Peerless prose. I generally agree with his judgments (although I think better of pop art, for example, than he does), but the pleasure of reading and re-reading him is the quality of his sentences. For that alone, the book is worth having. The book itself is a bit frustrating though in that it has no indications of editor and no context supplied for how and why these selections were made. His wife is his literary executor so presumably she had final say, but I wish there'd been more explicitly described. It'd also be useful to have had notes on when some of these pieces were originally published. Some were original to the books in which they appeared, but others were originally independent essays. Finally, while including reproductions of the works discussed might've been prohibitively expensive, it would've been easy to include a list or a build a website with links. So... bottom line is that it's well worth spending time engaged with Hughes, even if the book itself doesn't entirely do him justice. (finished 12/24/16) ( )

I love Robert Hughes, but I was very disappointed to find out that this tome is largely composed of selections from his published books instead of being a new collection of uncollected essays. There were literally hundreds upon hundreds of essays from his many years of writing weekly reviews for Time Magazine to choose from, and instead we're given chunks of books that many of us have already read. Thankfully there's a little bit of previously unpublished material, but not enough to justify buying this. ( )