Art critic Hilton Kramer died yesterday, and the responses to his death have been as polemic as his writing. A member of the old guard, Kramer was a modernist who tried, but failed, to grasp important trends in contemporary art; he also successfully identified many of its weaknesses. We admire his strong, provocative voice and fearless finger-wagging at bad taste. His assertion that defining Abstract Expressionism in terms of the artist’s psychological state turned everything to shit and replaced aesthetics with biography (we’re paraphrasing) still rings true.
In hopes of giving the late critic a well-rounded portrait, we've provided links to these essays and our own commentary below:
