[EN] Robert Hughes on art in the 1980's

“What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New 

-The shock of the new was a programm by the BBC in the 1980's observing contemporary art back then.. the episode are as follow

1. Mechanical Paradise - How the development of technology influenced art between 1880 and end of WWI.
2. The Powers That Be - Examining the relationship between art and authority.
3. The Landscape of Pleasure - Examining art's relationship with the pleasures of nature.
4. Trouble in Utopia - Examining the aspirations and reality of architecture.
5. The Threshold of Liberty - Examining the surrealists' attempts to make art without restrictions.
6. The View from the Edge - A look at those who made visual art from the crags and vistas of their internal world.
7. Culture as Nature - Examining the art that referred to the man-made world which fed off culture itself.
8. The Future That Was - Robert Hughes slips down the decline of modernism while watching art without substance.

-Episode 4 states architecture, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C04JZsoqs1A

-In 2004 Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New titled The NEW Shock of the New