Decline and Gall

Corinthian columns, classical pediments, a sculptural charioteer, flaming caldrons--the opening scenes of “American Visions,” Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes’ eight-hour television series on the history of American art, which has its debut Wednesday on PBS, are filled with triumphal images.

He is not, however, touring the monuments of ancient Greece, fountainhead of the Western democratic ideal with which the United States first imagined itself into being. Nor is he in ancient Rome, which American Federalists idolized and whose art and architecture inspired so many of our 19th century buildings and sculptures.

Instead, the critic is on the Strip in Las Vegas, seeing the glamorous sights at Caesars Palace. The setup is vintage Hughes.

The history of American painting and sculpture is a scholarly subject of limited appeal and potential dryness, but here it is introduced with exuberant panache, as demanded of the mass medium of TV. These are skills the expatriate Australian writer perfected long ago, as amply demonstrated by “The Shock of the New,” his hugely successful series about the often esoteric byways of Modern art, which aired on PBS 16 years ago.

Furthermore, when the flashy casino images eventually fade into classical picture-postcard views of the graceful Lincoln Memorial, the imposing Capitol dome and Thomas Jefferson’s masterpiece, Monticello, a thread of visual continuity is drawn from the present to the past. Hughes slides easily into the realm of hazy history, which Americans vaguely revere, even if they tend to know little of it.

Concise and eye-grabbing, this is “good TV.” Yet, it is also vintage Hughes in another sense, and this one we could do without. For we have begun our tour of the history of American art in the crass and grossly materialistic desert oasis so that Hughes can make the series’ overarching point.

Look what it has come to, the sullen critic frowns, comparing the civic monuments of Washington to the hurly-burly of the Vegas Strip. The elevated classical vocabulary of “a republican temple of virtue” that inspired so much American architecture a century and a half ago has degenerated into this, “the popular palace of middle-class sin.”

Here we go again. It’s the umpteenth chapter in Hughes’ favorite tiresome tale: the saga of the Decline and Fall of Western Civ. The critic, poised amid the tacky rubble, offers himself up as tour guide to paradise lost.

Frankly, I don’t have much patience with this sort of condescension. Hughes is smart, unformed, funny and a master of the turn of phrase. But as one who’s quite enamored of a good deal of American art and architecture of the last 30 years, and who finds some of it at least the equal of anything produced in Europe or elsewhere in the past, I get irritable when the broad brush of gloom and doom is hauled out to paint lopsided pictures.

Nor does “American Visions” turn out to be nearly as engaging as “The Shock of the New”--and it isn’t just because of its seemingly endless shots of the narrator driving around the countryside in an open-top convertible, to no apparent purpose. The most surprising feature of the new series, given Hughes’ impressive rhetorical flourish, is how flat-out boring most of the episodes are.

In tone and philosophy, however, the program seamlessly continues his earlier work. The specter of collapse was also the subtext of “The Shock of the New,” which weekly charted a slippery slide from greatness into infamy that art supposedly underwent as the grueling 20th century wore on--from the acknowledged grandeur that was Matisse to the presumed quackery that was Warhol.

Similarly, decline was the fuel that stoked Hughes’ fire in the pages of Time during the raucous 1980s, when an overheated market turned the art world upside down. It formed the basis of his blustery 1993 book on multiculturalism, “The Culture of Complaint,” which managed to make William Bennett and his ilk sound like Little Nell. And, not surprisingly, it’s at the core of “American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America” (Alfred A. Knopf, 636 pages, $65), the heavily illustrated--and heavily promoted--book now being published to coincide with the dull new television series.

Open the book to the text’s first illustration, and you’ll start to see what I mean. A charming version of Edward Hicks’ famous “The Peaceable Kingdom” (circa 1834) shows, way off in the distance, a toylike William Penn and a band of Quakers concluding their peace treaty with the Indians, while the foreground is dominated by a serene, pastoral gathering of wild beasts. The lion has lain down with the lamb, in both the animal kingdom and the human one, as appropriate to an American Eden ordained by God.

Now, turn to the book’s last illustration, many hundreds of pages beyond. Here’s another glowing religious image--albeit one of a rather different order.

Andres Serrano is no pious Quaker like Hicks. His notorious 1987 photograph “Piss Christ” shows a cheap plastic crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s own urine and sarcastically lit with red and yellow gels, like a Technicolor outtake from a biblical epic.

Whether on TV or in print, Hughes’ interpretive trajectory is the same. From the idiosyncratic glory of Monticello to the tawdry flash of Caesars Palace, from the quaint piety of “The Peaceable Kingdom” to the vulgar posing of “Piss Christ”--look what it has come to!

Hughes is a declinist. The term was coined by Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington to describe those for whom everything is always only getting worse. Declinism is a virtual light industry today.

Of course, bad news sells. With a tough-sell TV subject like the visual arts, the glum idea that our cultural life is going to hell in a handbasket might get eagerly gobbled up. But it’s more like the random gore sought out by the 6 o’clock local news, to the exclusion of more significant if less eye-catching events: For some observers it proves the deplorable state of the world, rather than the deplorable state of the 6 o’clock news.

Handled with stylish verve, charting decline also swiftly elevates the stature of the declinist. He seems to stand astride history, as big and tenacious as the problems he lays out. A self-aggrandizing aura of power shines forth.

Perhaps that explains something about “American Visions.” After three only intermittently interesting hourlong episodes discussing the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries in American art, Hughes finally manages a rousing and sustained look at “The Gilded Age.” His passion is ignited by the post-Civil War intersection between art and power: the birth of great urban art museums like New York’s Metropolitan, the building of baronial palaces in Newport, R.I., the arrival of big-time art collecting as a rich industrialists’ game and more. Hughes, the scion of a wealthy and powerful Australian family, suddenly seems to be in his element.

But the excitement is short-lived. The four remaining episodes sink back into a haphazard tour of the present century--the years of foreign immigration, the Roaring ‘20s and the Great Depression, postwar prosperity and ‘60s social tensions.

Hughes has said in interviews that his is a distinctly personal view of American art. In fact, the series is something else. It’s a thumbnail sketch of three centuries of American history. Works of art are consigned to the role of illustration.

That’s why symbols are selectively crafted to represent decline--into the morass of Las Vegas and “Piss Christ.” As our tour guide gravely concludes in the final episode, “All cultures decay. The culture of American Modernism . . . may be no exception to that, as we move into the 21st century.”

Ironically, the idea of decline might have made for one useful organizing theme for this misbegotten show. It’s as American as apple pie, enjoying a glorious history of its own.

In the mid-1830s, for example, when our national experiment in democracy was barely a few generations old, Thomas Cole painted his famous and hugely popular epic “The Course of Empire,” which pictured a scenario of collapse. His cycle of five paintings began with a landscape of paradise and went through the rise and corruption of civilization and on to ruination and decay.

The cycle’s third picture shows a confectionary city of gilded marble, whose luxurious details hint at the rot infecting civilization’s core. Squint your eyes and the classical fantasia might be--yes!--Caesars Palace.

In part, declinism has been useful to Americans as a brake on the old industrial ideal of progress, which is its opposite. Progress is exciting in its promises of an auspicious life but chilling in its potential for rapaciousness. As Cole knew, declinism can function as a mediating force.

But what’s Hughes’ excuse for his manipulative litany of gloom and doom, which is ofttimes condescending? I mean, heaven forbid some poor schlub--such as me--might actually enjoy himself amid the faux-classical gewgaws of Las Vegas.

Indeed, might even enjoy them as faux-classical gewgaws, precisely for their glittering honesty about the false promises inherent in Golden Age nostalgia.

And at least “Piss Christ,” a deceptive photograph showing an image of radiant salvation actually fabricated from filth, took a stab at illuminating the hypocritical workings of the 1986-87 televangelist scandals. Remember Jimmy Swaggart and the buffoonish Bakkers, whose evil antics immediately preceded the making of the infamous photograph? Theirs was truly a promise of salvation fabricated from filth; the artist merely tried to expose the horrible ease of seduction possible from the image-intensive trickery available to the modern world.

If Serrano is a distinctly minor artist--and he is--and if Caesars Palace is simply a vernacular building, and thus not fairly comparable to a Monticello, product of a major American architect, then positioning them as evidence of our cultural decline is harum-scarum stuff. Nor is the only alternative to don the rose-colored glasses of a Pollyanna, misleading audiences in a different direction.

But “American Visions” does mislead, finally curdling in its own sour spectacle of deterioration. It’s time for the cultural doctrine of declinism to go into steep decline.

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* “American Visions,” a co-production of the BBC and Time, Inc., in association with WNET, will air Wednesdays, beginning this week, at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.