Dead Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes died last week. I spent a lot of time with his work, and loved some of it even to the point of wading through his lousy work, like his execrable autobiography. He was somebody I think I actually expected to meet and have a chat with someday because my first reaction to his death was suprise, even though he was enormously fat, not young, and obviously in very poor health for many years.

I read his most recent book most recently - Rome - just before I went to Rome in July. Of course the mental comparison was made with Barcelona, which I read just before going to Barcelona yonks ago. It wasn't nearly as good. I thought, reading it, "you can tell he's tired." Even too tired to remember. Hi most bookish book, in the sense of most academic. I mean, it's a good book - I didn't give up on it 3/4 of the way through like The Fatal Shore (at which point I also started getting the feeling he was tired). But Barcelona was a fucking great book.

Anyways, I'm sort of pissed off he's dead, even if he didn't really have any great books left in him and even if we weren't going to meet and have a chat. I've never seen Damien Hirst so ably bashed by someone people listened to.