A Rollerblader scoots by. He’s headed fast downhill, on the portion of Michigan Avenue that’s raised from the river north to Ohio Street, creating a small hill on this flat place.
Robert Hughes-art critic for Time magazine, brilliant and flashy cultural observer, best-selling author and, in his younger days, a motorcycle-riding roisterer-pauses to stare at the young man, recklessly slaloming through suits and shopping bags until swinging wide for a sharp right turn, and disappearing east.
“Ah,” says Hughes, “youth.”
It is difficult to determine whether he is being wistful-he is, after all, 55, a fact he will mention often in the next hour-or merely accurate.
In any case, there is a bounce in his step as he makes his way to Niketown,q that celebration of shoes and commerce that, since opening in the past year, has become one of the city’s leading tourist attractions, variously described by visitors as a museum and a gallery.
What better place, then, to take Hughes? He has been Time’s art critic since 1970. He is also-this being the reason for his Chicago visit-the author of a provocative new book, “Culture of Complaint” (Oxford University Press), based on a series of lectures he gave at the New York Public Library in 1992. It is a passionate and not-very-optimistic look at American culture and politics, from politically correct censoriousness to the catastrophic state of public education; from the dangers of multiculturalism to the politicization of art; from the nonsense of self-help therapies to the inanities of historical revisionists.
If that sounds intellectually weighty, it is. But Hughes is such a supple and engaging writer that the book is as accessible as it is rewarding.
In it he writes, “America is a collective work of the imagination whose making never ends, and once that sense of collectivity and mutual respect is broken the possibilities of America begin to unravel.”
More to the Niketown point he writes: “America seemed to have no great public buildings or works projects to show for the ’80s . . . only a succession of ticky-tacky post-modernist confections . . . formica-thin memorials to the vanity of this or that corporate raider, gilded Trumpery, visual propaganda for the empire of Donald Duck. Cultural tourists came to New York”-he might have added Chicago-“to gaze on its past monuments, as they once had Rome; but in the present, they saw only discos, galleries, trends, the brightly roiled surface of fashion.”
Given such sentiments, perhaps he will rip Niketown. As he walks in the store, he does so in bright white new gym shoes.
“What kind are these?” he asks, repeating a question and lifting one of his feet in hope of catching a logo, which he doesn’t. “Don’t bloody know, mate. You call them gym shoes. That must be from your youth. They are now athletic shoes, aren’t they? In my youth, we called them sand shoes.”
Hughes’ youth was spent in his native Australia, a country whose history he detailed in the surprise 1987 best seller “The Fatal Shore,” which came after the best-selling “The Shock of the New” and before “Barcelona.”
Japanese stores and disco
Into the store he goes, heading toward a large fish tank used as a backdrop for the display of various sandals.
“Salt water,” he says, staring at the tank. “And an angel fish too. That would cost $500.”
A few steps away is one of the store’s most popular features, a block of video screens embedded under a layer of plastic in the floor on which images, sometimes wild, of water and underwater life are in constant play. Hughes arrives to find the screens relatively sedate, showing waves.
“We are walking on water,” he says, crossing the screens to plunk himself down on a bench. “Just like good old J.C.”
He sits down near the floor screens and, casting a glance around the space, offers some first impressions.
“Ah, filled with all these exhortations to self-improvement. . . . `Just do it,’ ” he says, referring to the Nike slogan. “This is like many of the Japanese department stores, meant to make people feel that they are taking part in a diffuse cultural experience.”
None of the things Hughes says, as witty, erudite, intelligent and profound as they may look in print, are delivered in the manner of a professor. The way in which he talks, affably and energetically-can you hear the wheels turning?-could remind you of one of the more engaging people you may have met at an adjoining barstool in a saloon. His ruddy complexion further heightens the image of lusty, appealing toughness.
It is not hard to imagine that there was raucous fun involved during his days in London during the 1960s, when he had long hair that flowed behind him when he tooled around on motorcycles and began writing for art magazines.
“How did I get so smart?” he asks, laughing in response to another question. “I had parents who kept me away from the tube. Actually that wasn’t hard to do since I was able to grow up in a pre-TV culture. Reading was my vice, and I was lucky that my parents were avid readers.”
Hughes studied at St. Ignatius College, a boarding school run by the Jesuits, who believed that memorization was essential to learning. He claims to be able to still recite some of the “Iliad”-in Greek.
“I first remember being read to,” he says. “I can recall with great pleasure the sounds of my parents’ voices as they read to me.”
He pauses for a lengthy look around the room, all flashes of neon clothing and shoes and bicycles hanging from invisible wires in the air. On one of the bikes sits a plaster rider.
“This place is overdesigned to the point of frenzy,” he says. “Curious, it does feed in from art. Where would it be without George Segal,” the artist famed for creating life-sized plaster people.
“And this was all explored in disco. This is actually the merchandising equivalent of disco design. This is a shrine to layers of status involved in layers of sneakers. Two hundred dollars for shoes to run in the sand . . . for shoes in which to play basketball, to mug people. Some young people even kill for them.”
Stumped by basketball
In his recent book Hughes, who lives with his wife, Victoria, on Shelter Island in New York, writes that there is much he still finds exotic about his adopted land.
“Basketball, for one. I have been here 23 years and I still don’t know the rules of basketball,” he says. “Also that everyone believes that America should be a Utopia. It is a font of hope, but also disappointment. This is a country founded in despair. In Australia we are less optimistic. When something bad happens, there is a line we have: `It’s better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick.’ “
He tries to return to his native land once a year.
“As a young man there I was considered an enfant terrible,” he says. “But that is impossible to sustain.
“Australians can be a bit snarky about expatriates. But when I wrote `The Fatal Shore,’ I think most people came around: `Ah, yes, there, he is one of us.’ My status there is not the object of any willed decision. I was a bit of a celebrity when the book was published. Now I’m just a well-known writer.
“But my wife likes to say that Australia is my fame brothel,” he says, grinning. “When I go home, I get the pleasant sensation of fitting into a society I understand.”
He’s walking around now, looking at the vast array of athletic gear, handsomely displayed.
“I’m just an old geezer, pre-MTV, before one was continually bombarded by images,” he says. “This isn’t my idea of shopping, but I’m sure it’s entertaining for kids. . . . Saying that, I must sound 108.”
Outside he poses for a photographer, who places him against the facade of the building, which is decorated with sculptures of athletes.
`Is he famous?’
” `Just do it.’ . . . That could have been coined by Mussolini,” he says. “There was a time in the ’30s when every new public building in Italy was adorned with athletic figures to give hope to the fascist youth. They, too, could `just do it.’ “
A well-dressed woman walks by and asks about the picture-posing Hughes, “Is he famous?”
“I can’t be an athlete, that’s for sure,” Hughes says. “I may be the 210-pound anti-type. Good for nothing but flycasting.”
That is what he will be doing the next day, in some river near Seattle, the next stop on his book tour. Further off is a new TV series for the British Broadcasting Corp. on American art. And there is always Time.
“Tired of it?” he says, incredulous at another question. “I do 20, 25 pieces a year for Time. It’s like having a bloody permanent Guggenheim grant.”
The photographer continues to snap. From the store walk a man and a little boy-father and son-in identical blue Nike outfits.
“I would never buy something like that,” Hughes says. “I have an abhorrence of wearing other people’s names on clothing. There is something vulgar about someone else’s initials on your body. The only piece of such clothing I have are these waders from Orvis, and one day, standing in a river, I found myself trying to claw the name off. It wouldn’t budge. Bloody inconvenient.”
