Dumbed-down ‘accessible’ writing is just as bad as obscurantist art-speak

When the art critic Robert Hughes died in 2012, someone from the Times turned up on Channel 4 News to sing his praises. The journalist burbled on for a few flailing, hapless minutes and you were left wondering whether she’d actually ever read him. The great critic’s strength was apparently his, wait for it, ‘accessibility’. Eschewing obscurantist art-speak – the desiccated argot of the art establishment – it seemed Hughes’ critical gifts lay in not being difficult to read.

But who familiar with Hughes’ robust and sinuous prose would ever call it ‘accessible’? It wasn’t. His facility with language was underpinned by a ferocious intellect, and it showed. Acuity and insight made him a tremendously exciting critic, not accessibility. And, in fact, he was hardly ever one to hide his erudition – it glinted off his prose with a seductive, cocksure swagger. It was exactly because his writing didn’t play dumb that it managed to cast a forensic light upon the work.