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I was recently in Oakland, California, spending the afternoon watching some hipster bands play a house show in a sort of art-school punk-rock party compound, complete with barbed wire fencing all around the perimeter of the backyard (this is the sort of exotic jet-setting one does when one is an art blogger). I was having a good time, but after an hour or so, all the skinny kids thrashing away on their instruments were becoming less and less distinguishable, so I decided to wander elsewhere in the house to see what things I could find there.

Inside one room were two friendly fellows that claimed to work as operatives for the local Democratic Party, drinking beer and sitting around a mattress on the floor talking politics. They offered me a beer, so I joined them. Introducing myself as a Minnesotan, our state's favorite liberal son Gene McCarthy naturally came up in the course of conversation, and at some point one of the operatives wanted to show me an old magazine article he had on the late Senator. I was surprised and delighted to see the magazine in question was a 1968 issue of Horizon. The operative, in fact, had nearly an entire bookshelf devoted to back issues of Horizon, nearly the full run, all sitting there in sequential order.

I was surprised and delighted because I knew the magazine well. My aunt was an art teacher in the Cincinnati suburbs beginning in the 1970s, and in her professional career she'd accrued an entire collection of them, which she'd bequeathed to me in high school, thinking I'd enjoy them. Published between 1958 and 1978 by the American Heritage Publishing Company of New York City, Horizon was everything you would want out of an arts magazine: oversized, hardbound, each issue numbered with a gold-embossed numeral. It was full of color plate illustrations and clever marginal pen-and-ink doodles supplementing the stories, and totally free of advertising. Really, calling Horizon simply a "magazine" is a little like calling the Beatles a Merseybeat band -- true, generally, but missing the epic scope. I hadn't seen one since I'd moved out my parents' house in college and left all those boxes of them in the basement for my poor mom to deal with.

I spent a lot of the rest of the afternoon at the Oakland art-school punk-rock party compound leafing through the operative's collection. Not only were the magazines as gorgeous as I recalled, but they were smart and well-written, too. I had remembered them seeming a bit stodgy, but the assemblage of talent was much greater than I recognized as a sixteen year old, a who's-who of still-remembered mid-century popular artists and public intellectuals: David Levine, I.F. Stone, Tomi Ungerer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Frank O'Hara. There were contributions, too, by a whole vanished world of forgotten critics and writers, serious men and women that one imagines smoked pipes, lived in penthouses and knew how to diagram a sentence.

Unfortunately, one thing you can't really discern from reading back issues of Horizon in 2008 is the context in which the magazine originally appeared. I wondered what sort of readers these magazines were intended for, besides my aunt's Ford Administration-era art class pupils. Looking at the contents of the January 1962 issue, the articles seem so perfectly tuned to the interests of a penthouse-dwelling New Frontier urban aesthete that it's borderline parodic: there are profiles of pianist Glenn Gould, The Second City improv theater and actor Warren Beatty (who looks about fifteen years old), features on cave painters of the Negev and the Ford Foundation, a survey of Belgian painting from Bosch to Ensor, an overview of young French novelists such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, and a piece on the history of chess, complete with a full-color spread on different artists' takes on chess pieces as objets d'art. The overarching message seems to be this: you're a smart person that is interested in the world, so here are some articles that will make you a more cultured, better-informed person. It's easy for me or you to snicker now about the rarefied, self-consciously cultivated tastes of that archetypal penthouse-dweller and his dilettante-ish interest in Glenn Gould and the desert art of the Negev -- why, ha ha, it's all just Stuff White People Like!

Well, laugh it up, smart guy; the joke is more likely than not on you and me in the end. The magazines we read today -- if we even read magazines -- aren't anywhere near as wide-ranging or generous in their scope as that one issue of Horizon from 1962, covering contemporary cultural developments right alongside more academic or historical topics. That's doubly true for the blogs or blog aggregators or whatever other media sources we consume daily, weekly or monthly. The center, as the great Yeatsian cliché goes, cannot hold -- you're either left on one hand with "popular" magazines that are sloppy, condescending and willfully stupid, or "smart" magazines on the other hand that are insidery, miniaturist or precious to the point where you feel compelled to hop a Greyhound to the coast, bust into the editorial boardroom and give the entire staff a collective wedgie. Besides that, a full eighty percent of magazines both smart and stupid amount to not much more than a fifty-page shopping list of things to buy anyway.

Looking at the September 1958 inaugural issue of Horizon, though it was published only fifty years ago, seems like it came from another universe. There is an introductory essay by the editors that is so heartbreakingly optimistic and ambitious in scope that it's a little hard to read without feeling a serious tinge of sadness. It starts by explaining the significance of the Van Eyck painting on the issue's frontispiece (a ship setting sail for the, ahem, horizon), and reflecting on the considerable contributions of the Dutch to the Western canon. "We may also observe the heartening fact, in a time of trouble like our own, that Holland's greatness was achieved in an era of peril and uncertainty," the editors write. The peril and uncertainty of the atomic age is invoked. No one can say as yet, they reflect, "whether it is time to sing a recessional or chant a magnificat for the United States at what seems from a historical standpoint it's moment of greatest magnificence." Then this statement of purpose: "This magazine in any case is commenced in the belief that some better guide than now exists in America is needed to the house of culture, with all its thousands of rooms. Never has there been in history such an opportunity to explore this imposing edifice, or so wide a horizon open to our sight...We invite all whose interests lie in this broad field, whether as contributors or readers, to join in this venture." Wow. How to begin to respond to language like that at this point in history, which is arguably even more perilous and definitely more uncertain than 1958?

