COMMENT
9
cultural situation was accurate then, or now - and the whole ques–
tion of mass culture has been debated and redefined endlessly- it
does suggest the complexity of the problem: a complexity that
Kramer reduces to its most banal formulations.
But Kramer has tried to have it both ways throughout his shift–
ing career. Earlier he wavered between modernism and antimod–
ernism. At the beginning of the abstract expressionist movement, he
opposed it on the leftist grounds that it reflected the growth of
American imperialism, though it might not have satisfied his taste
for pictures in a more naturalist vein. Later he accepted some of the
new figures, but generally favored the more representational
painters, characteristically unaware that the realist tradition to
which he is naturally drawn is associated with certain social and left–
ist trends that he abhors. To what extent this contradiction comes
from esthetic indecisiveness or the conflict between his taste and his
ideology, I would not venture to speculate about. The fact is that his
writings on art have not had the influence that Clement Greenberg,
for example, has had; and on
The New York Times
he actually played
the role of a crusading cultural journalist more than an art critic. But
the effect of his recently acquired ideology is clear enough.
It
leads
him to dismiss what he thinks is radical or advanced, and to
denigrate those who do not share his political and artistic
prejudices - including most liberals.
It
also blinds him to the fact
that the lowering of standards and the coopting of the avant-garde
by the culture of the media are rooted, as Daniel Bell has pointed
out, in the contradictions of modern society and not in some radical
conspiracy.
The other contributors to the neoconservative version of our
country and our culture lack Kramer's killer instinct, though many
of them follow the line of the movement. Some make sense in their
criticism of our intellectual decline and of the radical nonsense ram–
pant these days. But generally their ideology keeps them from realiz–
ing that the political and cultural malaise they deplore is a product of
the society they accept so uncritically.
It
is one thing to reject the
anti-American carping at our country and our culture; it is quite
another to celebrate their shortcomings.
Robert Nisbet and Gertrude Himmelfarb, for example, are
quite right in pointing to the dismal intellectual state of the univer–
sities. And part of this is due to the mindless reduction of all ques–
tions by leftist professors to semi-Marxist formulations about peace,
the third world, capitalist justice, etc. But this is not the whole story.
