I can’t believe Jen Graves and I are arguing about William Hogarth. My comment was an incredulous, take-it-for-granted, passing swipe in parenthesis in a story about my misgivings on the appointment of Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker as director of the Frye Art Museum:
(Graves also wrote Danzker’s exhibit, William Hogarth: Nationalism, Mass Media and the Artist,
was “awesome-sounding.” Awesome? Hogarth is an illustrator in the worst
sense of the word. He belongs in picture books accompanying stories.)
Her response:
I cannot even address a person who dismisses Hogarth.
Maybe it’s generational. Nobody from my time and place countenances the didactical moralism of Hogarth, the 18th-century’s Norman Rockwell. It’s hardwired. You can have them both, Jen.
I always avoid the argument, “oh, you just don’t get it,” when discussing the merits of art, but I don’t have the energy (nor the motivation) to resist in this case. Hogarth is no genius, but Hackett… your position is extreme. Consider that you just don’t get it. Norman Rockwell? This comparison proves my point.
I will agree that “awesome” — besides being a dubious prediction of the quality of an exhibit of Hogarth — is an adjective best left to high-school papers, but your flippant dismissal is equally juvenile (parentheses or no).
Leave poor Jen Graves alone. You’re the only one who likes to fight. Pick on somebody your own size. She gets flustered.
Whoever you are, Jen Graves is not “poor,” she is my size in the sense you seem to mean, and she enjoys engagement or she wouldn’t do it. It’s not a fight; it’s a discussion, with guitar.
You’re both right. Hogarth’s appeal was broadly accessible to the lowest common denominator and for that he has been perennially panned by critics with an interest in maintaining standards of taste. According to Wikipedia, Hogarth’s aesthetic treatise Analysis of Beauty “formed the intellectual centrepiece of what the historian Ernst Gombrich described as Hogarth’s ‘grim campaign against fashionable taste’, which Hogarth himself described as his ‘War with the Connoisseurs’.” I find this to be laugh-out-loud hilarious, which I believe was the point.
Yes, the ham-fisted moralizing does tend to fall flat. But I like to think comparing aristocratic hairstyles to sheep’s rumps is as funny today as it was in 1761.