Hughes, After Calamity

After Calamity, a Critic’s Soft Landing - New York Times:

"Not then, not ever. Mr. Hughes, the brilliant and acerbic art critic who wrote for Time magazine for 30 years and has published a dozen books, including “The Fatal Shore,” his best-selling history of his native Australia, was never one to pull a punch. Comparing the careers of J. Seward Johnson Jr. and Jeff Koons, he once said, was like debating the merits of dog excrement versus cat excrement — although Mr. Hughes would never use a word as flat and unevocative as excrement.

He is a big man who has lived large, riding a motorcycle, attending New York parties with a cockatoo on his shoulder, deep-sea fishing. He is an accomplished carpenter: an early, romantic gift to his wife was a wooden jewelry box, which he planned to fill with jewels"