Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes's programme on Channel 4 this evening was a magnificent debunking of the modern art world: that the forces manipulating it now were purely commercial.
It's good to know that so distinguished a critic as Hughes dislikes the same poseurs as I do - Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst in particular. Another "artist" who has gained popularity as well as notoriety as well as his works attracting really big money whom Hughes feels is not a great artist ("the work has charm") is Klimpt and there again I agree with him.
But Hughes said something at the end of the programme that rather jolted me: that art should tell us something about the world; he felt that Warhol etc. fell by the wayside in this respect.
What about Rubens? Does his work tell us something about the world?
I am sure that Robert Hughes would be able to present an argument that would help me out here, but I have another trouble in that I have a blind spot with a good many "famous" painters and with Rubens in particular.
The most ironic thing I felt about the programme and that last comment is that the diamond skull of Damien Hirst, which Hughes reserves reservoirs of vilification and contempt for, does actually fulfill Hughes's precept about a work saying something about the world. What this work tells me is this: "Here I have constructed a skull encrusted with diamonds which shows how empty the world is of good art, the skull being simply a skull, but it also shows that this emptiness supports an art world solely led by the forces of commercialism."
Well done Hirst, you have at last created a work that is meaningful to the world of art today: it shows the emptiness of thought in works of "art" while vast amounts of money are lavished on them.