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The New Criterion

It operates as a refuge for a civilizing element in short supply in contemporary America: honest criticism
- The Wall Street Journal

Letters

February 2013

Hogwash, abstract & the rest

by Gideon Rappaport

It mystifies me that, continuing under the editorship of Roger Kimball as previously under that of Hilton Kramer, The New Criterion persists in intermittently admiring in the visual arts the very decline and fall of culture that it so well and rightly militates against in government, politics, theater, music, and the media. Not seven pages after the editor, in his obituary “Jacques Barzun, 1907–2012” (The New Criterion, December 2012), gives with one hand by approving of Jacques Barzun’s apt indictment of the modern art scene—“ ‘When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is deca ...

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Gideon Rappaport


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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 February 2013, on page 80

Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Hogwash--abstract---the-rest-7565

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