Hilton Kramer > Quotes

“The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation. ”
― Hilton Kramer

“It was all so long ago and Stalin doesn't matter any more. Stalin lost his chic before you were born. Sex is always chic.”
― Hilton Kramer

“Postmodernism is a very bogus term. I think it mostly applies to kitsch. I don't know of a single important artist who would ever even allow the term 'postmodern artist.' It's a creation of arts journalists. To me, it's a polite way of talking about failed art.”
― Hilton Kramer

“It was as if an intellectual Iron Curtain of highly sophisticated mendacity had been erected in anticipation of the fall of the actual Iron Curtain in order to forestall any prospect of a moral reckoning. With the idea of truth reduced to the status of a mere social construct--and thus dismissable as a malign
instrument of power-- history itself had been rendered absurd. Our culture was no longer in command of the moral intelligence that was needed to measure the
scale of human suffering and loss that had been incurred as a consequence of eighty years of totalitarian terror. We can only hope that the price to be paid for such a self-willed ignorance and complacency will not be as high in this century as it was in the last.”
― Hilton Kramer

“The thing to remember about those “Cold War witch-hunts” is that they turned up a number of real witches. Alger Hiss was one of them. On the scale of academic fatuousness, NYU’s website honoring Alger Hiss ranks somewhere below Bard College’s decision some years
ago to accept money to create an Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies.
But it is nevertheless a useful reminder that the doctrine of moral equivalence regularly results in moral blindness.”
― Hilton Kramer

“People no longer have any understanding of what blasphemy means.”
― Hilton Kramer