Life at the Kramer Hilton
Wiener, Jon
This past fall, Hilton Kramer, America's angriest art critic, began his fifteenth year editing the New Criterion, the neocon journal of art and culture. In Kramer's lead comment in the journal's...
...Much of Kramer's animus is directed toward the New York art world, and he is right that its hallmarks are hype, hustle, and greed...
...Kramer claims to be practicing disinterested criticism, but here he sounds like an aging Rolling Stones fan who hates rap music...
...The modernists "derived a good deal of their force and momentum from an overt attempt to change the quality—and at times, even the organization—of the societies in which they were conceived...
...Kramer claims to possess objective and rational aesthetic criteria, independent from his political views, but if you read his weekly and monthly writings on art over the last few years, you don't find any...
...he also wrote without bitterness, contempt, or loathing...
...But even Kramer couldn't find enough to complain about in the Times, hence the title change...
...The substantive difference between Kramer and the other critics can be found in his insistence that his own judgments about what's good and what's lousy are based on the disinterested application of standards of intrinsic merit—standards that have been abandoned by virtually everyone else...
...Instead, you find reverential adjectives and hymns to greatness: how good is Vermeer...
...In addition to editing the New Criterion, Kramer writes a weekly "Media Watch" column for the New York Post...
...Kramer today still manages to fill the space in his various venues, and his voice remains unmistakable: the man is in a perpetual state of rage...
...Virtually everything he writes is shaped by his melodramatic ideology, which requires that he go out every morning to fight the battle for control of the culture, to defend what remains of true art from sixties-inspired degradation...
...After fifteen years of shouting, Kramer's voice seems tired...
...In his fifteenth anniversary issue, Kramer again portrays himself as a beleaguered figure, standing alone as a defender of true seriousness against a cultural establishment that has politicized art...
...when the art market floated on a sea of junk bonds, greenmail, and leveraged buyouts...
...In fact, he was not talking about the subversion of American national security, but rather of something he calls "disinterested criticism...
...they didn't like it...
...He takes as the principal exponent of that view Duke University critic Stanley Fish, who wrote, "There is no such thing as intrinsic merit," a statement Kramer—with typical understatement—characterizes as "a version of nihilism and a license for sophistry," as well as "a prescription for moral and cultural catastrophe...
...they are part of the blue-chip world of free-market corporate capitalism that Kramer celebrates...
...All this has a single cause: Kramer's Great Satan, "the sixties...
...The only thing that distinguished Kramer from the others writing about Vermeer was that he failed to mention the fact that the Republican Congress shut down this once-in-a-lifetime exhibit—along with the rest of the federal government—in its destructive 98 • DISSENT The Kramer Hilton attempt to balance the budget...
...Political art is bad art, while good art exists in a realm above politics, a separate realm of aesthetic value—for Kramer this is especially true of the modern art of abstraction...
...Kramer opposes government funding for the arts—even funding for a Vermeer show...
...This is "disinterested" criticism...
...But why should those claims be accepted as valid, any more than the claims made for artists practicing other styles in other periods...
...But in the world of art criticism today, Kramer is hardly isolated...
...Brancusi was "great" because of his "consummate technical skill and remarkable intellectual command...
...It had been called "Times Watch," and was devoted to bashing the New York Times for being left wing...
...Even artists such as Mondrian . . . whose styles seem totally absorbed in formal considerations, cannot really be understood apart from the social ideologies which acted as an impetus and an ideal in their aesthetic formulations...
...The catalog, he cornWINTER • 1997 • 99 The Kramer Hilton plained, "all but surrenders to the enemies of abstract art in a feckless attempt to appease and accommodate" them...
...surprisingly, perhaps, he's not especially adept at explaining what's good about the art he does like...
...He not only had a better understanding of the relationship between politics and the art he loved...
...like most of the critics, he didn't like last year's Carnegie International...
...its spontaneous gesture, they said, was bringing painting toward the sublime...
...He was unhappy with the Guggenheim's recent abstraction retrospective, and devoted much of his review to lambasting the author of the catalog for failing to mount a "rousing" and "spirited defense" of abstraction...
...Kramer did not take on this fundamental problem in his review of the Guggenheim abstraction show...
...And, Kramer says, it's been downhill ever since...
...very good indeed" because "what he does, he does perfectly...
...Pisarro was a "great painter" who did work of "astonishing quality...
...And while no critic in the United States today denounces his opponents more loudly for being "political," in fact few critics have done more to bring political judgments to bear on the contemporary art world...
...His weekly and monthly reviews fall into two categories: the positive ones, filled with vague clichés about greatness instead of articulating his often-proclaimed objective standards...
...But the problem here is hardly the sixties...
...The special issue follows the publication of Against the Grain, an anniversary anthology of forty-five New Criterion pieces...
...Despite his claims, Kramer does not enunciate anything like objective aesthetic standards...
