The weird thing is, the art world he bashes reads Kramer like crazy, even if it’s by flashlight, under the blankets. A poll conducted by an art insider’s newsletter named Kramer its second most-read critic (behind Roberta Smith, the contemporary specialist at The New York Times). SoHo dealers Brooke Alexander and Jay Gorney, who often show the kind of art Kramer hates, read him. Photographer John Co-plans, who once edited the cutting-edge journal Artforum, says Kramer’s the only critic he reads anymore. Whitney Museum curator Thelma Golden, whose very appointment prompted a Kramer tirade, says, “I do read him, except when it’s about me.”
Kramer dislikes just about everything since pop art. Video? “Artists who work in video offer something that cannot be experienced as high art,” he declares over a long midtown lunch. “They’re basically offering you an amateur version of something people in the networks do much better.” How about some nice, soothing figurative painting then? “I see stuff like that in Westport [Conn.], where there’s an art-supply store that gives over its windows to illustrators who live there. A lot of it is better than what’s in the New York galleries. As I say to my wife, ‘I’ve reviewed worse’.”
So, is some kind of masochism chic going around the art world? No and yes. Kramer doesn’t attack contemporary art as a con game, the way that Morley Safer did on “60 Minutes.” He painted when he was a kid in Gloucester, Mass. As a Syracuse University undergraduate (in English and philosophy) in the late ’40s, he helped set up a gallery and artists’ studios in an abandoned building downtown. His idea of a great American artist isn’t Andrew Wyeth, but rather the abstract sculptor David Smith, who made all those welded steel “Cubi” in the 1960s. And Kramer put in a decade as chief art critic at The New York Times, where he even wrote a favorable review of the notoriously self-indulgent postmodernist painter Julian Schnabel, Kramer left the paper in 1982 to found The New Criterion, which hestill edits. The wickedly iconoclastic, sinfully readable Kramer makes other art critics read like, well, art critics.
But it’s Kramer’s thundering conservative politics that make him so deliciously scary. He wrote that Golden’s “Black Male” show “is not fundamentally an art exhibition at all. It is an exercise in the hermeneuties of left-wing racial politics.” Kramer asked his Observer readers to “take the hapless history of the National Endowment for the Arts, for example. There are days when we seem to be witnessing the 22nd act of its long-playing saga of bureaucratic subterfuge and denial.” In conversation, he adds, “I think you could extend [abolishing the NEA] to cutting off all taxpayer funding of living artists.”
Understandably, many in the art world take exception. Marcia Tucker, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art (which has absorbed its share of Hilton’s hits), says, “Hilton calls everything he doesn’t care for ‘political,’ which points to his own preoccupation with politics.” Museum of Modern Art curator Kirk Varnedoe, long a Kramer target, tries to put Kramer’s negativism in perspective. “His view of art is actually a mirror of the left’s. They both start with the grand idea that in works of art one can read the moral state of the culture. But then they both devolve to a eraven view of art in which power and strategy are everything, and actually experiencing a work of art is left out.” Hal Foster, an editor at The New Criterion’s political polar opposite, October magazine, says, “What Newt Gingrich and Kramer share is the trauma of the 1960s, when culture opened up to other people, other interests. [Critics like] Kra-met still resent having the status of art and culture taken away from them. They want to get it back, even if they have to attack culture to do it.”
Some people claim that Kramer doesn’t play at all well west of the Hudson River, where you’d think he’d have a huge impact. Museum of New Mexico modern-art curator Sandy Ballatore says, “He never comes up. He has no effect on anything we do at the museum or in any dialogue in the local press.” Or maybe the Santa Fe art crowd just hides Kramer’s reviews in the bathroom basket, between the Tweeds catalog and an old issue of October – just like they do in New York.
