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So, Hilton Kramer has passed away. The William F. Buckley of American art criticism, he will be remembered for the hard line he toed against all manner of contemporary art as the editor of the New Criterion, where he acted as if the avant-garde had accomplished its noble goal in the 1950s and then died from the effort, only to see successive generations of pseudo-artists disturbing its dignified grave. It’s interesting to note that the young Kramer, who wasn’t really an art person per se, was roused to the battlements by Harold Rosenberg‘s seminal 1952 Art News essay American Action Painters, which placed the “art” in work like Jackson Pollock‘s paintings in the process and not the canvas result, a fundamental tenet of so much art from the ’60s onward—a position the fledgling conservative pundit declared to be “intellectually fraudulent.” He later went on to become the art critic for the New York Times, which memorializes him today in an obit that unspools curt dismissals of major art movements: “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’).” Not that Kramer had much warmth for the Times: after leaving the paper of record, he dashed out a regular column in the New York Post called Times Watch to lament the paper’s liberal moral failings.
– QUOTE OF THE DAY –
“Let’s say you have a budget of $10,000 that you’d be happy to spend and you’re having a hard time making a decision, but you happen to spot a $1,000 picture that you love. Don’t dismiss it because it doesn’t match your budget—grab it…. It might not be much more expensive than eating in a nice restaurant, and I guarantee that you’ll enjoy the photograph for longer than you’ll remember that meal.” – AIPAD president Stephen Bulger on this year’s photo fair (opening at the Park Avenue Armory tonight), in an interview with Artspace chairman Chris Vroom
– MUST READ –
Bronx Museum Drops Admission Fees – On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, the institution has announced that it will dispense with its suggested $5 entry and, in another community-minded gesture, that it will provide arts counseling for 40 Bronx public schools. (NYT)
New Nazi-Art Loot Find – It turns out that the long-lost documents revealed at the National Archives yesterday were two volumes of the notorious Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the catalogue maintained by Hitler‘s art-theft squad as it pillaged Jewish art collections across Europe for the Führer’s megalomaniacal planned museum in Linz; the books had been liberated from Hitler’s Bavarian vacation home by two U.S. officers, now dead. (NYT)
Eisenhower Commission Backs Frank Gehry – The official Eisenhower Memorial Commission has fired back against the calumny the late president’s family has levied against the architect’s plan for the site, stating: “We confirm our selection of him, confirm our enthusiastic endorsement of his design concept, and express our regret and sadness at the tone and nature of the selected comments that have been made on Mr. Gehry’s design for the memorial.” (LAT)
– ART MARKET –
Sotheby’s to Show Keith Haring, Too – The auction company has announced that the next show for its hybrid gallery-within-an-auction-house S|2 will be Keith Haring: Shine On, with a range of the artist’s work and “music and guests meant to evoke Haring’s time at Club 57 and the Pop Shops that he opened in New York and Tokyo”—which sounds quite a bit like the artist’s current Brooklyn Museum show. (Press Release)
– IN & OUT –
Bank of America has announced that the campaigns its charitable Art Conservation Project is funding this year include the restoration of 12 Chamberlain sculptures at the Menil Collection, three Murillo paintings at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Tintoretto‘s Il Paradiso at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, five paintings by Chagall at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 17 mural sketches by Diego Rivera at the Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, Jackson Pollock‘s Sea Change at the Seattle Art Museum, and 16 historical portraits by presidential painter Gilbert Stuart at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. (Press Release)
Blackstone Group exec John Studzinski has created a new prize for avant-garde institutions, giving the $40,000 award to Hamish Dunbar‘s Cafe Oto on London’s East End, “a venue for experimental music and sound art.” (Bloomberg)
