Going to Bed with The New Criterion

Is it perverse to want to have intimacies with a magazine?

Perhaps not, if the magazine in question is The New Criterion. The New Criterion is celebrating 30 years of publication this year. It is probably the best magazine in the world. It is by far the most sensual.

The cover format is a pure modernist thrill: two bold colors, white at the top set off by green, yellow, orange or another color depending on the month. It's like a Rothko print with cleaner lines. The contents of the magazine are also on the cover, giving a hint of the pleasures to be had inside.

Once inside there is acid-free paper, a good, thick stock, and ads that themselves are on paper as thick as most modern book covers -- in some cases, thicker. The font is galliard, which is manages to be both austere and sensual. And those delicious words editor Roger Kimball uses in his surgeries on liberal nonsense -- "Rebarbative." "Otiose." "Emetic."

YES! YES! YES! (Was it good for you?) To spend some time with The New Criterion is to realize anew the irreplaceable tactile pleasure of a substantive magazine in the hand.

The New Criterion launched in 1982. Ronald Reagan had been president for a year. There was no internet. The magazine was founded by pianist and critic Samuel Lipman and Hilton Kramer, who had been the chief art critic for The New York Times.

Kramer had left the Times because he was fed up with the phoniness, pretentiousness, and aesthetic awfulness of the art scene at the time. The first issue of The New Criterion promised "to speak plainly and vigorously about the problems that beset the life of the artists and the life of the mind in our society." It would be a discriminating conservative magazine about high art, politics, and culture.

It delivered.

I came across The New Criterion in the early 1990s, right around the time I was abandoning liberalism. It was a godsend. I was raised in a family of artists and writers, and everyone I knew who was an artists or who was interested in the arts. More, they were deeply hostile to conservatives, whom they considered philistines. Liberals were the ones who saw plays (my brother was an actor who won the Helen Hayes Award), listened to classical music and jazz, and took in exhibits.

One of my favorite places in the world is the Phillips Museum in my home town of Washington, D.C. It was America's first museum dedicated to modern art (this year is the museum's 90th anniversary). My father, a writer for National Geographic, referenced Renoir's "Boating Party," which hangs in the Phillips, in an article shorty after I was born. I still think of him when I see the painting. How could I leave any of that?

With The New Criterion, I didn't have to; in fact, I could exponentially expand my knowledge of art and culture and still vote Republican. The New Criterion is a great champion of modernism, defining it, in Hilton Kramer's phrase, as "the discipline of truthfulness, the rigor of honesty." It was in the pages of The New Criterion that I began to understand that artistic modernism was not a complete break from the past -- that Picasso, Stuart Davis and Salvador Dali actually had to learn certain basics and study the masters before even attempting to break away from them.

I also found it refreshing that The New Criterion was eager to blowtorch the left's artistic icons. Whenever I see an Andy Warhol exhibit -- including the most recent, "Warhol: Headlines" at the National Gallery of Art -- I think of Kramer's description of the artist: "the cheerful nihilist."

With the rise of the internet, we entered an age of the instant insult -- the hand-to-hand combat of the "comments" section, the Twitter "flame war." What is being lost is what The New Criterion has maintained: the art of the slow, careful, methodical takedown. A great place to see some of these collected, and to get a general introduction to The New Criterion, is the 2007 book Counterpoints: 25 Years of Thew New Criterion on Culture & the Arts.

You'll find the great Australian historian Kenneth Monogue on "Christophobia and the West," David Frum on "The Legacy of Russell Kirk," and Theodore Dalrymple, the British physician who predicted he recent London riots, on "The Epidemiology of Evil." There's also great pieces on Milton Avery, Elliot's "The Waste Land," and the New York School Poets.

What other magazine could even offer an essay entitled "Frantz Fanon: The Platonic Form of Human Resentment"? And like everything else in the magazine, it is beautifully written. This is cultural criticism that is for everyone, even as they refuse to dumb it down.

When I first started reading The New Criterion, I thought that Kramer and Kimball, while first-rate writers and thinkers, may have been a little to hopeless in their views on modern America and the liberalism that became part of the culture in the 1960s. I was especially disappointed that The New Criterion would never engage itself with rock and roll, which I consider a great form of modernist art itself.

While I still think that the magazine would do well to cover popular culture like films and pop music, I must admit that it seems like the world is catching up with their dour warnings. One of the most powerful essays in Counterpoints is "the Fortunes of Permanence," Roger Kimball's take on the modern, or postmodern, attack on permanence.

"The attack on permanence is an attack on the idea that anything possesses inherent value," he writes. Kimball then ties in this current culture to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which anything that is old is forbidden: "As Huxley saw, a world in which reproduction was ‘rationalized' and emancipated from love was also a world in which culture in the Arnoldian sense was not only otiose but dangerous."

This was written almost ten years ago, but seems terribly prescient today. My only argument would be that the transformation from industrial to consumer capitalism in the last 100 years has played a part in the destruction of the idea of permanence, even if not as large a part as the assaults on culture and tradition from the left. But that's an argument for another day.

At 30 years old The New Criterion still looks great -- and feels great. Tonight I'm going to bed with it's 30th anniversary issue. And I won't hate myself in the morning.