...During his year as the Nation's art critic, he argued that abstract art "had a political component that cannot be completely assimilated to the purely formalistic analysis to which the middle-class temper of the Western democracies has reduced most serious discussion of art...
...But, as one critic wrote in the Nation, "Modern art as a whole has had a far more explicit connection with social and political ideologies than is now commonly supposed...
...Reading Kramer's art columns written over the last several years—those from the New Criterion that were not included in the anthology, as well as those in the New York Observer, where Kramer has served as art critic since 1992, one finds a consistent style—outrage and contempt— and a consistent argument...
...and the negative reviews, the political diatribes, which have become increasingly formulaic...
...It can't mean "universally agreed on," as George Scialabba has written in these pages ("Living by Ideas," Fall 1995), because obviously we don't all agree with Kramer—that's what makes him so angry...
...The far-right-wing Washington Times regularly highlights Kramer's New York Post columns, including one in which he praised conservative columnist William Safire for calling Hillary Clinton "a congenital liar...
...Max Beckman is "one of the great portrait artists of the modern period...
...At the Kramer Hilton (the term comes from Gore Vidal), we find an exemplary case of the hypocrisy of the critic who claims to stand above politics...
...In Kramer's lead comment in the journal's "special anniversary issue," he rededicated the journal to fighting leftist "subversion"— which makes him sound like J. Edgar Hoover...
...Kramer lets you dream that the Reagan revolution never happened...
...Young Man Kramer politicized art criticism...
...It can't refer to judgments made independently of or outside particular times and places and experiences, because there aren't any...
...National Review runs Kramer, where recently he described the New Yorker as "malign rubbish" that combined the worst features of the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and—believe it or not—the Nation...
...If there is no such thing as intrinsic merit, he writes, "then criticism and scholarship degenerate into a species of propaganda, and morality becomes little more than a cynical calculus aimed at increasing personal advantage...
...This passage was written by Hilton Kramer, art critic for the Nation, in June 1963...
...And so on...
...like most of the critics, he didn't like the Whitney's recent show on the Beats...
...For Mondrian, art was "a spiritual adventure...
...The problem of the left, he writes, is that it believes "nothing is meaningful or valuable in itself...
...The art Kramer likes is art everybody likes: over the past year, the exhibitions of Mondrian at MOMA, Brancusi in Philadelphia, and Vermeer in Washington...
...That world is a product of the eighties, of the Age of Reagan, when rich Wall Street types were buying more art, at higher prices, than ever before in history...
...that last year's Carnegie International exhibition "degenerated into a repulsive rehearsal of antisocial political gestures and the trivializing follies of cultural deconstruction...
...He writes often for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page— where he recently denounced Susan Sontag for criticizing intellectuals' lack of support for Sarajevo...
...That, of course, is the big question for aesthetic theory...
...Instead he told readers that the best that American artists have thought and done reached a climax around 1960...
...Like the other critics, Kramer makes judgments about what's good and what's not...
...Since the first issue of the New Criterion, Kramer has had two themes: contemporary art has been politicized by the left, and art criticism has degenerated—" true seriousness" and "informed intelligence" are under assault, "disinterested criticism" is almost dead...
...The Village Voice is the living incarnation of the sixties, but Kramer agreed with its art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, in hating the new Pace sculpture garden...
...When Stanley Fish says there is no such thing as intrinsic merit, he means only that all of us have to justify and explain why others should accept our criteria as legitimate...
...Repulsive" is one of his favorite adjectives...
...that the Modern Language Association is "an intellectual catastrophe...
...100 • DISSENT...
...Often he occupies a comfortable place in the middle of the critical mainstream: like most of the critics, he didn't like the Whitney's 1994 "Black Male" show...
...Typical headline: "Times formally identifies with the counterculture...
...What could this intrinsic merit be...
...They turn out to be the artists of his youth, the artists he wrote about for the Nation...
...He says that an "orgy of fatuousness has swept through American colleges and universities since the 1960s...
...The issue of abstraction today provides a good place to examine Kramer's claim that he possesses objective aesthetic standards...
...The defenders of abstract art in the fifties claimed that it represented the highest and the purest aesthetic...
...Although Kramer continues in his fifteenth anniversary issue to portray himself as a disinterested critic of the political in art, in fact he functions as a well-connected member of the right-wing punditocracy...
...Full disclosure alert: my book of essays from the Nation and Dissent was reviewed in the New Criterion in 1992...
...Places like the Pace-Wildenstein Sculpture Garden on Manhattan's Madison Avenue, which Kramer detests, are hardly expressions of the sixties counterculture...
...in his introduction to that volume, Kramer declares that, not only in the universities, but also in the museums, the federal arts agencies, and even in the media, dissent from "the legacy of 1960s radicalism" is "virtually nonexistent...
...He has less and less to say...
...it's also one Kramer needs to answer...
Vol. 44 • January 1997 • No. 1
