Art critic and author Robert Hughes died four years ago this month.  Here’s how I remembered him at the time.

Prolific and influential art critic Robert Hughes died last week at age 74.  An Australian by birth, he was as well known in the United States and England as in his home country.  He served as the chief art critic for Time magazine for decades, and his eight-part documentary on modern art, “The Shock of the New,” was hugely popular on both the BBC and on American PBS stations.  He published a book by the same title based on the series and it was a hit as well.

In 1997, Hughes published American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, one of my favorite books.  Lavishly illustrated, it’s written with insight, clarity, and a strong, enjoyable narrative.  It also follows the course of American history very closely.   For an encyclopedic view of American art it’s a singular achievement and what I regard to be one of his best accomplishments.

A writer for the New York Times remembered him as “eloquent and combative,” and the Wall Street Journal called him “the most feared art critic of his time,” but added, “no one could doubt how ardently he believed in the soul-nourishing potency of art.” Most of the eulogies offered have been of the “we will never see his like again” flavor, and once you ponder his ideas and the energy with which he put them forward, it’s hard to disagree.

Hughes was a gifted writer and deeply informed about art, having studied it at the University of Sydney.  He watched with disapproval the transformation of the American art scene from the 1960s through the 1980s, as Pop gave way to a multiplicity of styles that were increasingly individualistic, fragmented and primarily political.

Then, as market forces moved in and transformed the art scene into a multi-billion-dollar business, there was even more to lament.  Hughes believed that the advent of record-setting prices at art auction week after week—oftentimes for works he regarded as an insult to the very idea of painting or sculpture—signaled, in his words, “the victory of promotion over connoisseurship.”  He thought it was the new goal of the art market to “erase all values that might impede anything at all from becoming a ‘masterpiece.’” There were no redeeming qualities in the change.  “What strip-mining is to nature,” he wrote, “the art market has become to culture.”

Equally as corrosive to art was the way in which way it was becoming more celebrated as merely an affirmation of identity.  “Thanks to America’s tedious obsession with the therapeutic,” he wrote in 1987, “the aim of its art schools, and of art broadly understood among educators, was less to transmit the difficult skills of painting and sculpture than to produce ‘fulfilled’ personalities.”

By now of course, knowledgeable criticism has been largely replaced by either a blanket acceptance of everything, under the guise of cultural relativism, or by heated televised arguments in which we seem to revel.  Thinking critics who seek to hold contemporary work to a fixed standard are not only poor media figures but are generally unwelcome as, well, too mean.  Art as affirmation can’t comport with the work of a genuine critic, but art, as art, needs it desperately.

Connoisseurship is a waning pursuit in today’s culture.  “The values of painting and sculpture are not those of mass media,” Hughes once wrote.  “Art requires the long look.”  As critics like Hughes pass from the scene with no one to take their place, it will gradually become more difficult to understand what it is that separates truly great art from the flashy but passing wisps of pop culture.