Maggie's Farm

Kramer's Criteria - Hilton Kramer's Life of Cultural Discernment Meant Speaking Truth to Art:

Any age has its darkness, and the age of modernism was decidedly not an exception. Kramer pointed out that even Eliot had "illustrated the apparently unavoidable paradox that the advent of modernism brought with it the seeds of its own perpetual renovation." This "perpetual renovation" had the potential for decadence as surely as it had the promise of fresh insights into the particularities of modern life, and no one knew this better than Kramer. Much of his life as a critic was spent exposing the humbuggery and snake oil that is often gathered under the label of "postmodernism" (or of "modernism" for that matter).