Australian greatest intellectual dissident about September 11and and World Trade Centre. "He is happy that what he calls that "great ugly scaleless box of a thing" no longer disfigures the New York skyline".http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/the-wrath-of-hughes/story-e6frg6z6...FROM the windows of the Manhattan loft he has inhabited for more than 20 years, Robert Hughes, Australia's most opinionated aesthete, looked out last week at the patch of sky where the World Trade Centre used to stand.
Hughes was looking out of this window on September 11, 2001, when a hijacked aircraft flew low over his SoHo building and crashed into one of the towers.
"There were a couple of BBC producers standing with their backs to the window; we were talking about a possible film on Goya," Hughes recalled last week. "One of them said to me, 'Bob, you've got a very strange expression on your face."'
Five years later, the rest of New York continues to wallow in pained debate about how the victims of the attacks should be memorialised and what kind of buildings should be erected next to the void at ground zero. Not Hughes, though.
He is happy that what he calls that "great ugly scaleless box of a thing" no longer disfigures the New York skyline.
"deeply discombobulating". The post-9/11 view from his window was like "looking into a familiar face with a piece bashed out by some maniac with a baseball bat, which of course was the case". "But do I miss it aesthetically? Obviously not."
This was fighting talk from a New York resident on the day most of the city was weepily observing the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on the US. Yet Hughes has made a career out of the unflinching honesty of his opinions, as several prominent British artists know to their cost. As the vastly influential art critic for Time magazine for more than 30 years, Hughes was never much impressed with Brit Art celebrities such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and he is not about to change his mind now he is ageing and injured.
Nor is he in any hurry to make peace with his biggest critics, his fellow Australians, some of whom seem to regard him as a traitorous exile devoted to pissing venom on his homeland. Further aggro may well follow the publication of Things I Didn't Know, the first volume of Hughes's memoirs.
The book opens with an embittered account of the head-on car crash that nearly claimed his life on a remote road in Western Australia in 1999. After a long legal wrangle over who had caused the crash, Hughes was eventually fined $2500 and banned from driving in the state for three years.
Hughes, now 68, still walks with a severe limp and is in near-constant pain from the injuries he suffered. He has not forgiven the Australian reporters who condemned his behaviour during his trial.
At one point, he incautiously described the occupants of the oncoming car as "low-life scum" and was then alleged to have described a prosecutor of Indian ancestry as a "curry-muncher" (a charge he has always denied). The media depicted him as an elitist bully; he accused them of making it all up.
On learning that Hughes would be returning to Australia in November to promote his memoirs, The Australian's Strewth column summed up the relationship thus: "He thinks we are an uncultured and ungrateful bunch of yobs ("Bullshit!" interjects Hughes, when I read him this passage); we think he's a grumpy old bugger who should get over it." "Well, I am a grumpy old bugger, but I don't see any need to get over it," snaps Hughes as he hobbles barefoot around his kitchen, making coffee.
It may seem odd that so distinguished an Australian intellectual, so admired by much of the English-speaking world, should be regarded with such reserve by his countrymen. Yet Hughes believes he is not alone in suffering from what he calls "the strange cluster of fantasies that cling to the word 'expatriate' in Australia". "There are at present north of 70,000 Australians living and earning their keep abroad," he says. "As far as the Australian media is concerned (he pronounces it 'meejah' with a contemptuous flourish), there are only four expats, and these are Germaine (Greer), Barry (Humphries), Clive (James) and Bob (Hughes)." According to Hughes, the Australian media has concluded that "we four form a sort of cabal whose purpose is to denigrate Australia and piss on its fair name. It's total rubbish."