THE NEW CRITERION READER
The First Five Years
Edited, with an introduction by Hilton Kramer
New York: The Free Press, 1988
429 pp., $24.95
The New Criterion has been around for over five years now, but it seems much longer. Partly this is because, in the brief span of half a decade, the magazine has succeeded in establishing itself as an institution, however minor a one, in the ecological system of contemporary literary journalism. It occupies a niche that would otherwise go unfilled, viewing every branch of the arts from an appropriately distanced perspective and according to the strictest critical standards evolved over a couple of millennia of Western culture, without regard for fashion, personality, commerce, or political correctness.
Partly too it is because it reads--has always read--like the Old Criterion. It was birthed already middle-aged: solemn, substantial, prosperous-looking, burdened with the self-aware satisfaction of recognized accomplishment. Personified, it would resemble Edmund Wilson at fifty, although lacking the strong magisterial quality of his prose. Yet its self-imposed mission is iconoclastic, almost prophetic: "From the outset," its editor, Hilton Kramer, writes in his introduction to The New Criterion Reader, "this monthly review devoted to the arts and contemporary culture was intended to serve as a 'critical dissenting voice,' as the editors wrote in our inaugural issue."
The statement proves to have been an understatement: The New Criterion's (TNC) case against both the culture and the cultural criteria of its day is almost as radcial as the case made by the prophets Amos and Isaiah against the decadent and wayward Israelites. For example, in his introduction Kramer castigates
an establishment culture devoid of serious artistic
standards, and in some cases devoid of serious artistic
interests. Increasingly, indeed, the only standard that
counted was a publicity standard…Criticism thus
surrendered its standards before the juggernaut of the
new cultural establishment and became, in effect, an
adjunct to the very enterprise it had once been its
function to question.
A few pages on, he writes:
American cultural life in the early 1980s was
characterized by an odd combination of social euphoria
and critical entropy. In many fields, we were confronted
with the dismaying spectacle of rapid institutional growth
taking place in an environment of creative inertia…[I]t
is indeed only by the application of a sustained critical
intelligence that we can hope to penetrate and
...
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