Shelf Life: Season’s Best

HILTON KRAMER, onetime chief art critic for the New York Times and now co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion, has long been one of our most valuable cultural resources. In his highly readable new anthology, The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985–2005 (Ivan R. Dee, 384 pp., $27.50), he presents his subject unflinchingly and with great insight. The book’s “guiding ambition,” he writes, “is to discriminate between the genuine and the fraudulent in cultural life.”

What is essential to Kramer is that what we call modernism in art remain true to its high spiritual vocation. “Modernism,” he explains, “denominates not a particular ‘stance’ or style—it is by disposition neither figurative nor abstract, for example— but rather a discipline: the discipline of truthfulness, the rigor of honesty.” And it emerged in precisely the century that needed it most:

About the Author

Michael Potemra

Michael Potemra was a literary editor for National Review.

HILTON KRAMER, onetime chief art critic for the New York Times and now co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion, has long been one of our most valuable cultural resources. In his highly readable new anthology, The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985–2005 (Ivan R. Dee, 384 pp., $27.50), he presents his subject unflinchingly and with great insight. The book’s “guiding ambition,” he writes, “is to discriminate between the genuine and the fraudulent in cultural life.”

What is essential to Kramer is that what we call modernism in art remain true to its high spiritual vocation. “Modernism,” he explains, “denominates not a particular ‘stance’ or style—it is by disposition neither figurative nor abstract, for example— but rather a discipline: the discipline of truthfulness, the rigor of honesty.” And it emerged in precisely the century that needed it most: