PLAGENS: Are you aware that you’re considered the second most conservative critic out there, after Hilton Kramer? HUGHES: I am? Well, at least I’m to the left of Louis XIV, and Kramer’s not. PLAGENS: You don’t like many artists under 50. HUGHES: I don’t think the age of the artists one likes is the criterion for conservatism. I’ve never thought of my job as one that seeks and slots young talent into the art world. So what really gets you off in the contemporary scene? PLAGENS: Ann Hamilton and Mary Lucier. Do those names mean anything to you? HUGHES: No. Sorry. They aren’t artists who pile up beer cans like Cady Noland, are they?
PLAGENS: For sheer, white-hot change in an attitude about art, Warhol’s one of the best artists of the 20th century. HUGHES: I think you give him too much credit. What he did was to institutionalize ironic art. I prefer Claes Oldenburg’s large-scale, erotic, haptic vision. I remember when I saw some huge, sewn, slatternly-looking french fries on some gallery floor in ‘67, I wanted to eat one. PLAGENS: You never liked Warhol’s films, I gather. HUGHES: Oh, I enjoyed “Chelsea Girls” back in ‘68, in some underground cinema, sitting on a cushion with a girl. I sat through it because it was clear I wasn’t going to get anywhere with her if I didn’t.
PLAGENS: I hear people say, “Of course, Hughes doesn’t like art by gays, because he’s such a macho Australian guy.” HUGHES: Really? The fact that one is a macho Australian guy who likes fishing doesn’t mean one doesn’t like gays. I could give you a list of gay trout fishermen if you want. PLAGENS: “Essentialism” says gay art can be understood only by gays, black art by blacks, etc. What are a couple of old hers like us to make of it? HUGHES: I think essentialism is mostly crap. I was in Australia recently and talked to a bunch of young artists-some gay, some straight. None of them have this hang-up about me being some phallocentric old Hemingway figure waving his fishing rod at the young and the angular.
PLAGENS: There’s a 15th century painting of Saint Francis by Giovanni Bellini in the Frick that I love. The more I think about art like that, the tougher it is to go out looking for a beautiful needle in a drab contemporary haystack. HUGHES: Yeah, but saying you can only nourish yourself on Bellini is like saying you only listen to the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, and you’d never listen to Little Richard.
