[Rick Mullin]

To me, Hilton Kramer is, above all else, the straw man in the best essay on (and most searing indictment of) 20th century art, Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word. Here is the opening few paragraphs:
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PEOPLE DON’T READ THE MORNING NEWSPAPER, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm bath. Too true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York City on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974, like I was, slipping into that great public bath, that vat, that spa, that, regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad, that Ganges, that River Jordan for a million souls which is the Sunday New York Times. Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing, in Arts & Leisure, Section 2, page 19, in a state of perfect sensory deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened:

I noticed something!

Yet another clam-broth-colored current had begun to roll over me, as warm and predictable as the Gulf Stream ... a review, it was, by the Time’s dean of the arts, Hilton Kramer, of an exhibition at Yale University of “Seven Realists,” seven realistic painters . . . when I was jerked alert by the following:

“Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial—the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”

Now, you may say, My God, man! You woke up over that? You forsook your blissful coma over a mere swell in the sea of words?

But I knew what I was looking at. I realized that without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away.

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, “to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.” I read it again. It didn’t say “something helpful” or “enriching” or even “extremely valuable.” No, the word was crucial.

In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.
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I agree so wholeheartedly with Kramer’s perspective on art, that I am actually heartbroken over how he screwed up. How he created something worse than Warholism. While Perls’ essay tells us less than Wolfe’s about “the problem,” here, for what a painter’s thoughts are worth, are the passages in Perls’ that I think are most insightful.

Here are the passages of Perl’s essay that matter most to me

Too often the judiciousness stands in the way of his enthusiasm; I want him to expostulate a bit more about the things he loves.

Eventually, he was willing to leave the impression that traditional values in the arts had an inherent relationship with what people on the Right in this country believe are traditional social values. This was a terrible lie.

What was lost in this grotesque game of matching artistic values and social or political values was art’s freestanding power.

Moving on to The New Criterion, he came to believe that polemic might work where persuasion had already failed.

I think I speak for many people when I say that we were grateful to him for raising so many of the important questions about art and society, even when he was all too quick to embrace the wrong answers.

He knew we were in for some tough times in 1985, when he titled his second book The Revenge of the Philistines. More than a quarter of a century later, the philistines are only more firmly entrenched.


RM