The art world invites strange alliances. Painters achieve considerable success making indulgent, facile work. And yet, you find yourself rooting for them out of a stubborn allegiance to the discipline itself. Hey, at least they're painting. Sometimes, these alliances form not out of shared ideology but from a mutual recognition of what others are unwilling to acknowledge.


In this contradictory spirit, I long to build a philosophical bond with Roger Kimball. His writing, particularly in Art's Prospect (2003), often takes the form of lonely lamentation, mourning the collapse of aesthetic standards. In the book's opening essay, The Museum as Funhouse, Kimball articulates an incisive critique of the loss of institutional rigor:

 

"Art museums were democratic, but not necessarily demotic institutions. They were open, but not necessarily accessible, to all. The bounty they offered exacted the homage of informed interest as the price of participation. Accessibility was a privilege that anyone could earn, not a right that everyone enjoyed."


He resists flattening aesthetic standards in the name of inclusivity and asserts the dignity of difficulty. Kimball's sentiments here don't endorse gatekeeping but insist that cultural literacy, like any meaningful form of literacy, is earned through labor and not bestowed by institutional fiat.


I didn't grow up frequenting museums or libraries filled with monographs or with a family fluent in the codes of art history. Whatever understanding I have has been assembled haltingly, over time. And it has transformed me. Kimball's argument is not elitist. It is aspirational. Institutions that should embrace the slow cultivation of receptivity, take the much easier path of reducing accessibility to simplification. He's right to call this out, and he's one of the few who do so with such vigor.


But two pages later, he characterizes MASS MoCA's use of the term "cultural production" as an expression of a "Marxist view of art." Here, his rhetorical precision gives way to reflexive ideology. To equate the language of cultural labor with Marxism, particularly in an institution underwritten (partly) by private capital, governed by a board of corporate executives, and driven by the logic of ticket sales, is disingenuous. The Whitney, The MoMA, The Guggenheim. These are not revolutionary cells. They are mechanisms of elite consensus.


He diagnoses the commodification of museums and the infantilization of audiences, but fails to critique the economic structures that underwrite these shifts, misassigning blame to the point of caricature: "Marxism" becomes a stand-in for that which he finds culturally distasteful. And Kimball, a scholar of intellectual depth, does himself a disservice by making an argument that is beneath him.


He rightly acknowledges that museums have adopted the logic of entertainment and corporate branding, and that their rhetoric of inclusivity can mask a more profound disengagement with rigor. However, Kimball's critique remains incomplete and reactive by misplacing the source of these developments in the cultural left.


This tension extends beyond his art criticism. In the updated 2008 preface to Tenured Radicals, Kimball laments the fragmentation of the humanities into "studies" disciplines and the academically unserious proliferation of workshop-based curricula. Yet he remains conspicuously silent on the broader political and economic assault on the humanities. The defunding of departments, the adjunctification of faculty labor, and the cultural campaigns that have encouraged students to abandon liberal education in favor of vocational training. (Thus removing working-class voices from the cultural conversation completely).


In Tenured Radicals, free speech is an excuse liberals use to justify inviting ex-members of the Weather Underground into the classroom. Today, Kimball sits on the board of Ralston College, a self-styled bulwark of free thought and academic virtue, whose chancellor is Jordan Peterson.


Kimball cites the rise of Fox News and conservative talk radio as hopeful signs of resistance to a "leftist" cultural hegemony. One, he asserts, is dominated by aging ex-radicals obsessed with gender identity and hellbent on the destruction of Western civilization. But what does he make of the forces those media platforms have unleashed twenty years later? Does he still believe the solution to cultural incoherence lies in figures like Sean Hannity?


And yet, I continue to find value in his provocations. He is one of the few living art critics willing to engage with aesthetic experience with even the slightest posturing of moral seriousness. In his best moments, Kimball reminds us that art is not merely a vehicle for messaging, but a demanding encounter with form, tradition, and the imagination.