Roger Kimball (born 1953) is a conservative U.S. art critic and social commentator. He was educated at Cheverus High School, a Jesuit institution in South Portland, Maine, and then at Bennington College, where he took a BA in philosophy and classical Greek, and Yale University. He first gained prominence in the early 1990s with the publication of his book, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education. Additionally, he is editor and publisher of The New Criterion magazine and the publisher of Encounter Books. He currently serves on the board of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the board of Transaction Publishers and as a Visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college based in Savannah, Georgia.[1] He also served on the Board of Visitors of St. John's College (Annapolis and Santa Fe). His forthcoming book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, will be published by St. Augustine's Press in the Spring of 2012.
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Kimball lectures widely and is a frequent contributor to many newspapers and journals, including The Wall Street Journal, 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,[2] a regular column at the Pajamas Media weblog,[3] 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 Western 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 Kołakowski. 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.
First published in 1990, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education was updated in 1998 and again in 2008. The most recent third edition includes a new introduction by Kimball as well as the preface to the 1998 edition. The book critiques the ways in which humanities are currently taught and studied in American universities. The book takes the stance that modern humanities have become politicized while seeking to subvert "the tradition of high culture embodied in the classics of Western art and thought."[4] Kimball claims that yesterday's radical thinker has become today's tenured professor carrying out "ideologically motivated assaults on the intellectual and moral substance of our culture."[4] The book has been deemed controversial due to its specificity, with the New York Times Book Review's Roger Rosenblatt noting, "Mr. Kimball names his enemies precisely...This book will breed fistfights."[5]
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."
Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age is a book criticizing the literary and philosophical foundations of postmodernity. Examining the work of Eliot, Auden, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and more, Kimball critiques the ways in which these writers deal with what he views as the intellectual and moral deterioration of modernity. He also laments the state of modern culture, focusing his analysis on the realms of contemporary art and academia. Kimball argues against nihilist, deconstructionist, and anti-enlightenment perspectives prevalent in modern theory, contending that objective truth is an important tenant of any discourse. The New York Times Book Review calls Kimball a “scathing critic…whose tirades are usually justified” and whose “intellectual rigor is refreshing.”[6]
Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse is a book that explores intellect and rationality through western history. Kimball posits that intelligence “is neither good nor bad in itself but rather takes its virtue, its moral coloring, from its application.”[7] He examines a variety of figures, ranging from Plutarch to Kierkegaard to Descartes, illuminating the benefits and dangers of genius as it relates to culture, common sense, and reality.
In 2003's Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity, Kimball turns a critical eye towards what he sees as modern art's avant-garde assault on tradition. He argues that the most invigorating action in today's modern art is a quiet affair that takes place out of the limelight and celebrity that have become part of the art world. In a series of essays and reviews, he touches on numerous subjects including minimalism, the Barnes Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art and examines artists including Vincent van Gogh, Edward Burne-Jones, Gustave Moreau, Picasso, Renoir, Matisse, Paul Klee. Mark Rothko, and more.[8] The book has enjoyed positive critical reception from a variety of pulications. The Tennessean called the book's reviews "lucid mini-educations in the exercise of taste"[9] and in The Weekly Standard, Thomas M. Disch raved that "Kimball knows his business...His reviews make me hungry to see what I've missed" and that "Kimball is an honest hater: deadpan in delivery, deadly in his accuracy."[10]
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.