Requiem for The New Criterion

Nathalie Djurberg, Tiger Licking Girl's Butt (still), 2004.

The New Criterion used to be the publication that made it unsafe to like painting. For a time—for a long time, I think—under the wing of former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, TNC served as a destination for effusive and unambiguously ideological criticism in praise of painting. I loved it. Some of the old flavor still persists: See Karen Wilkin's writings on Cézanne over the last decade if you're able (her reviews are behind the firewall, regrettably). I loved it: For an enthusiastic admirer of painting who never subscribed to the painting-is-dead notion, I was sympathetic to the urgency of their agenda. But I also felt the strong urge to temper my enthusiasm—for TNC if not for the priority of painting they supported—because their reviews were informed by an utter disdain for contemporary media. (Installation art and so forth).

Threading that needle was great exercise. How can I convey that my appreciation for Childe Hassam does not come at the expense of my affection for George Condo (or for his protege, Kanye West)? Once, if I recall correctly, a New Critter wrote a favorable gloss of my review on the Turner retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. Now, I'm proud of that review. But reading their commiseration with its points, their suggestion of solidarity with me as a critic defending the classical ramparts against all the site-specific Saracens and video-art Visigoths made me feel gross. I like all that new stuff!

This is a roundabout way to say that I miss the TNC that did not, for example, even pause after Harold Pinter's death to condemn the man, his politics, his sympathetic obituaries, and all of the theatre world for indulging him. "I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place," Pinter once said. "[I]nstead of being called out for his political autism and his acquiescence in atrocity, he will be awarded the Nobel Prize," said TNC.

Roger Kimball has turned TNC into a high-brow Tea Party rag—but enough preamble. Here is James Bowman from earlier this week, writing about the "culture of honor" in the media that shielded President Kennedy's indiscretions:

As more women were admitted to the group, the honor culture of the media was diluted and ultimately disappeared. I have some sympathy for the view that this is a good thing — at least insofar as I think female journalists are a good thing — though I don’t quite share it.

Does Bowman think it is a good thing there are female journalists? His byline is a long lament for the lost culture of honor, so I would guess the answer is "no," insofar as he thinks women cost the professional world its honor, which is actually his explicit opinion. Sad thing. TNC was at one time the place to read the untimely but passionate defense of Spenser against the longstanding perfidy of blank verse. Bowman might as well be writing about Mad Men.