In defense of standards

THE TRIUMPH OF MODERNISM: THE ART WORLD, 1985-2005

By Hilton Kramer

Ivan R. Dee, $27.50, 384 pages

REVIEWED BY STEPHEN GOODE

Hilton Kramer is a national treasure, an indispensable part of the American art world today. No one argues with greater eloquence the case for high aesthetic standards at a time when those standards have been debased.

No one attacks with greater precision the jargon that corrupts art writing, or ridicules more tellingly the three ideologies that now dominate “thinking” about art: gender, race and leftist politics.

“The Triumph of Modernism” is a collection of Mr. Kramer’s essays of the past two decades, many from the New York Observer and the New Criterion, the journal Mr. Kramer has edited from its beginning and which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.

Though these essays and reviews cover a myriad of subjects, they share common, underlying themes. There is lament for a nearly lost time when the art world valued aesthetic sensibility, and when high artistic achievement was recognized and prized for the rare, difficult thing that it is.

There are delicious jeremiads attacking the meretricious, fad-obsessed art world of today, with its willful and destructive refusal to recognize a distinction between high and low culture, and its sad preoccupation with gender, race and leftist politics as the final arbiters of what art should be.

Yet amid the pessimism and regret for a lost world, Mr. Kramer is hopeful. Many of his finest pieces celebrate great artists of the past (and their enduring influence), such as the German Max Beckmann and the Frenchmen Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard.

And he voices enthusiasm for high artistic achievement of a more recent vintage, the work of Odd Nerdrum, a Norwegian, for example, and of the American John Walker, and of the late American artists Richard Diebenkorn and Christopher Wilmarth.

What’s most encouraging is that Mr. Kramer believes that within our degraded art world itself there lies a way out of what it has become. “The pressure of human experience” — by which he means “the allegiance art maintains to the pulse of lived experience” — will work to subvert the frivolousness of so much of contemporary art.

For Mr. Kramer, what characterized the art world before the present “forces devoted to disintegration” took their toll was a “seriousness” about art which regarded art as something mastered only over time, whether by the individual artist struggling to realize his vision, or by the critic or connoisseur learning to appreciate and recognize what is truly good.

It is this seriousness about art and its purpose united with the pressure of experience, he argues, that is the enemy of the shallow and faddish and will aid the art world in learning, once again, the importance of distinguishing the genuine from the fraudulent.

In the past, the work of influential critics (who were often first-rate writers) such as Clement Greenberg, Mr. Kramer writes, was “always firmly anchored in concrete aesthetic experience.” Art museums, in those days, were places “we looked to … for our touchstones of artistic quality and achievement.”

The study of art at great institutions such as Harvard was “based, above all,” Mr. Kramer recalls, “on the close, comparative study of individual art objects, and one of its goals was to produce a certain kind of expert intelligence — aesthetic intelligence.”

But beginning in the 1960s this world came to an end, at least for the most part, in Mr. Kramer’s opinion. Critics and academics now judge art not on aesthetics, but on whether it advances a progressive political agenda, he writes, while an impenetrable, soul-destroying jargon, spawned by these “intellectual” fads, dominates writing about art.

Museums such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and other similar top-notch institutions, Mr. Kramer claims, have become places to shop for home decorations and smart gifts, have lunch, and encounter the work of the current art world favorite, not to come to view and appreciate the best of the past.

Mr. Kramer, who packs his reviews and essays with telling anecdotes, notes that there is a Los Angeles gallery called the Temporary Museum of Contemporary Art, a name that underlines, for him, how art is now regarded as ephemeral, not permanent.

Even art once regarded as indisputably great has been stripped of its greatness in the contemporary art world. In an essay on Svetlana Alpers’ 1988 book “Rembrandt’s Enterprise,” Mr. Kramer shows how this highly regarded art historian takes the 17th-century Dutch artist to task for turning art into a “commodity,” by which she means that Rembrandt vigorously sought to sell his own paintings — the “sin” of being too capitalistic.

Looking at Ms. Alpers’ book (and the work of other scholars of similar ilk), Mr. Kramer concludes: “It is the unmistakable goal of this new learning (as I suppose it must be called) not to bring us a deeper appreciation of the achievements of the past but, on the contrary, to discredit them in some fundamental way and thereby render the whole idea of achievement … highly suspect if not indeed completely fraudulent.”

Perhaps no one represents the trivialization of art for Mr. Kramer than Pop artist Andy Warhol, the “cheerful nihilist,” in Mr. Kramer’s words. After Warhol and Warhol’s celebration of celebrity and superficiality, “The art public was now a different public — larger, to be sure, but less serious, less introspective, less willing or able to distinguish between achievement and its trashy simulacrum.”

Mr. Kramer’s prose is often elegant, even when he expresses his discontents with the current art world. So it comes as a (happy) surprise when he changes pace to call former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Tom Hoving (Mr. Kramer pointedly calls him Tom, rather than Thomas), “a spoiled smarty-pants.”

When he becomes enthusiastic about an art work he really likes, Mr. Kramer can exclaim (and we share his enthusiasm) that Christopher Wilmarth has done a “knockout figurative drawing of a female nude,” “knockout” not being part of Mr. Kramer’s usual written aesthetic vocabulary.

And there is a lot that Mr. Kramer genuinely likes. He gives high praise, for example, to former MOMA curator of photography John Szarkowski for his book “Photography Until Now.”

He believes that small, independent, commercial galleries such as Manhattan’s Alexandre Gallery have helped preserve aesthetic good sense by ignoring art world fads and continuing to show quality work such as that of Lois Dodd.

He voices strong approval of the taste of private collectors — he has Eugene and Clare Thaw in mind — who continued to amass great art, and allow that art to be shown at exhibitions at the Morgan Library and the Metropolitan.

Right now, the forces of destruction Mr. Kramer writes about still seem strong. But if he’s correct — and, at its best, this book convinces that he is — the powers that will undermine those destructive forces are at work, setting right an art world fallen on bad times. How welcome that would be.

Stephen Goode is a writer and critic in Milton, Del.