A post on Andrew Gelman’s blog got me thinking about contemporary art and art criticism – two art critics in particular, Hilton Kramer and Donald Kuspit. (Not much commentary at the moment – just want to note a couple quotes for future reference.)
From Hilton Kramer’s obituary in the New York Times:
Mr. Kramer took dead aim at a long list of targets: creeping populism at leading art museums; the incursion of politics into artistic production and curatorial decision-making; the fecklessness, as he saw it, of the National Endowment for the Arts; and the decline of intellectual standards in the culture at large.
A resolute high Modernist, he was out of sympathy with many of the aesthetic waves that came after the great achievements of the New York School, notably Pop (“a very great disaster”), Conceptual art (“scrapbook art”) and postmodernism (“modernism with a sneer, a giggle, modernism without any animating faith in the nobility and pertinence of its cultural mandate”).
At the same time, he made it his mission to bring underappreciated artists to public attention and open up the history of 20th-century American art to include figures like David Smith, Milton Avery and Arthur Dove, about whom he wrote with insight and affection. Some of his best criticism was devoted to artists who had up until then been regarded as footnotes.
“Nothing gives me more pleasure,” he wrote in a 1999 catalog essay for the painter Bert Carpenter, “than to discover unfamiliar work of significant quality and intelligence.”