This week’s Legacy Series, which was originally recorded on March 3rd, 1995, featured Geno Rodriguez interviewing critic Hilton Kramer.
Geno Rodriguez is an author and a former owner of the Alternative Museum in SoHo which ran from 1975 through 2000. At a time when political art and diversity were not considered mainstream issues, The Alternative Museum served as a base for the many artists who were disenfranchised from the American arts scene.
Rodriguez is also known as an artist. His artworks have been widely exhibited and are in the collections of numerous museums and private collections including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of the City of New York, the International Center of Photography, New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. Rodriguez is also the recipient of awards and fellowships such as: The National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowship (1979), and a Ludwig Voglestein arts award. He is also the recipient of the Phelps Stokes Foundation’s Distinguished Visitor to Africa, the Rockefeller Trust for Mutual Understanding and a Rockefeller Asian Cultural Council award.
Hilton Kramer (1928 – 2012) was an American art critic and essayist. Kramer worked as the editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, and from 1965 to 1982, as chief art critic for The New York Times. He also published in the Art and Antiques Magazine and The New York Observer. Kramer's New York Post column, initially called "Times Watch" - focused on his former employer, the New York Times - and later expanded to "Media Watch", was published weekly from 1993 to November 1997.
Kramer fought against what he considered to be leftist political bias in art criticism, and what he perceived as the aesthetic nihilism characteristic of many 20th-century working artists and art critics. The frustration with The New York Times's policies led to his resignation from the newspaper in 1982. He co-founded (with Samuel Lipman) the conservative magazine The New Criterion, for which Kramer was also co-editor and publisher. He took a strongly anti-Communist stance in his 2003 review of Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History. In The Twilight of the Intellectuals (1999), he defended the anti-Communist views of art critic Clement Greenberg.