2010 考研英语阅读出处.docVIP

/viewarticle.cfm/the-amateur-as-critic-10980 The Amateur as Critic Terry Teachout November 2007 E-mail This Article to a Friend Subject: The Amateur as Critic 窗体顶端 Yes, I would like to receive periodic updates and information via e-mail from Commentary. Recipient Addresses: Separate each address with a comma. Your E-mail Address: Message: 窗体底端 E-mail This Article to a Friend Thank You A link to The Amateur as Critic has been emailed to your friends. Most E-mailed articles: Of all the changes that have taken place in English-language newspapers during the past quarter-century, perhaps the most far-reaching has been the inexorable decline in the scope and seriousness of their arts coverage. Not only have many newspapers done away with their book-review sections, but several major papers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, no longer employ full-time classical-music critics. Even those papers that continue to review fine-arts events are devoting less space to them, while the “think pieces” on cultural subjects that once graced the pages of big-city Sunday papers are becoming a thing of the past. It is, I suspect, difficult to the point of impossibility for the average reader under the age of forty to imagine a time when high-quality arts criticism could be found in most big-city newspapers. Yet a considerable number of the most significant collections of criticism published in the 20th century, including Virgil Thomson’s The Musical Scene 1945 , Edwin Denby’s Looking at the Dance 1949 , Kenneth Tynan’s Curtains 1961 , and Hilton Kramer’s The Age of the Avant-Garde 1973 consisted in large part of newspaper reviews. To read such books today is to marvel at the fact that their erudite contents were once deemed suitable for publication in general-circulation dailies. We are even farther removed from the discursive newspaper reviews published in England between the turn of the 20th century and the eve of World War II, at a time w