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Posted on 06/24/2025 6:16:18 PM PDT by Angelino97
I really wish I could stop reading the Sunday New York Times. The political content is pure communism, but it’s the arts coverage that lures me in every week.
A recent Sunday edition of the Times offered stories about a new film honoring Nat King Cole, a review of a documentary about the lives of ballerinas, a fantastic profile of the British band Pulp, and an interview with Mia Threapleton, an actress in the new Wes Anderson movie The Phoenician Scheme. Then there’s the book review section, which included books about the history of spies in American high society, how sex has interacted with Christianity, and a memoir by 1980s restauranteur Keith McNally.
Conservatives have taken enormous strides in the last few decades to become competitive with the leftist media in promoting books and culture. This is particularly true when it comes to the important task of advancing the books written by conservative authors who otherwise would get no attention. My own book, The Devil’s Triangle, would not have been published, let alone promoted, without places like Bombardier Books and Chronicles.
Yet it’s time for conservative media to move into a richer, deeper, and more challenging phase. Conservative media needs to get serious about covering culture. Ben Shapiro talking about Batman doesn’t cut it. We need our own version of the New York Times arts section.
Some would say we already have it in Chronicles, The Claremont Review of Books, and The New Criterion. And there’s some truth in that. There’s more available today for conservatives interested in serious conversation about the culture than ever before. For example, for someone with my interests, The New Criterion, has been a revelation on the intersection of the arts and politics. Objectively speaking, it offers some of the best arts coverage anywhere.
When my politics turned to the right in the early 1990s, I sometimes wondered how I could square Pat Buchanan, Thomas Sowell, and Phyllis Schlafly with Andy Warhol, Hemingway, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The New Criterion taught me that there’s no necessary contradiction between appreciating artistic modernism and subscribing to political conservatism.
In fact, as I write this I have on my desk two books: Lord Byron’s Foot by George Green, one of my favorite works of poetry and the winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize, and The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told by Bill Janovitz, a history of the great 1980s band. Both are celebrations of popular culture and modernism.
Indeed, the critic Hilton Kramer, one of the co-founders of The New Criterion, convincingly argued that mainstream Americans absorbed and accepted modernism, making it part of our tradition. We love Edward Hopper, and Picasso, and jazz, and the minimalism of California architecture. It is forward-thinking while also nodding to tradition and reality.
Although conservative media long ago established itself as a player in America’s cultural ecosystem, it is past time for it to evolve to the next level. It needs to get better at anticipating rather than reacting to movement in the culture.
In No Sense in Wishing, a forthcoming collection of essays by Lawrence Burney, Burney explores those moments in life when we encounter art that transforms us. “In this life,” Burney writes, "we endure an infinite series of experiences that change us at the molecular level. The first song that had a lasting impression on you isn’t likely the first memory you have of a song, but something about the one you do remember changes you in considerable ways. Just like your first fight did. Or the first time you sat with a book that made you say to yourself, “I have to change the course of my life after reading this.”
The liberal media is still better at anticipating these kinds of cultural turning points and covering them. There’s no reason why conservatives can’t be just as good at it—indeed, they ought to be even better, as conservatives have a firmer grasp of what it means to be fully human. What passes as today’s arts scene often embraces things that are, in fact, the antithesis of art. Conservatives are not inclined to endorse this but, because we are so accustomed to that culture, we often dismiss real art along with this fake art. That’s a failure on our part.
The moments we spend discovering a great new novelist or a jazz band are things that enrich our souls, and they should and have deep importance. Cultural writers at places like The New York Times understand this, even if they don’t put it in those terms. The issue, of course, is that it’s not cheap to get this kind of coverage from a magazine.
It’s costly to go to concerts, buy and review new novels, and spend time investigating the talent behind a new film. Chronicles is not a media empire like The New York Times. Yet, with the blessings of technology we have still been able to cost-effectively challenge places like the Times on their own turf.
As I mentioned above, on my desk is a copy of the book The Cars: Let the Story Be Told. I received an advanced copy of the book, which means my coverage, potentially, could come out before anything in the Times or the Post. The topic is as important as anything going on in our politics, since sometimes music touches people on a level deeper than world events.
