A Serious Critic for Unserious Times

When I was an art history graduate student in the early 1990s, Hilton Kramer (1928–2012) was a peripheral figure for my colleagues and me. We didn’t read The New Criterion, which he cofounded and published from 1982 to his retirement in 2007. All of us were too young to remember his tenure from 1965 to 1982 with the New York Times, during which he wrote more than 1,000 reviews of exhibitions. He was the paper’s first art critic.