Interior of the 1913 Armory Show

To the Editors:

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 decadent’ ” and suffers “a progressive loss of resistance to humbug”—James Panero takes away with the other hand in a review that sets up the Armory Show (“The Armory Show at 100”) as embodying the work of “like-minded souls who helped nurture and propagate a renewed vision for culture.” “Renewed vision for culture”? Whom is he kidding? The Armory Show itself was the beginning of that end of art of which even The New Criterion disapproves.

Though Panero seconds Barzun in objecting to the present-day “professionalized museum class [that] dictates the story of art to an increasingly passive public,” he praises the “energy” of the Armory Show, which consisted of what he calls a “resurgence in art [that captured] the vital spirit of the times” in revolt against “the dry bones of a dead art.” He