Foundation for Cultural Review

Background

The Foundation for Cultural Review says it wants to foster, promote, encourage, and finance research, discussion, and publication in the broad fields of cultural, intellectual and aesthetic activities in the context of American thought and life. ³

The foundation publishes The New Criterion, founded in 1982 by Hilton Kramer, a former art critic for the New York Times, and Samuel Lipman, a music critic and pianist and music critic for Commentary. ² The magazine is published monthly from September through June. ⁵

The New Criterion’s other initiatives include a Visiting Critic program, the Hilton Kramer Fellowship, a podcast series featuring its executive editor James Panero, and publications by Encounter Books. ⁶

The early funders of the Foundation for Cultural Review included the John M. Olin Foundation. ⁷

The New Criterion

Hilton Kramer was the founding editor of The New Criterion in 1982. Kramer began his career as an art critic as editor of Arts Digest in 1953. Kramer began working for the New York Times as an art critic in the 1960s. After almost two decades, Kramer left the Times at age 54 to co-found The New Criterion. ⁷

Kamer was also the art critic for the New York Observer from 1987 to 2006 and wrote the “Media Watch” column for the New York Post from 1993 to 1997. He was born in 1928 and died in 2012. ⁸

Kramer named the magazine after T.S. Eliot’s British journal called The Criterion that was published in the 1920s and 1930s. ⁷

Samuel Lipman was the first publisher of The New Criterion.  He was a concert pianist and wrote music criticism for Commentary. He was a member of the National Council on the Arts. Lipman was born in 1934 and died in 1994. ⁹

The first issue of The New Criterion featured pieces by Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, English literary critic F.R. Leavis, and Joseph Epstein, neoconservative editor of the American Scholar. Kramer wrote the lead essay titled “Postmodern: Art and Culture in the 1980s.” ⁷

The magazine has been critical of the National Endowment for the Arts and has regularly criticized liberalism, deconstructivism, Marxism, Black studies, and feminist studies. ^{7 10}

It has focused on what it claims to be “the dismal state of academia” since its inaugural issue in 1982. To combat the alleged “woke” multiculturalist agenda in academia, The New Criterion has convened a symposium on “affirmative action & the law” and said it plans to hold future symposiums aimed at helping conservatives compete against left-wing radical agendas. ⁶

Though some of the original neoconservatives influenced its founding, the magazine devoted its January 2018 issue to populism in America. Also, the magazine’s editor Roger Kimball wrote a July 2017 piece for the pro-Donald Trump publication American Greatness titled “Donald Trump as Pericles” about a speech then-President Trump gave in Warsaw, Poland. ¹¹

Leadership and Staff

James Panero is the executive editor of The New Criterion and was on the staff since 2022. ¹² He is a former editor of National Review. ¹³

Roger Kimball is the vice chair of the board of the Foundation for Cultural Review, the editor and publisher of The New Criterion, and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. Kimball sits on the board of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and is the chair of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. His books include The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, and Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. Kimball was a member of boards for Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, St. John’s College, and Transaction Publishers. ¹⁴

Benjamin Riley is the managing editor of The New Criterion. He came to the publication as the Hilton Kramer Fellow in Criticism at The New Criterion. He graduated from Dartmouth, and was the president and publisher of the Dartmouth Review. ¹⁵

Adam Kirsch is the poetry editor of The New Criterion. He is also an editor of The Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section. He is the author of several books, including The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature, Why Trilling Matters, and Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer? Essays. In 2013, he was a judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He attended Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. ¹⁶

James Piereson is the chairman of the board of the Foundation for Cultural Review. ¹⁷ He a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and president of the William E. Simon Foundation. Piereson is a former executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation. Piereson sits on the boards of the Pinkerton Foundation, the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, the Center for Individual Rights, the Philanthropy Roundtable, the American Spectator Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and DonorsTrust. ¹⁸

Russell Pennoyer is the treasurer of the board of the Foundation for Cultural Review. ¹⁷ Pennoyer is the vice chair of the board of the Hudson Institute, the chair of the William T. Grant Foundation, and the president of the Achelous and Bodman Foundations. ¹⁹

Erich Eichman is a board member. ¹⁷ He is the deputy books editor of The Wall Street Journal. Eichman formerly worked as an associate editor of Harper’s Magazine and as managing editor of The New Criterion. ²⁰

Other members of the board include Christopher Laconi, secretary; Lionel Goldfrank; Marco Grassi; Stephen Jenks; Richard Miller, Jr.; and Peter Pettus. ¹⁷