Roger Kimball

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Roger Kimball (b. 1953) is a conservative U.S. art critic and social commentator. He first gained prominence in the 1990s with the publication of his book, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education. Additionally, he is co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion magazine and the publisher of Encounter Books.

Kimball lectures widely and is a frequent contributor to many newspapers and journals, including The Wall Street Journal, The National Review, The Spectator, The New Criterion, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Sun. Kimball is also a regular contributor to The New Criterion's weblog Armavirumque. In the autumn of 2007 he inaugurated Roger's Rules, a regular column at the Pajamas Media weblog, which was launched in the spring of 2006.

Some of Kimball's work as a writer is polemical, directed against what he sees as the politicization and "dumbing down" of culture and the arts. Much of his work, however, endeavors to battle what he has called "cultural amnesia." Responding in April 2007 to a query about Counterpoints,a new anthology of work from The New Criterion, Kimball wrote that "For us, the imperative of criticism has revolved primarily around two tasks. . . . The first is the negative task of forthright critical discrimination. To a large extent, that means the gritty job of intellectual and cultural trash collector. . . . [M]uch of what presents itself as art today can scarcely be distinguished from political sermonizing, on the one hand, or the pathetic recapitulation of Dadaist pathologies, on the other. Mastery of the artifice of art is mostly a forgotten, often an actively disparaged, goal. At such a time, simply telling the truth is bound to be regarded as an unwelcome provocation. . . . An equally important part of criticism revolves around the task of battling cultural amnesia. From our first issue, we have labored in the vast storehouse of cultural achievement to introduce, or reintroduce, readers to some of the salient figures whose works helped weave the great unfolding tapestry of our civilization. Writers and artists, philosophers and musicians, scientists, historians, controversialists, explorers, and politicians: The New Criterion has specialized in resuscitating important figures whose voices have been drowned out by the demotic inanities of pop culture or embalmed by the dead hand of the academy."

Many of Kimball's essays in The New Criterion, and in books like Experiments Against Reality and Lives of the Mind, endeavor to reacquaint readers with important figures from the Western canon whose work he feels has been neglected or misunderstood. Kimball's interests range from the work of literary figures such as G.C. Lichtenberg, Robert Musil, Walter Pater, Anthony Trollope, Milan Kundera, and P.G. Wodehouse, to philosophers and historians such as Plutarch, Hegel, Walter Bagehot, George Santayana, Raymond Aron, and Leszek Kolakowski. Kimball also writes regularly about art. He has devoted essays to artists from Delacroix and Vuillard to Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg; in recent years, he has been particularly interested in bringing attention to Classical Realism and other contemporary art movements that champion the traditional values and techniques of representational art. In addition, Kimball was instrumental in bringing the thought of the Australian philosopher David Stove (1927-1994) to a wider audience through his anthology of Stove's writings, Against the Idols of the Age.

One abiding concern of Kimball's work is the legacy of the 1960s. In The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, Kimball critically examined many of the accepted notions about that decade and its influential figures, including Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, William Sloane Coffin, Eldridge Cleaver, Charles Reich, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse. The aim of the book, Kimball wrote in his introduction, was to "show how the paroxysms of the 1960s continue to reverberate throughout our culture." Kimball contended that "The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog."

Kimball's most recent book, published in 2004, is The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, a critical account of contemporary academic art history and its infatuation with "theory" and the "transgressive" at the expense of aesthetic appreciation and a traditional view of the ennobling resources of art. Among the figures Kimball discusses are Michael Fried on Gustave Courbet, Svetlana Alpers on Peter Paul Rubens, Griselda Pollock on Paul Gauguin, and Martin Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro on Vincent van Gogh.

Contents 1 Works 1.1 As author 1.2 As editor and contributor 1.3 As editor 1.4 External links

[edit] Works

[edit] As author

• The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, Encounter Books: San Francisco, 2004.
• Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity, Ivan R. Dee: Chicago, 2003.
• Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse, Ivan R. Dee: Chicago 2002.
• Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age , Ivan R. Dee: Chicago 2000.
• The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, Encounter Books: San Francisco, 2000.
• Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, HarperCollins, New York, 1990; revised edition, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1998.

[edit] As editor and contributor

• Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Art and Culture, co-edited by Roger Kimball & Hilton Kramer, Ivan R. Dee: Chicago, 2007.
• Lengthened Shadows: America and Its Institutions in the Twenty-first Century, co-edited by Roger Kimball & Hilton Kramer, Encounter Books: San Francisco, 2004.
• The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age co-edited by Roger Kimball & Hilton Kramer, Ivan R. Dee: Chicago 2002.
• The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control, co-edited by Roger Kimball & Hilton Kramer, Ivan R. Dee: Chicago, 2000
• The Future of the European Past co-edited by Roger Kimball & Hilton Kramer Ivan R. Dee: Chicago 1997.
• Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect in the Twentieth Century co-edited by Roger Kimball & Hilton Kramer, Ivan R. Dee: Chicago 1994.

[edit] As editor

• The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julien Benda, introduction by Roger Kimball, Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 2006.
• Art in Crisis, by Hans Sedlmayr, introduction by Roger Kimball, Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 2006.
• Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution,by David Stove, edited and with an Introduction by Roger Kimball, Encounter Books: New York, 2006.
• Diversions And Animadversions: Essays from the New Criterion,by Alexander Coleman, edited with a preface by Roger Kimball, introduction by Denis Donoghue, Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 2005.
• Physics and Politics: Or: Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of 'Natural Selection' and 'Inheritance' to Political Society, by Walter Bagehot, edited and with an introduction by Roger Kimball, Ivan R. Dee: Chicago, 1999.
• Against the Idols of the Age, by David Stove, edited and with an introduction by Roger Kimball, Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 1999.

[edit] External links

• Carl E. Olson The Life of the Mind: An interview with cultural critic Roger Kimball Ignatius Insight, August 2005
• Interview with Roger Kimball Defending the Sublime The Intellectual Conservative Jun 2004
• Interview with Roger Kimball Alternative Answers Right Reason Sep 2006
• Armavriumque essay on Classical Realism Bright Spots, Apr 2006.