A post on Andrew Gelman’s blog got me thinking about contemporary art and art criticism – two art critics in particular, Hilton Kramer and Donald Kuspit.  (Not much commentary at the moment – just want to note a couple quotes for future reference.)

From Hilton Kramer’s obituary in the New York Times:

Mr. Kramer took dead aim at a long list of targets: creeping populism at leading art museums; the incursion of politics into artistic production and curatorial decision-making; the fecklessness, as he saw it, of the National Endowment for the Arts; and the decline of intellectual standards in the culture at large.

A resolute high Modernist, he was out of sympathy with many of the aesthetic waves that came after the great achievements of the New York School, notably 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”).

At the same time, he made it his mission to bring underappreciated artists to public attention and open up the history of 20th-century American art to include figures like David Smith, Milton Avery and Arthur Dove, about whom he wrote with insight and affection. Some of his best criticism was devoted to artists who had up until then been regarded as footnotes.

“Nothing gives me more pleasure,” he wrote in a 1999 catalog essay for the painter Bert Carpenter, “than to discover unfamiliar work of significant quality and intelligence.”

I think Kramer wasted far too much time waging pointless battles during The Culture Wars of the 1990’s but he was a fine art critic.

Emmet Cole on Donald Kuspit and the contrast between Modernism and Postmodernism (“postart”):

Whereas modern art consisted of revolutionary experiments motivated by a desire to express aspects of the newly-discovered “unconscious mind,” Kuspit argues, postart is shallow, unreflective banality motivated by the desire to become institutionalized; that is, part of the mainstream (along with the commercial reward that such co-opted acceptability brings). In this regard, the messianic zeal with which Van Gogh approached his work represents an ideal because it demonstrates the kind of authentic and individualistic commitment to artistic expression that today’s commercialized postartists lack. The crucifixion has become a cabaret.

The point as I see it is that Modernism builds upon Van Gogh’s work.  Modernists continue on hundreds of years of artistic tradition.  The style is different but they honor the past.  In particular, I remember reading an essay by Charles Sheeler years ago where he wrote about seeing himself as a descendant of Rembrandt.  I thought it came through in his work.