Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 6, 1993 TAG: 9306060205
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO Book page editor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Amid the loud and often incoherent voices that are part of the public debate over "cultural values," Robert Hughes speaks with reason and an informed attitude. It's about time someone did.
The essays in this short, powerful book were first presented as lectures at the New York Public Library. In them, Hughes, an art critic by profession, attacks and deflates the arguments of both the left and the right. At heart, Hughes is a sort of cultural libertarian _ though he believes in strong government support for the arts - who tempers freedom of expression with "a scrupulous adherence to high artistic and intellectual standards."
That point of view allows him to attack the right-wing zealots who tried to censor the Robert Mapplethorpe photographs and then to criticize the photographsthemselves as lacking any real artistic value. (In that same essay, though, he, like so many folk in the art world, mistakenly uses "curate" as a verb.)
When his just as perceptive. He notes, for example, that much of the partisan political debate in this country is empty us-vs.-them posturing. "The right needs a left: if the battlements of Western culture were not under continuous siege, what would happen to the defenders?" He's also
correct in pointing out the hypocrisy of much of the so-called "Pro-life" movement. While some well-meaning individuals doubtless are motivated by sincere beliefs, others have different aims. "When the person laying siege to the abortion clinic declares himself to be `Pro-Life,' we may be sure that he's not worrying about the life of the scared pregnant teenager; what is at stake is not so much the survival of the fetus, as the issue of how much male control over the bodies of women this society will allow."
But don't dismiss Hughes as a conventional liberal. His criticisms of the political left are even more pointed. His views on speech codes, Afro-centrism and narrow-minded multiculturalism are well-taken. He's just as tough on the larger issues: "Nevertheless, Marxism is dead; that part of history is over. Itscarcass will continue to make sounds and smells,as fluids drain and pockets of gas expand; Europeans who were once Communists will continue to be reborn as ultra-nationalists, like the genocidal former apparatchik, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia."
On other matters that haven't received as much attention and public comment recently, Hughes is illuminating. His comments, for example, on the changes in funding sources for public broadcasting are well taken. So are his views on popular misconceptions about the history of slavery in the world and in America.
Hughes supports his arguments with with a broad and unusual assortment of sources, from the poetry of Auden and Derek Walcott to a recently discovered 18th-century autobiography, "Journal of My Life" by Jacques-Louis Menetra, a French glazier.
In the end, "Culture of Complaint" is a bracing, controversial, thought- provoking critique of our rowdy country. It will anger all the right people and deserves a wide readership.
by CNB