The Shock of the New | show | 1980 | Official Trailer - video Dailymotion

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A definitive eight part series on the rise and fall of the modern art movement presented by critic Robert Hughes. | dHNfcmEtQ3BSanRaSlE

Transcript

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]

The Shock of the New | show | 1980 | Official Trailer

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