In this adaptation from the forthcoming collection and posthumous memoir The Spectacle of Skill, the late Robert Hughes offers his delightful if bittersweet recollections about what life was like at Time magazine in the latter decades of the 20th century. For 31 years, Bob reigned as the magazine’s chief (and, as he dryly notes, only) art critic. Hughes, who left Time in 2001 and died in 2012, notes the pleasures of working at a magazine when editors ran what they thought readers would appreciate knowing about, rather than editing for the biggest number of page views. The best kind of reader is open to the passions and curiosities of editors, and Hughes was lucky to have worked with one of the best in Henry Anatole Grunwald. Grunwald ran Time from 1968 until 1977, before ascending to the 34th floor of the Time & Life Building, where, beginning in 1979, he ruled the entire Time Inc. magazine empire before becoming U.S. ambassador to Austria.

Hughes is especially nostalgic about the company’s generous expense accounts, and it is impossible to run into colleagues from those days without lapsing into tales of expense-account bravado (the correspondent, for example, nicknamed “42” because he would dine at the 21 Club twice a day, or the British-born writer who would eat solo at a now-defunct restaurant that specialized in English food and write off as his dining companion the five pounds of English sausage he had the staff pack up for him to bring home). But none of these stories can beat Bob’s account of a dinner in Paris, as described in this adaptation. Read on . . .

Nobody at Time ever told me what shows to review, still less what to say about them. All that was left entirely to me—a remarkable guarantee of editorial freedom. Everyone, from the managing editor down, agreed that since I had been hired for my judgment and for a certain independence of mind, they did not think it their business to interfere with either. Actually, I don’t think any of the editors cared strongly enough about art in general, or had enough acquaintances in the “art world,” to put any pressure on me. I don’t know what it would have been like to review classical music, especially opera, for an expert and highly opinionated frequenter of the Met and Carnegie Hall like Henry Grunwald [Time’s managing editor from 1968 until 1977]. I assume that the post would not have been without its difficulties—though they could hardly arise now, since the Time magazine that exists today is much less likely to be interested in such obscure and elitist diversions as weighing the merits of a production of Tosca, let alone an evening of Phil Glass. You could as easily imagine the magazine reporting on a quarrel over taxonomy between lepidopterists.

In 1970, when I went on Time’s payroll as its art critic—I encountered references through the next three decades to the magazine’s “chief” art critic, but in fact there was only one. The magazine didn’t have all that much space for art coverage. That it regularly had any at all was something of a miracle, due entirely to Henry Luce’s original belief—not shared by all managing editors—that once Time acquired the ability to print in color, the best thing it could do with such pages was use them to show art to readers. This, happily for me, had become one of the magazine’s minor traditions.