A definitive eight part series on the rise and fall of the modern art movement presented by critic Robert Hughes. | dHNfcmEtQ3BSanRaSlE
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00:00 (airplane engine roaring)
00:03 We finish where modernism began,
00:07 at the foot of the Eiffel Tower,
00:08 and perhaps the etiquette now demands
00:10 that I should try and prognosticate
00:12 about what is coming next.
00:14 Well, I won't, because I don't know.
00:17 History teaches us one certain thing,
00:19 that critics, when they fish out the crystal ball
00:22 and start trying to guess what the future will be,
00:24 are almost invariably wrong.
00:26 I don't think there's ever been such a rush
00:28 towards insignificance in the name of the historical future
00:31 as we've seen in the last 15 years.
00:34 The famous radicalism of '60s and '70s art
00:36 turns out to have been a kind of dumb show,
00:39 a charade of toughness, a way of avoiding feeling.
00:43 And I don't think we are ever again obliged
00:45 to look at a plywood box or a row of bricks on the floor
00:48 or a videotape of some twit from the University
00:50 of Central Paranoia sticking pins in himself
00:53 and think, "This is the real thing.
00:56 "This is the necessary art of our time.
00:58 "This needs respect, because it isn't,
01:01 "and it doesn't, and nobody cares."
01:05 The fact is that anyone except a child can make such things
01:09 because children have the kind of direct, sensuous,
01:12 and complex relationship with the world around them
01:14 that modernism, in its declining years, was trying to deny.
01:19 That relationship is the lost paradise
01:21 that art wants to give back to us,
01:23 not as children, but as adults.
01:25 It's also what the modern and the old have in common,
01:27 Pollock with Turner, Matisse with Rubens,
01:30 or Braque with Poussin.
01:32 And the basic project of art is always
01:34 to make the world whole and comprehensible,
01:37 to restore it to us in all its glory
01:39 and its occasional nastiness,
01:41 not through argument, but through feeling,
01:43 and then to close the gap between you
01:47 and everything that is not you,
01:49 and in this way, to pass from feeling to meaning.
01:53 It's not something that committees can do.
01:56 It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements.
01:59 It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way
02:04 between a sense of history and an experience of the world.
02:08 This task is literally endless,
02:12 and so although we don't have an avant-garde anymore,
02:15 we're always going to have art.
02:17 (dramatic music)
02:21 [Music]