Caravaggio - documentary by Robert Hughes (1975) 3 of 7

• published: 12 Oct 2011
• views: 10433

In 1996, Robert Hughes wrote: there is a Spanish saying, Mestizaje es grandeza: mixture is greatness. It comes from deep historical experience. In the 8th century AD Spain was invaded and largely conquered by the Arabs. Between the 12th and 15th centuries, the south of Spain, Hispano-Arabic Andalusia, became a brilliant multicultural civilization, built over the ruins of ancient Roman colonies, mingling Western with middle-Eastern forms, glorious in its lyric invention and adaptive tolerance. What architecture surpasses that of the Alhambra in Granada, or the Great Mosque of Cordoba? The passage of cultural meaning through mixture is so universal that the only perfect example of a monoculture is probably Easter Island, one of the most isolated specks of land on the globe. When Europeans arrived there in 1722 they saw, with astonishment, its hundreds of great stone trunks and heads, weighing up to 80 tons -- the moai, as they were called. What did they mean? How had they got there? The Rapanui, the native inhabitants, could offer no clue. They knew no more about their meaning or technology than the Europeans did. At first, therefore, the visitors assumed that the Rapanui had arrived after the death of an earlier megalithic culture which had created them. But this was wrong. The Rapanui's ancestors had indeed created them, between 1000 and 1500 AD. But marooned for centuries in complete isolation and in a stage of frequent internal war, deprived of all outside contact or stimulus, the natives gradually forgot their cultural heritage: nothing provoked them to explain, defend or remember it. It was as enigmatic to them as to the Europeans. Perfect cultural purity led to perfect cultural sterility. This is a useful fable to remember when people talk about the impurities visited upon high art by the supposed intrusions of popular culture. For it is the lesson of modernism that these so-called intrusions from below have led to great clarifications, to expansions of language, to leaps of vividness that an immutably Mandarin culture, fixated on its own notions of high art alone, cannot produce. But they have also tended to create a game without self-evident or settled rules, where, as the artist Fernand Leger once said, "No tribunal exists to settle the dispute over beauty." Hence the conservative longing for a modernism that excludes the demotic and the vernacular. But such a modernism doesn't fit our cultural experience any more. There's no contradiction attached to liking both Tiepolo and Doonesbury, both country-and-western and Mozart. The task is to distinguish, without snobbery or condescension, between the good stuff, the absolute crap, and everything that lies between within each of the myriad forms that make up our cultural mosaic. And this, I take it, will be a matter of some heated argument between you all over the next day or two.