
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Title: Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists by Robert Hughes ISBN: 014016524X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 1992 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Goya by ROBERT HUGHES ISBN: 0394580281 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 11 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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Title: The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes ISBN: 0679728767 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 01 May, 1991 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America by Robert Hughes ISBN: 0375703659 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Barcelona by Robert Hughes ISBN: 0679743839 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 1993 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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