Nothing If Not Critical.

Into this miasma rides the redoubtable Robert Hughes like a paladin of old. His new volume of essays, Nothing if not Critical, collected over the past decade, is surely one of the finest art books of the fall season. It is the sort of text that reminds us how to look at art with fresh eyes, what it was that got us interested in art in the first place. Everything that a critic must be able to do, Hughes does with effortless bravura. He can mount an intellectual argument with lean and lethal agility, and he can succumb to meditations of an almost baroque grandiosity. He is one of only a few critics in America who has heard of Raphael, and he seems uncannily able to write authoritatively about Holbein and Poussin with one hand, while, with the other, skinning alive such unappetizing deadbeats as Warhol and Jeff Koons. Coming from Down Under, Mr. Hughes has an indurated sense of privileged alienation from the twee-ness of the art world. Sometimes this is so strong and arrogant that you begin to hear the flat, broad tones of the Australian twang protruding, with naked effrontery, from under the elegant rhythms of his expert prose. side from a few lapses in judgment, Hughes, the art critic for Time magazine, is overwhelmingly on the side of the angels. One can only admire his virulent antagonism to the cant and hypocrisy of the SoHoites: "Schnabel's work is to painting what Stallone's is to acting-a lurching display of oily pectorals." Jean-Michel Basquiat's meteoric career, ending in his death from a heroin overdose, "was a tale of a small untrained talent caught in the buzz-saw of art-world promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, critics, and, not least, himself." At the same time, he can rise brilliantly to the task of describing painters like Chardin. Mr. Hughes is the best art critic in America at the moment, and it is not too great an exaggeration to say that an age that could engender him is not as far gone in the way of corruption as we often believe.

From across the sea comes the work of another angel of enlightenment, this time the eminent Italian art historian Federico Zeri.