The Shock of the New
Highly opinionated, always readable, wildly loved and reviled, the Australian-born art critic with a dash of the street punk in him, Robert Hughes, has died. The Telegraph‘s tribute captures Hughes’ contradictory qualities, labeling him “obnoxious, flawed, incomparable.”
Hughes once famously said that being a critic was “like being a piano-player in a whorehouse; you don’t have any control over the action going on upstairs.” He’s perhaps best known for his book The Shock of the New, a provocative account on the evolution of modern art. He spun off a 1980 BBC TV series from the book, and we present the first episode, The Mechanical Paradise. You can find many other episodes on YouTube, offering a crash-course on 20th-century art. H/T Five Feet of Fury fivefeetoffury.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByIlGYQxUMY&w=420&h=315%5D
