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Art critic Hilton Kramer, a champion of modernism, dies at 84

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A fierce champion of modernism both in his tenure as critic at the New York Times and at the New Criterion, Hilton Kramer died Tuesday morning in Maine at 84 years old.

A combative but immensely respected figure on the art scene, Kramer took barbed stances against postmodernism, the politicization of art and the Pop movement, and he took a particularly negative view of the Whitney Biennial.

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‘The Whitney curatorial staff has amply demonstrated its weakness for funky, kinky, kitschy claptrap in recent years,” he wrote in a review of the 1975 Biennial, as cited in the New York Times obituary, “and there is the inevitable abundance of this rubbish in the current show.”

Shifting into cultural politics in his later years that included attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts and liberal bias in media (a frequent target in his late-’90s columns in the New York Post), Kramer was not a critic who shied away from criticism, either of his subject or of himself.

A full obituary will follow on latimes.com/obits.

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