“Some think that so much of today’s art mir­rors and thus crit­i­cizes deca­dence,” Robert Hugh­es once said; “not so. It’s just deca­dent, full stop. It serves no crit­i­cal func­tion. It is part of the prob­lem.”

Hugh­es died Mon­day at the age of 74. One of the tow­er­ing fig­ures of late 20th cen­tu­ry art crit­i­cism, the Aus­tralian writer is best known for The Shock of the New, his 1980 tele­vi­sion series on the rise and fall of mod­ernism, and the best­selling book of the same name. He wrote at least 15 oth­er wide-rang­ing books on art and his­to­ry. He was an elo­quent writer and a tough crit­ic. “It was decid­ed­ly not Mr. Hugh­es’s method to take pris­on­ers,” writes Randy Kennedy in the New York Times obit­u­ary. “He was as damn­ing about artists who fell short of his expec­ta­tions as he was ecsta­t­ic about those who met them, and his prose seemed to reach only lofti­er heights when he was angry.”

Per­haps noth­ing made Hugh­es more angry than the per­ni­cious influ­ence of mon­ey on art in the past few decades. In the scene above from the 2008 BBC doc­u­men­tary The Mona Lisa Curse, Hugh­es pays a vis­it to Alber­to Mugra­bi, whose wealthy fam­i­ly makes no secret of its efforts to manip­u­late the art mar­ket by buy­ing up large num­bers of works by cer­tain artists (often those whom Hugh­es despised, like Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst) and stor­ing them in ware­hous­es. What fol­lows is less of an inter­view than a brow­beat­ing. When it’s over and Hugh­es has left the room, Mugra­bi says, “He’s a tough cook­ie.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Robert Hugh­es, Famed Art Crit­ic, Demys­ti­fies Mod­ern Art

This short inter­net doc­u­men­tary from Etsy pro­files Jim Pow­er, a.k.a. “Mosa­ic Man,” an artist and local his­to­ri­an of sorts on Manhattan’s Low­er East Side who cre­ates tile por­traits of the city’s most sig­nif­i­cant peo­ple and places. Pow­er embod­ies all of the qual­i­ties that attract­ed me to the neigh­bor­hood in the ear­ly 2000’s—a hard-bit­ten do-it-your­self ethos and a ded­i­ca­tion to com­mu­nal val­ues. And he has with­stood the forces that drove me out: the often harsh impact of so-called “qual­i­ty of life” laws passed by May­ors Giu­liani and Bloomberg and the soar­ing rents occa­sioned by encroach­ing new devel­op­ments and ever-increas­ing demand for real-estate on the island. Dur­ing Giuliani’s tenure in the 90s much of the arts com­mu­ni­ty in low­er Man­hat­tan was swept away, includ­ing fifty light posts bear­ing Jim Power’s now-clas­sic mosaics.

But Pow­er is undaunt­ed and is work­ing to rebuild the “Mosa­ic Trail,” tile mosaics on a series of light poles and oth­er fix­tures rep­re­sent­ing sev­er­al eras of Low­er East Side his­to­ry and cul­ture. Power’s mosaics have been a stal­wart fea­ture of the neighborhood’s idio­syn­crat­ic land­scape, as has the artist him­self. Home­less for near­ly thir­ty years, he is sus­tained by the gen­eros­i­ty of his neigh­bors, who have donat­ed stu­dio space and help­ing hands. But he con­tends with the harsh conditions—whether on the streets or in the city shelters—that all New York’s home­less must, as you can read on his web­site. Nonethe­less, Pow­er thrives, in part, because as the documentary’s direc­tor Tara Young writes on her Etsy blog, “Jim’s not out for fame. He makes his art for the com­mu­ni­ty that he loves and that loves him so dear­ly in return.”