The story goes that one night, when Hilton was still chief art critic of The New York Times, he found himself seated next to Woody Allen, who asked Hilton whether he felt embarrassed when he ran into people whose work he had attacked. “No,” Hilton replied without missing a beat, “I expect them to be embarrassed for doing bad work.”

I love this story because it so perfectly encapsulates certain of the qualities of character and the convictions of mind that together enabled Hilton Kramer to become the best critic of our generation and one of the preeminent intellectuals of the age.

To begin with, there was the magnificent self-assurance revealed and expressed in his response to Allen’s question. In part, this was a sign of how tough he was, and of how little the conventional niceties or the demands of politesse could force him into biting his tongue. And he was just as impervious to sentimentality, cajolery, or flattery.

But there was an intellectual correlate to this quality of Hilton’s character, and it was the tenacious and yet serene conviction that indisputable standards, whether aesthetic or moral, whether intellectual or political, were as real as the rock Dr. Johnson once kicked to refute Bishop Berkeley’s idea that the material world did not actually exist. So real and so clear and so exigent were these standards to Hilton that he refused to believe, indeed was simply unable to believe, in the good faith of those