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

The magazine's cultural columns were vastly overrated, too. Could anyone ever finish one of those pedantic, soporific reviews by Andrew Porter? Could you take George Steiner seriously after he had accused Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of "moral indecency" for comparing the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany? I couldn't. There was Arlene Croce, to be sure, as there had once been Edmund Wilson. But otherwise The New Yorker was the last place in the world where you would ever expect to read about an artist or a book you did not already know all about. It was a bad sign when Pauline Kael, with her penchant for extolling the virtues of trashy movies, became the star of the show, for it produced a younger generation of mini-Kaels who spread the gospel of "good" trash to papers far and wide.

Still, compared to the malign rubbish that is now served up as reportage and criticism in Tina Brown's New Yorker, Shawn's could at least make claim to a certain civility. It was often wrong-headed, but it wasn't vicious or vulgar. Everything about the magazine is now corrupt: its graphics, its language, its politics, even its standard of proofreading. (There are also weeks when, owing to those disgusting scent ads, it literally stinks.) Above all, it has set a new low in journalistic ethics by its concealment of the offstage conflicts of interest that so often lie behind its more aggressive editorial features. Tina Brown has performed the remarkable feat of combining in a single magazine the worst features of Vanity Fair, The Nation, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone, while extinguishing the last traces of civility from its editorial columns. One's heart goes out to the remaining old-timers who, with no place else to go, still strive to keep up appearances while everything they cherished in the magazine is being systematically trashed.

It is not a pretty picture, but this is what has happened to cultural journalism in the "quality" press. In some publications (The Nation, for example) it is often worse, while in others (The New Republic) it is occasionally better; though it was The New Republic, come to think of it, that first changed the priorities of cultural journalism when, many years ago, it decided to lead off its arts pages not with a literary article but with a movie column. Maybe that was where the rot first set in.

Mr. Kramer is editor of The New Criterion and art critic for the New York Observer. He is the author of The Age of the AvantGarde and The Revenge of the Philistines.