Robert Hughes Never Mellowed  by Timothy Noah | August 8, 2012
If too much of what you learned about the world in your
adolescence came from Time magazine during the 1970s—as was the
case with me—you encountered, in Time’s pages, exactly one great
writer. That was the art critic Robert Hughes, who died this
week. You’d think a then-flush outfit like Time would put more
than one great writer on its payroll, but for whatever reason it
did not. Hughes’s hiring was apparently some sort of glorious
accident.  Hughes wrote for TNR, too, and TNR''s "The Plank" is
paying tribute by reprinting an excerpt from an essay Hughes
published here in 1990 on the decline of the New York art scene.
(The complete piece can be found here.) I thought I’d add a
snippet from Hughes’s final book, Rome: A Cultural, Visual, And
Personal History (2011), which I happened to be reading when
word came of his death. The passage, a brief meditation on the
legacy of the Crusades, removes all doubt (if any existed) that
Hughes remained pugnac