The book tells the history of the pop group The Cars. Janovitch (who is by trade a musician, not a journalist) describes the moment he knew something different was on the horizon when, as a young teenager in 1978 he was holding that first Cars record:
"There are no hirsute hippies or crusty southern-rock dudes in hats and denim on the cover of this album. No, there is something far more appealing: the close-up of a hot model with high cheekbones and glossy ruby-red lips that look like they inspired the Rolling Stones’ logo. Her long fingers with matching red polished fingernails are loosely draped around a translucent steering wheel. She’s illuminated in comic-book colors, blue and red, like from a cop car. She’s got her other forearm up to her forehead, her palm turned outward like a silent-movie starlet in a melodramatic display of duress.
"But she’s smiling, maybe even laughing, possibly singing; her tongue is visible in her open mouth, the tip up on the roof, as if she is about to sing the word ‘la’ or ‘love.’ We sit on the shag carpet in Jeff’s wood-paneled bedroom as he opens the shrink-wrap and puts the record on the turntable. The needle drops."
The Cars were my first concert when I was just 15. The band announced the coming of New Wave, which was also a return to modernism in the arts. In his book Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds describes how the postpunk years from 1978 to 1984 “saw the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature.”
The postpunk period was: "an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music. Cabaret Voltaire borrowed their name from Dada. Pere Ubu too theirs from Alfred Jarry. Talking Heads turned a Hugo Ball sound poem into a tribal-disco dance track. Gang of Four, inspired by Brecht and Godard’s alienation effects, tried to deconstruct rock even as they rocked hard. Lyricists absorbed the radical science fiction of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick, and techniques of collage and cut-up were transplanted into the music."
He argues further that the album cover artwork of the post punk period “matched the neomodernist aspirations of the words and music, with graphic designers like Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville and labels like Factory and Fast Product drawing from constructivism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, John Heartfield and Die Neue Typograhie.”
There’s no reason conservatives can’t cover these topics and find interesting things to say about them. Why should The New Criterion have all the fun? That doesn’t mean you jettison tradition, Dostoyevsky, Milton, Keats, or the Bible. There’s enough room for all of this if we want to understand ourselves.
The other book on my desk, Lord Byron’s Foot, is the poetry collection by George Green. There are funny and profound poems about Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, opera, art and movies. As Juliana Gray put it in her GoodReads review, “Green writes about film, art, and writers in language that’s fresh and engaging. Often I had to reread a poem to trace the train of thought—to see how, for example, a poem that begins with Jimi Hendrix can end with Dolly Madison (“Broad Stripes and Bright Stars”).
The title poem is not quite as hilarious on the page as when Green reads it live, but it’s still wonderful.” Another reviewer called Lord Byron’s Foot “the finest book of poems published this century.” Conservative media should be elevating the art of people like George Green. We already know how Charlie Kirk feels about Hollywood.
One of my favorite poems in Lord Byron’s Foot is about how Cervantes survived war and captivity and went on to write Don Quixote. “Lepanto” captures Cervantes’ trauma:
Cervantes, wounded three times, nearly died, and, luckily, his left hand had been mangled, which saved him from a slow death in the galleys. The Moors would hold him captive for five years, but, even after three escape attempts, they let him stroll at leisure on the beach.
Back home, he took great pride in his survival and knew those years of wrangling with corsairs, those years of starving on the beach, had taught him more than patience in adversity. He could, at will, dissolve into the ether, dissolve into the empty golden shore.
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I subscribe to Chronicles.
However I also subscribe to City journal and The Spectator.
For just the reason the author talks about.
Pity one cannot find another conservative to discuss all the interesting things their
Writers talk about.
No one.
As a Christian with both Catholic and Protestant inclinations, I blame a lot of this on the anti-intellectual, anti-culture current that has long defined American Evangelicalism.
Strip mall churches and things. 😑
The guy really needs to get a life. Anyone who thinks this drivel is worth spending time on is missing out on reality.
