The New Criterion

The New Criterion, edited by Roger Kimball, was founded in 1982 by the art critic Hilton Kramer and the pianist and music critic Samuel Lipman. A monthly review of the arts and intellectual life, The New Criterion began as an experiment in critical audacity—a publication devoted to engaging, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, with “the best that has been thought and said.”

This also meant engaging with those forces dedicated to traducing genuine cultural and intellectual achievement, whether through obfuscation, politicization, or a commitment to nihilistic absurdity. We are proud that The New Criterion has been at the forefront both of championing what is best and most humanely vital in our cultural inheritance and of exposing what is mendacious, corrosive, and spurious.

Published monthly from September through June, The New Criterion brings together a wide range of young and established critics whose common aim is to bring you the most incisive criticism being written today.