We’ve had several occasions to remark on the astonishing
metaphysical feat of The New York Times Book Review. For
as long as anyone can remember, it has been an
embarrassment, as bad as it was possible for such a
mainstream paper to be, and yet—how do they do it?—it
always manages to surprise by being just a little worse this
week than last. A couple of months ago, the Review treated
readers to a feature about the size of black
genitalia. In its issue for December 11, there appears an
immensely long essay on contemporary art criticism
called “State of the Art.” We do not
know who put Barry Gewen, an editor at the Book Review, up
to the task. Perhaps he lost some bet with the editor and this was his
punishment. Mr. Gewen has never before betrayed any public
interest in art or art criticism—he certainly betrayed no
knowledge of the subject in this essay. To call it
confused would be a calumny on confusion; to say that it was a
hash of half-understood liberal clichés
would be unfair
to the institution of the cliché. It is a dog’s breakfast of
an essay, so bad that pity for the author competes with
irritation at the travesty he has perpetrated. Those
unfortunate enough to have read the piece will understand
our particular irritation at such sentences as “[Hilton]
Kramer employs a clear-cut either/or aesthetic equation:
modernism good, postmodernism bad” and the suggestion that,
somehow, writings by the editors of October “sound like no
one so much as the traditionalist Hilton Kramer,” a
statement of such consummate preposterousness that we
wondered for a moment whether the whole essay was some sort
of joke. Nietzsche once said of the Germans that they had no
fingers, only paws; what, we wonder, would he have said about
the lurching clumsiness of The New York Times Book
Review?