God bless Mark Judge... a good man whose good name was dragged through the mud in the left’s wild-eyed, reckless and utterly diabolical attempt to take down Brett Kavanaugh and save Roe v. Wade.
…….
And I once read Playboy for the philosophical articles.
The guy really needs to get a life. Anyone who thinks this drivel is worth spending time on is missing out on reality.
I agree, I'd rather blow my brains out than read about a documentary on the lives of ballerinas, and I love to read. Eons ago, I used to read the Los Angeles Times book reviews every Sunday.
This is a great article.
Back in the 80s, there was a meaningfully large portion of Intellectuals that were Republicans. While they generally Country Club Republicans, they brought a vital rigor to the underpinnings of free markets, free minds, and a free society.
This group TENDED to be - as we denizens would call them - Quiche Eaters. They liked going to museums over the shooting ranges, liked the Opera over mosh pits, and has more classics than Mad magazines in their library. There was a slight animosity between the Quiche Eaters and Denizens. But, in general, we overlooked these differences since America was more important.
Over the past decade, a strong anti-intellectual sentiment has spread across MAGA land. To be fair, it’s well-earned: professors are anti-American, as are journalists, k-12 educators, globalists, and many medical/Fauci-types.
At the same time, many of us Denizens grew up. We have Bach and the Dead Kennedys in our music collection, have Atlas Shrugged and As I Lay Dying next to Calvin and Hobbes, and concealed carry when going to the museum. We still think Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. But we will go to brunch.
Enter the MAGA anti-intellectuals. Again, their skepticism or hostility to anyone on FR who reads the Sunday Times, knows about Wagnerian opera beyond Looney Tunes, or lives in a blue state or works in Manhattan, LA, or Chicago is understandable. And yea, I find the ballet to be pure Quiche-eating fare. However, that doesn’t make anti-intellectuals superior or better.
I get it. The arts tend to be the domain of the left. As such, using the transitive property of politics, if the left is useless, and the left likes the arts, then the arts are useless.
Not only is this wrong, but given that Our Side tends to be empirically driven and, dare I say, smarter and more insightful than statists, our assessment and critique and championing of the arts would wrestle away this dimension of culture. Beethoven’s 9th IS a masterpiece because, contrary to leftist claptrap about equality, some people are just better than others, and Beethoven was da bomb. Eddie Murphy a superior comedic actor vs Jim Carrey not because he’s black, but because his movies and comedy hit upon fundamental elements of greatness and differences without being preachy. Finally, as always, Springsteen sucks. And so on.
If there is any indication that I’m close to right, one only needs to review any Sunkenciv article. You CAN be MAGA and a cultural intellectual without having to undergo reassignment surgery with a congratulatory Quiche served afterwards.
I suspect that if there WAS a “conservative” culture magazine, it would crush the Sunday Times. Indeed, if there was a Culture Ping List, it’d take off.
YMMV.
Conservative media is the culture, or at least what is left of it.
I agree. Nat King Cole, Pulp, and Mia T, who cares? In 30 years nobody will know, or care, who they are.
In addition it is written in a newspaper that routinely lies. What purpose is achieved by reading writers who lie?
Wouldn’t you say that the Spectator fills that bill?
One of the major reasons Trump won in 2024 was due to TikTok and X.
It’s about 60 years since Nat King Cole died and people still remember him and care. In another 30 years I expect most of us will be gone, but what will people then remember or care about? Anything more worthwhile? I doubt it.
Didn’t Mark Judge say last week or so that he was leaving journalism to pursue something else? The dude is taking his time.
“Politics is downstream of culture.” Andrew Breitbart.
L
We do engage. It might seem we don’t because most of the media doesn’t cover it, or the little it does cover, is heavily biased.
But just living our lives, we do. The things we decide to do, we do. The things we decide not to do, we do.
American Evangelicalism has tried to create its own counter-culture. They gave us Christian heavy metal and Christian rap. And Hallmark style Christian movies.
You described William F. Buckley.
Yeah and the sub culture is nothing to write home…or the NY Times about.
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