American culture is collapsing, and it is the Right’s fault. The Left is out there fighting and we are not; the Left operates the institutions that deliver culture to the public. The New York Times and the Smithsonian take their cases to the people. We talk only to each other. If we had any guts and heart — and, come to think of it, we do — we would seize control of today’s culture agenda instead of merely issuing lamentations from the sidelines.
Philip Terzian captured the ethos of the New York Times perfectly in his comments on the Sunday magazine’s centennial issue (THE WEEKLY STANDARD, April 29). Gazing from Olympian heights over the last hundred years, the magazine discerns nothing worth mentioning about classical music or serious painting, or Yeats or Kafka or Orwell; but Joseph McCarthy, Janis Joplin, Jesse Jackson, and the usual bunch of feminists are too important to pass over. Yet there is more to the story. The New York Times is the only U.S. newspaper that covers the art world’s daily business. If you care about art you have to read it.
