In defense of standards

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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.