The art critic Camille Paglia with a bronze of a Roman general, Marcus Agrippa, at the Metropolitan Museum. CreditMarcus Yam for The New York Times

Camille Cameo: Thoughts on the writing of Feminist author Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia on the Visual Arts in America Today

by Kenneth Anderson on October 7, 2012 12:57 pm

Camille Paglia writes an essay in the weekend Wall Street Journal Review on the state of the visual arts in America today (seems to be open access on the website).  As I imagine is true of many readers, I blow hot and cold on Paglia; some things are dead on and others dead misses, but such are the wages of volatility.  This seems to me one of her better pieces.  She starts by saying that her critique is specific to painting and sculpture, not performance genres such as opera, theatre, music or dance or, for that matter, architecture.  In this specific domain of visual art, however, she says that “no major figure of profound influence has emerged … since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.”  I’m sure she will be disputed on this point, but since that will depend upon “major” and “profound,” better to move along to her later remarks.

The most interesting of which is not so much her criticism of the incorporation of aesthetic “theory” as such into art, rather than keeping it as a category of criticism; this is something she shares with many critics.  It is, rather, her account of how this comes about in the culture of the visual fine arts, in its high art sense, as its practitioners’ bourgeois culture itself evolves away from anything resembling manual labor, arts, skills, or culture.

Our woefully shrunken industrial base means that today’s college-bound young people rarely have direct contact any longer with the manual trades, which share skills, methods and materials with artistic workmanship.  Warhol, for example, grew up in industrial Pittsburgh and borrowed the commercial process of silk-screening for his art-making at the Factory, as he called his New York studio. With the shift of manufacturing overseas, an overwhelming number of America’s old factory cities and towns have lost businesses and population and are struggling to stave off disrepair. That is certainly true of my birthplace, the once-bustling upstate town of Endicott, N.Y., to which my family immigrated to work in the now-vanished shoe factories. Manual labor was both a norm and an ideal in that era, when tools, machinery and industrial supplies dominated daily life.

For the [fine] arts to revive in the U.S., young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds. We need a revalorization of the trades that would allow students to enter those fields without social prejudice (which often emanates from parents eager for the false cachet of an Ivy League sticker on the car). Among my students at art schools, for example, have been virtuoso woodworkers who were already earning income as craft furniture-makers. Artists should learn to see themselves as entrepreneurs. Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design.

Paglia goes on to a variety of observations about fine arts and capitalism, industrial design and the aesthetics of technology.  There are parts of the discussion that I think right and others wrong – the parts I think wrong are mostly claims about capitalism and art that seem to me too sweeping – but I thought it a worthwhile read.

Camille Paglia Lays Into the Academy, Marxism, and Rachel Maddow, Among Others

Our Negligent, Academically Corrupt Culture Neglects High Art

Camille Paglia Lays Into the Academy, Marxism, and Rachel Maddow, Among Others

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BY SARAH ROTHBARD|OCTOBER 25, 2012

In a wide-ranging talk at the Skirball Cultural Center, critic Camille Paglia, author of Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars, exalted George Lucas, Adele, and the artist Tamara de Lempicka. Less lucky were Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault (“false messiahs” who have destroyed the humanities), Lady Gaga (who has not produced anything at the level of Madonna at her high point), and Christopher Hitchens (who wrote a whole book on God without doing any research).

Paglia, who has taught in art schools (she is currently a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia) for 40 years, is concerned about most of her students’ lack of exposure to art. Our culture, she said, has been “negligent in not making an attempt to introduce children at the primary school to the arts.” She’s not talking about the do-it-yourself art classes that you find in schools today but the introduction of children to fine arts and artists as they do in Europe. This deficit continues at the college level, where style studies—learning about the major styles in the history of art—have been out of fashion since the 1970s. