"Darkly pessimistic towards the end, he despaired of ever liberating art from the art world. The nineties turned out, in his view, to be still worse, though he hailed the giants—Kiefer, Richter, Freud—who towered above the pigmies. He was, like the Victorians he admired—Hazlitt, Ruskin—a fighter-writer: While he was acutely aware of the social matrix from which art arose and to which it would be directed, he was the adversary of all reductionism. Those who thought art the mere extrusion of a set of theories, positions, and class concerns, he pitied as intellectually obtuse, compensating for their inadequacy at registering the ultimately irreducible force of art itself, by shackling it to the lumbering ball and chain of social theory and wishing away (how he chortled at this) the notion of authorship, genius, beauty, those ancient qualities modern muttering had decreed were fictions. Had they never actually opened their eyes in front of, say, Cezanne’s Mont St. Victoire or Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, he once growled to me? Or were their eyes somehow locked into an inward glance, lost in the empty spaces of vain self-regard and third-rate speculation?"
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