The Essential New Art Examiner

The Art Scene of the ’80s

H ilton K ramer The Art Scene of the ’80s October 1985 On May 9, 1985, the Chicago New Art Association and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago co-sponsored a lecture by Hilton Kramer, which is reprinted below. The Chicago New Art Association is a not-for-profit educational organization that sponsors visual arts-related activities such as lectures, seminars, and the publishing of the New Art Examiner. Hilton Kramer is the editor of The New Criterion. He was formerly the editor of Arts Magazine and the chief art critic and art news editor of the New York Times. He is the author of The Age of the Avant-Garde (1973), a collection of critical writings on the art of the modern period. The Revenge of the Philistines, a new collection of art criticisms from the years 1972–1984, will be published by the Free Press this month. It was a pleasure and an honor to welcome Mr. Kramer to Chicago. Nowadays there are many people like myself who, in observing the art scene of the 1980s and seeing it in a perspective reaching back to the 1960s and even the ’50s, cannot but have the impression that we are living in a distinctly new period. Not merely because of the passage of years, but because of the issues that characterize the life of art at the present moment, we feel that we have entered a new era. 166   T h e E s s e n t i a l N ew A rt E xaminer This sense of a new period haunts not only the art of our time, as we see it, but also the discussion of the art of our time, the whole surrounding world of analysis—the world of ideas, the world of gossip and criticism, and the world of commerce: in other words, everything that has now attached itself to the life of art and made it something of a mainstream experience in American cultural life. The question that is often asked about a period that makes itself felt as something new, as a new historical development, is: What accounts for it? How can we really explain these changes in art as well as the changes in our response to it? We know pretty well what the usual explanations offer us. Some say: Well, it’s fashion. It’s like hemlines. It’s the cultural equivalent of women’s fashions, or indeed, for that matter, men’s fashions. Or we are told that it’s all the result of shrewd and cynical dealers, or that it’s all the result of influential museum curators and influential critics. In short, the usual explanations come down to a kind of conspiracy theory in which money and the market, in collusion with the media, shape our cultural life and account for these significant changes in taste—not just minor ones, not just passing ones, here today and gone tomorrow, but the really significant changes in taste and in standards that we see taking place. Now only a fool would deny that all of these things—fashion, dealers, critics, the media, money, the market—play a role, and a fairly obvious role. But in my view they do not really play the fundamental role that is customarily ascribed to them in accounting for the real changes in taste that we are observing and reeling from, the changes that induce this sense of a new period. When we consider the nature of the changes that come into art, I think it is always a great mistake to omit the key figure responsible for those changes, the figure who tends to get left out of all these conspiracy theories about changes in the art world—the figure of the artist, who is in my view the key figure. It is really the artist who stands at the center of all fundamental change in art. So the question really comes down to: What induces an artist to initiate a change, a really fundamental change in art? I want to attempt to answer that question, to begin with, in two parts—first, with a quotation, alas from myself, from something I wrote in the New York Times in April of 1981, and then with an anecdote. The article from which this passage is drawn was the first review that I wrote H I L T O N...