David BolesThe Avant-Garde Never Left: Robert Hughes Described the Revolution and Then Declared It Over
Robert Hughes wanted it both ways. In the final moments of “The Shock of the New,” his landmark 1980 BBC series on modern art, he declared the avant-garde dead and then, in the same breath, described its beating heart. He told us that the radical project of art was finished, that the market had swallowed it whole, that the institutions had filed its teeth down to nothing. And then he said this: the task of art is “done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.” That sentence is the avant-garde. Hughes described the thing he claimed to be burying.
The error is architectural. Hughes defines the avant-garde as a historical phenomenon: a set of movements, manifestos, gallery provocations, and collective shocks running roughly from the Impressionists through the Abstract Expressionists. When those movements exhausted themselves, when Warhol turned the commodity into the artwork and the artwork into the commodity, Hughes concluded that the engine had seized. The machine stopped. What remained was individual feeling, which he treated as a consolation prize, a lesser thing than the grand project of collective radical rupture.
But this gets the history backward. The movements were never the avant-garde. The movements were the institutional afterlife of individual radical acts. Manet did not paint “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” because Impressionism existed; Impressionism exists because Manet painted it. Duchamp’s urinal at the Society of Independent Artists generated Dada’s program, rather than the reverse. The individual act of creation came first. The movement was the footnote. Hughes, a man of enormous erudition, mistook the footnote for the text.
Consider what it means to make something that did not previously exist. A painter before a blank surface, a writer facing an empty page, a composer confronting silence: in each case, the creator is refusing the world as given. The world presented itself as complete, as finished, as requiring no additions, and the artist said: no, it is not enough. I will add to it. I will change it. That refusal is the most basic form of radicalism available to a human being. It precedes politics, manifestos, and every collective movement that has ever organized itself around a shared aesthetic vision. The individual act of creation is the ur-rebellion, and it has never stopped.
Hughes was right that the market absorbs, that institutions neutralize, that celebrity distorts. Where he was wrong was in believing that absorption, neutralization, and distortion constitute victory over the radical impulse. The market can only absorb what has already been made. It is always late. It arrives after the fact of creation, and by the time it has processed one radical act, another has already occurred somewhere else, in some studio or notebook or rehearsal room that the market has not yet found. The gap between creation and commodification is where the avant-garde lives, and that gap never closes, because creation always moves faster than consumption.
The argument here rests on structure, on the relationship between making and taking, rather than on any romantic claim about the special nature of artists. To make is to assert. To take is to react. The distinction separates creation from reproduction. Reproducing an existing emotional template, as a greeting card does, requires craft but generates no new form. The radical act lives in the imposition of a form that did not exist before the artist labored to bring it into being. The avant-garde, properly understood, describes the permanent condition of anyone who creates in this way, who produces rather than acquires, who generates form rather than purchasing it. Hughes, trapped in his art-historical periodization, could not see this because he was looking for the avant-garde in galleries and auction houses, which is rather like looking for water by studying plumbing.
The problem is also one of scale. Hughes was measuring radicalism by its social effects: did Cubism change how people see? Did Surrealism alter consciousness? Did Abstract Expressionism redefine the relationship between viewer and canvas? These are valid questions, but they all assume that the avant-garde must register at the cultural level to count. A playwright in a basement workshop in Queens, producing a piece of theatre that twelve people will see, is no less engaged in the radical act of creation than Picasso was when he painted “Guernica.” The scale differs. The act does not. If the avant-garde requires mass cultural disruption to qualify, then Hughes is right and it is finished. If the avant-garde is located in the act itself, in the decision to impose form on formlessness, then it is as alive as it has ever been and can never be otherwise.
Hughes’s own quote betrays his position. He says art’s task is “to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument, but through feeling.” Set aside for a moment the contestable claim that art works through feeling rather than argument (a dichotomy that would have puzzled Brecht, Sondheim, and Athol Fugard alike). Focus instead on the word “restore.” To restore the world is to insist that something has been lost, that the version of reality currently on offer is incomplete or broken, and that the artist’s labor can repair it. That insistence is oppositional, standing against the status quo and declaring: the world as you have arranged it is insufficient, and I will fix it with my hands. Call that whatever you like. I call it the avant-garde.
There is a further irony in Hughes’s lament that art’s “new job” is “to sit on the wall and get more expensive.” He is describing the art market, not art. The confusion is telling. By 1980, Hughes had spent nearly a decade at Time magazine, embedded in the very institutional apparatus he was critiquing. He knew the dealers, the collectors, the auction houses, and watched as art became a financial instrument before his eyes. But the view from inside the market is not the view from inside the studio. The artist making work at three in the morning, unsure whether anyone will ever see it, unsure whether it is any good, driven by the compulsion to articulate something that has no other available form of expression, is not thinking about auction prices. That artist is the avant-garde, and has been since the first person pressed a hand against a cave wall in Lascaux and said, in effect: I was here, and the world looked like this.
Hughes deserves credit for his honesty; he could see the degradation and named it without flinching. “The Shock of the New” remains a staggering piece of criticism precisely because Hughes refused to sentimentalize what he saw. But his conclusion was wrong, and it was wrong because he confused the institutional history of radical movements with the human capacity for radical acts. The movements have shelf lives, but the capacity to create does not expire. Every time a person creates something from nothing, the avant-garde begins again. It has no end because creation has no end. And the market, however powerful, however relentless, will always arrive too late to stop it.
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