Certainly no one without a gaping head wound would argue that the United States is anywhere near our "moment of greatest magnificence." My initial reaction to this introduction, actually, was to look up the word "magnificat" on Wikipedia, because I had no idea what it meant. My second reaction was to conclude that the correct answer to the mangificat-vs.-recessional question was clearly the latter: amen, padre, and see you at Shoney's after the service.

I don't mean to sound overly cranky or nostalgic for a glorified past. Horizon was by no means perfect. Most of the contributors and subjects tended to be of the old, white variety. The writing could be fussy and pedantic. There were frequently obsequious profiles of America's sleek, efficient corporate overlords and the endless miracles they were performing, out of the goodness of their hearts, for the arts in America. So while I'm not suggesting the culture that made Horizon possible was quantifiably superior to ours in every way, I certainly do mean to suggest that these magazines are startling reminders that, from a cultural standpoint, ignorance, craven stupidity and pandering have not always been the default settings.

One fascinating article in that first issue from 1958 bears out many of these points. It was a profile of what the author termed "the cult of unthink," the concurrent movements in art and writing and music that we all now collectively know and love as "the beats." Pollock, Brando, Coltrane and Kerouac are singled-out as particularly "cool" leaders of this new school that inchoately expresses itself "with heaves, grunts, pigment splotches and howls." The writer, a young dramatist named Robert Brustein, is not particularly impressed with the whole affair, sniffing at the "inarticulateness, obscurity and self-isolation" of these figures -- for a moment, you imagine you're reading a hilariously dated screed from a reactionary "square" (throw up those air quotes!), a perfect example of the sort of soulless geriocractic nebbishes that ruled the Eisenhower years, trying in vain to dismiss something he's too clueless to really comprehend. And to an extent, that is what you're reading; Brustein does completely fail to anticipate the impact that the beats and the beboppers and the Abstract Expressionists would have on American culture. However, you keep reading, and you notice that he has actually devoted eight full pages, a few thousand words, to grappling with this incipient phenomenon. Brustein isn't some dour, finger-wagging reactionary. He invokes Melville, German expressionism and social protest theater of the 1930s in trying to draw connections between this new school and its artistic forebears, and makes some very trenchant insights that are sort of refreshing when one considers the virtual canonization of the beats and their allies that's occurred since that time. In other words, the piece is not a hacky hatchet job, but an honest, thorough and generally fair-minded critical assessment that, even if you don't necessarily agree, is agreeably thought- provoking. Basically, it's a good piece of criticism.

It actually reminded me quite a bit in tone and content of a recent article in Adbusters magazine by Douglas Haddow entitled "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization." In it, Haddow bemoans the sorry-ass state of American underground culture, decrying it as "lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning." This was, in fact, very similar to the thesis of "The Cult of the Unthink," with many of the very same talking points. Both are tough, funny, skeptical pieces of criticism. The primary difference is that Brustein's Horizon piece is basically quite cool and conservative and geared to a mass audience, and Haddow's Adbusters piece is basically quite furious and radical, geared towards a more niche audience of a few thousand people. Why the difference?

Well, that's the question, isn't it? It's worth asking here what other magazines today take up the mantle of Horizon, in aspiring to such a cohesive and generous reflection of our culture. The Believer is often identified as serving in such a capacity, and though it's a fine magazine, there's something about it that's unbearably arch -- maybe it's the cutesy "discussed in this article" headings that begin each feature. Even when the magazine is engaged and passionate about its subject (and it frequently is), it's hard to shake the feeling that air quotes are being thrown up all over. The arts and culture journal n+1 is fine, too, but probably more in the tradition of fringier, more academic offerings like The Partisan Review. The Brooklyn-based art magazine Cabinet comes very close to matching the same level of quality, breadth and depth of Horizon. However, there is a key difference in that Cabinet is not a magazine that is created for the mass market, and it doesn't read like one. According to Cabinet's website, they have a circulation of 13,000 per issue. O: The Oprah Magazine, for comparison's sake, boasts a circulation of around 2.3 million. Horizon never hit those numbers, of course, but the circulation was substantially greater than 13,000. It was greater, in fact, than the circulation of all of the aforementioned journals. And with all due respect to Ms. Winfrey, you'd be much more likely to find a piece on the desert art of the Negev in Cabinet than in O.

Though it frequently featured leftist writers and was moderately progressive in its political and social outlook, Horizon was essentially a conservative publication. I mean here, of course, it was "conservative" in the purest, most literal sense -- its mission was the conservation of culture, whether that was Glenn Gould or the desert art of the Negev. I thought it was quite funny that this great magazine, once a self- proclaimed standard-bearer for the grand experiment of Western culture, was now being appreciated in 2008 by a Northern Californian part-time left-wing Democratic operative, sitting in the cramped bedroom of a Bay Area art-school punk-rock party compound. This is exactly the sort of figure that culture warriors on the Right point their fingers at when they're looking for someone to blame about why everything is so fucked up, the sort of figure that has been pretty successfully marginalized as an out-of-the-mainstream "elitist" in the current cultural dialogue. Do you think Sarah Palin gives two shits about the history of Belgian painting from Bosch to Ensor? Do you think Sarah Palin even knows who Hieronymus Bosch is? And yet, not so long ago, here is a magazine insisting, as a matter of its own founding principles, that a regular American like Sarah Palin might very well be interested in the history of Belgian painting. Indeed, it goes even further than that and posits that a regular American like Sarah Palin might understand, somehow, that appreciating or even having a basic working knowledge of culture and history is relatively important to the intellectual health of the nation. What does it say about the United States now that the only magazines that seems closest to addressing these same questions, that conserving and appreciating and critiquing the breadth and depth of our thousand-room house of culture, are fairly radical, artsy small-circulation offerings?

I suppose it means we ought to go ahead and start singing that recessional. Amen, padre, and see you at Shoney's after the service.

Photos of New York City in 1965 by Barbara Rich.