The Philadelphia Foreman, Untitled, 1940s, gouache on paper
Evan Hughes is an art collector based in Paddington in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs whose art businesses seem to open and close more often than a kimono in one of the paintings in his vast Shunga collection.
In 2016, Hughes famously told the Art Newspaper:
Both my mentors, [the London dealer] James Mayor and my father, have such wonderful eyes and such extreme passion for the paintings they sell and the people that make them, that it was just depressing to realise that the art trade is now centred on glorified shopping malls run by quasi-property developers (art fairs) and tacky mail-order firms (internet enterprises). I suddenly asked myself: would Vollard be doing art fairs and Artsy?
Ten years later and the state of play is even worse than his dire predictions. But there is still some good art out there and Hughes still loves to find it and talk his wealthy friends into buying it with their eyes and not their ears. This is easier said than done, argues Hughes stating that "the internet seems to be making the dumb rich even more vapid by the day".
Hughes is not an art consultant - "My dad would call these people poop nibblers" - but he doesn't mind putting fabulous collections together for people far too rich and civilised to do it themselves. Though he has stopped telling fellow Cranbrook parents that he is a personality coach for tech billionaires who can't behave or dress properly. "My phone was ringing off the hook. Tedious".
In the intervening ten years since Hughes' angry spray in the international press, he has had a stint in Australian politics and wrote the current NSW Arts Policy. Only doing time with the Australian Labor Party is more sobering than enduring the art world, he claims.
Full Circle or Fool Circle? Ray Hughes founded the Hughes Gallery in 1969 and grew it into a national leader over the next four and a half decades. When his son didn't really want to follow in his footsteps in the same way, pere et fils decided 'fair enough' (after an almighty row) and the gallery was shuttered. But interesting art dies hard and when there is so much shit out there, and AI promises to make it even more vacuous, belligerent young men with a good eye and nothing to prove can do whatever they want.
Ray Hughes founded a modest gallery in a small suburban house in Brisbane and waited for interesting people to call by to sit and drink wine and chat about paintings and politics and sometimes... put their hand in their pockets. Evan Hughes has come around to the opinion that the original idea might just be the best way to spend the rest of his life.
"I always used to say that anyone with a shit opinion and a wifi connection thought they were an art critic. I don't know if putting art I like and own up on a website makes me an art dealer again? Christ I hope not. The best thing about politics is that unless you're stupid enough to get elected, no-one can call you a politican. The annoying thing about literature is until you're published cou can't call yourself a writer. Until someone comes through the door and wrestles me to the ground and forces me to sell them a Thornton Dial, I don't need a label".
As the purpose-built galleries he has been building for the last three years aren't likely to be finished before the Powerhouse Museum he tried to stop NSW from fucking up completely, there is remarkably little chance of anyone calling Evan Hughes an art dealer again any time soon.
- ED.
Image: The Philadelphia Foreman, Untitled, gouache on paper, 1940s