Warding off the barbarians

Counterpoints: 25 Years of ‘The New Criterion’ on Culture and the Arts
edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer

The 40 or so reviews and essays in this book celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of the New Criterion. It saw itself as the heir of T. S. Eliot’s Criterion. In 1922 Eliot wrote that his contributors sought to foster ‘a common concern for the highest standards of both thought and expression’. This was to echo Matthew Arnold’s definition of criticism as the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world and to protect it from the onslaught of philistine barbarians. For the writers of the New Criterion modern criticism fails to live up to this task.

Take the case of Sir Elton John. Social historians will long take an interest in him as a phenomenon of our times, with its cult of Princess Diana whose virtues he celebrated in ‘Candle in the Wind’ at her funeral service. But in 50 years his music will be forgotten. ‘Only what will last through the centuries,’ Hannah Arendt writes, ‘can ultimately claim to be a cultural object.’ By this definition, Sir Elton is not a cultural object. According to Roger Kimball, editor of this book, to equate Elton John with Bach, ‘cultural parity turns out to be a campaign for cultural reversal’. As a result, ‘the very notions of a high culture and the distinction that separates it from popular culture and commercial entertainment are radically eroded’. Since spontaneity is the imperative of our time, this opens the frightful prospect that we may get something worse than Sir Elton.

This book is something of an omnium gatherum. It covers topics as diverse as the architectural glories of Grand Central Station and Frantz Fanon on the cleansing power of violence in the struggle against white colonialism.