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Ben Lewis, award-winning writer, director and presenter of programmes including Art Safari, reflects on the power of The Shock of the New.
Shock of the New is the reason I fell in love with modern art. Shock of the New is the reason why I think so much contemporary art is awful.
Shock of the New is the reason I wanted to study art history. Shock of the New is probably the reason why my stuffy old art history professors at Cambridge didn't think I was very good at it.
Shock of the New is the reason I wanted to make television. And Shock of the New is the reason why I knew I could never be that confidently-opinionated, pieces-to-camera-type presenter of arts programmes of which there are hundreds, but among which Robert Hughes is the only decent example.
 See The Shock of the New on BBC Four
I was 14 years old when I watched it, hypnotised. It was brilliant, glittering, passionate, intellectual. Here was a leery, sneery, fat, camp Australian talking about art. Whatever would they think of next? The series operated within the language of the bog-standard BBC format, the landmark-series with its super-convincing intellectual presenter who would tell the viewers in fewer than 10 convenient 60-minute instalments exactly what to think about...Modernism. But, but, but.
Shock of the New is actually a full frontal attack on the old-fashioned snotty-nosed approach to art, in which the critic admired the unimpeachable timeless genius of artists.
Hughes took a startlingly contemporary approach, dividing up his series thematically - machines, utopia, war and so on. The connoisseurship of Kenneth
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Clark and Huw Weldon, packed with endless value judgments about art, ("This extraordinary porcelain vase...") was swept aside, and replaced by a sociological history of art. Hughes continually related the works of modern artists to the historical moment in which they were created - so Hughes |
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Art historian Kenneth Clark
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argued that the first aeroplanes had as much impact on Cubism as Cezanne and the Post-Impressionists.
This was the very latest art history, but it was also something more than that - a series of films in which a montage of images tell the story and more than the story. You know that within the first 10 minutes - when the first film cuts from a silhouette of the Eiffel tower to an early rocket with a similar profile. Here we go. Blast off.
Years later I studied art history at Cambridge. My historical approach to art history did not go down very well, and my professors spent two years vainly trying to teach me connoisseurship - the ability to distinguish between Donatello and Scuola di Donatello. I survived by reading Robert Hughes' excellent collected essays, Nothing If Not Critical, in which he debunked the terrible painters of the 1980s. When, 10 years later, I got the opportunity to make my own films about art I knew I couldn't be a connoisseur, but neither could I be the super-confident intellectual. I didn't want to compete with Robert. I tried to make an art series which was one level removed, in which I didn't have many opinions, or at least they weren't that important. Rather I wanted to go in search of things that the art world - that community of critics, galleries and artists - thought were important.
And although I don't like to foreground my opinions about art in Art Safari, I would like to underline my opinion of Shock of the New. It is the greatest series on art ever made and it hasn't dated by thirty milliseconds.
One reviewer described me in Art Safari as "a cross between Louis Theroux and Nick Broomfield in the body of Lloyd Grossman". I just wish that he had mentioned Robert Hughes.
See Ben Lewis's Art Safari on BBC Four
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