Hold the arts page - demise of standards in coverage of cultural subjects; includes related article on New York Times' music critic Alex Ross' disregard for the importance of classical music - Special Section: The Decline of American Journalism

National Review, June 21, 1993 by Hilton Kramer, Samuel (American pianist) Lipman

IT WAS inevitable, perhaps, that the decline in cultural literacy, which is now a chronic condition of the so-called educated classes in this country, would sooner or later result in a drastic deterioration of standards in cultural journalism. What began, a decade or so ago, as a worry about what readers could be counted upon to know or understand about culture past and present has developed into a question about the editors and writers, including in some cases the critics themselves, who can no longer be counted upon to know or understand the essentials of their subject. What currently passes for expert knowledge in these quarters is often little more than a general disposition to downgrade language and standards, follow the fashions of the day, and impose upon cultural coverage a Left-liberal political slant.

Even those of us who saw all this coming years ago scarcely dreamed that the devastation would be so rapid, so complete, or so political in character. The speed with which even major newspapers and magazines have hastened to "dumb down" their coverage of books and the arts has been shocking even to pessimists like myself. Criticism and feature writing of a kind that was still welcome in the mainstream media's coverage of the arts ten or fifteen years ago is now rejected as too esoteric and "elitist" to be allowed public expression; and negative criticism, except where politically called for by the Left, is severely frowned upon. All distinctions between high and low culture, including outright trash, are considered too invidious to be given a hearing.

The priority lately accorded the lowest forms of popular culture and media entertainment at the expense of literature and the fine arts in the "quality" press is now so advanced that it amounts to a cultural revolution. So does the politicization of reviewing, where the tenets of political correctness and multiculturalism are now regularly substituted for criteria of aesthetic judgment. It is not only that writers of critical opinion are discouraged from making reference to what used to be common knowledge. Many publications have now succumbed to the belief that thoughtful allusions to the classic achievements of Western culture are in themselves somehow invidious. After all, they may be threatening to the self-esteem of readers, especially if the readers in question can claim some minority or victim status. Everywhere the level of journalistic discourse is lowered in the name of some higher social virtue.

ALAS, it pains me to say that my own professional alma mater, the New York Times, where I labored for nearly 17 years to upgrade its arts coverage, is now the outstanding example of this decline. In the papers arts pages it has become a settled policy to give priority to pop music, television garbage, Hollywood gossip, and the inanities of show business, over coverage of high art. Indeed, art and classical music have been the casualties of a reverse-discrimination policy at the Times. Except for news about auction prices and other art-market matters, there is virtually no coverage of the New York art world, which, despite a silly report to the contrary recently in the New York Times Magazine, is still the most important in the world. The space devoted to reviews of gallery exhibitions is now so abridged that even major artists are often passed over in silence or dispatched in a few lines, never mind the newcomers whose work is never even looked at if it does not conform to some current political/sexual/ racial trend. However, no opportunity is lost to lavish space and praise on the cultural activities of "minority" groups, some of whom are actually a good deal larger and more powerful than the ranks of the serious painters and sculptors who really do constitute an endangered minority on today's cultural scene.

As for the New York Times Book Review, it is now established practice for serious books to be ignored while commercial hacks and authors of politically correct tracts are heaped with fulsome praise. Indeed, there are weeks when the front pages of the Book Review sound like nothing so much as the sessions of the radical feminists' caucus at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. And as the "diversity" chorus sings its hallelujahs in unison week after week, literary intelligence-- never exactly in abundant supply in this quarter--is quietly consigned to oblivion.

The weekly magazines are often no better. Consider the lugubrious fate of The New Yorker under Tina Brown. I was never a fan of the old New Yorker, whose politics--long before the age of political correctness--seemed to me the quintessence of radical chic. Remember The Greening of America, The Fate of the Earth, and all those other lachrymose five-part homilies we were treated to by William Shawn? No, it won't do to sentimentalize the old New Yorker, which for decades after 1963 often read like weekly memoranda exchanged by members of the Kennedy government-in-exile.