God bless him, even if he’s on the wrong side of [most of the intervening 40 years of] contemporary art history, you gotta love Hilton Kramer’s eviscerating takedown of MoMA’s 1970 conceptualist exhibition, Information, curated by Kynaston McShine:
The exhibition is, in its way, amusing and amazing, but only because it upholds an attitude one had scarcely thought worth entertaining: an attitude toward the artistic process that is so over-weeningly intellectual that it is, in its feeble results, virtually mindless. Here all the detritus of modern printing and electronic communications media has been transformed by an international gaggle of demi-intellectuals into a low grade form of show business. It leaves one almost nostalgic for a good old-fashioned hand-made happening.
Though he only mentioned one artist by name in his NY Times review [Hans Haacke], Kramer did note the “great many blowups of junky photographic materials…of earthworks,” which I assume is a reference to the four Gianfranco Gorgoni photos that introduced the just-completed Spiral Jetty to the public.
Show at The Modern Raises Questions, July 2, 1970 [nyt archives]