The New Criterion

Yesterday, I got a mailer from the New Criterion saying they were “defenders of the beautiful and the good” and that they focused on the arts and culture. I know from writing my dissertation that the New Criterion leans right, but I figured no big deal because the focus was on art and literature. So I subscribed. The first article was Heather Mac Donald parroting Trump’s dumb ideas with admiration while she accepted the Burke Award, and praising Roger Kimball for predicting (and celebrating) Trump’s election. The next article was about Hitler’s attack on “degenerate art,” which failed to note that Trump’s NEA policies echo those attacks. I canceled my subscription. Which bums me out because decent arts criticism is as hard to find as decent art itself. For the editor of a journal devoted to art and cultural criticism to celebrate a president who has never, to my knowledge, even mentioned a novel, a play, a piece of music, a dance, a painting or even a film undermines the New Criterion’s claim to defend the beautiful and the good (notice the deleting of “the true” from what is usually a 3-part phrase seems significant. Let me be clear: I have subscribed to many right-leaning journals in the past, and most recently the Dispatch and, to my initial horror, I am enjoying the thinking of Jonah Goldberg. But neither Goldberg nor those right-leaning journals have the intellectual cravenness to support Trump. So my search for a decent arts journal continues.