Robert Hughes on Slow Art

So here I was, thinking about Slow Food, knitting, and Slow Art, and it turns out that, as always, I've been living under a rock. Way back in 2004 the great Australian critic Robert Hughes, in an address at the Royal Academy, spoke scathingly of the vagaries of fashion in art, the damage done by speculation, and the role that the venerable institution might play in stopping the rot. Most notably, he spoke about drawing:

The camera, if it's lucky, may tell a different truth to drawing - but not a truer one. Drawing brings us into a different, a deeper and more fully experienced relation to the object. A good drawing says: "not so fast, buster". We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

In another Guardian Unlimited article, on Updating the Shock of the New, Hughes speaks of the importance of drawing skills, referring to Portuguese / British artist Paula Rego: "and she draws superbly, which her sisters across the Atlantic have either forgotten or never learned to do. Like Kiefer, but unlike most painters at work today, she does art with a strong political content that never turns into a merely ideological utterance."

It is worth noting that while Hughes espouses the value of drawing, he isn't necessarily suggesting a return to Classical art. On the contrary, he speaks highly of abstractionist Sean Scully and mentions David Hockney's photographic collages. And I just loved his comment about Jeff Koons' oevre: "it is such an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks." Brilliant.