To the Editor,

After reading Hilton Kramer's review ("If You Strike a Critic, You’d Better Snuff Him", Oct.2) of the exhibition Critic as Grist at White Box and learning about his behavior in the gallery, it seems he suffers from a combination of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Predominantly Inattentive Type, and other perceptual and cognitive challenges which severely impair his abilities to see and think about art. My observations are organized in relation to corresponding symptoms listed in the DSM-IV.

(c) often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly

Mr. Kramer arrived at White Box around 11:15 and was told the gallery would not open officially until 12:00. Nevertheless, he asked that the overhead lights be turned on and insisted on seeing the show. Hence, the "technological failure" of two of the video pieces and the slide projection which Mr. Kramer snidely suggests was due to curatorial neglect was actually a common state of many electrical objects, art related and otherwise, known as "not-turned-on-yet".

(h) is often forgetful in daily activities

Mr. Kramer has apparently forgotten much of art history since the '60s as some of the "aspiring talents" in the show (Dennis Oppenheim, Martha Rosler, Komar & Melamid, Les Levine) have accomplished quite a lot in the interim. (Ms. Rosler just had two concurrent museum retrospectives, in Manhattan.)

(f) often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort: Mr. Kramer admits, "I do not spend a great deal of my time thinking about art, especially when I am looking at specific examples of it."

(a) often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in work: He seems to attend indiscriminately to a few physical details of artworks and is unwilling or unable to synthesize these details into a whole about which he could potentially offer an interpretation. For instance, he fails to see in Xar Taplik's installation, Arthur Danto's Kledons, that the "variety of words", which he points to as one of the piece's meaningless constitutive elements, are arranged into what is usually recognized as sentences, which when read tell one clearly how the piece embodies Arthur Danto. This suggests difficulty in Visual Part-to-Whole Formulation possibly resulting from trauma or organic brain defects. Regarding Arthur Danto's Kledons and Fairsbie Tabs' Vessel in the Form of Decoration Lap or Robert Hughes Distends Base , Mr. Kramer is dumbstruck: "What any of this has to do with the content of criticism is anyone's guess." (Mr. Kramer seems to have no difficulty, however, fully perceiving his own image in Peter Saul's Art Critics' Suicide, and concentrates over a third of the review on this piece. This somewhat complicates the diagnosis of his condition.) Perhaps you are aware of Mr. Kramer's challenges and believe they help to establish a refreshingly "pre-conscious" refiguration of the role of the art critic -- if so, please aware your readers of this experiment with a short explanation preceding his column, and if not, I do recommend you, at the least, have him thoroughly examined and so too his, as he bravely asserts, "readable prose" -- readable, that is, of nothing other than himself.

With my deepest understanding,

Michael Portnoy, Curator of Critic as Grist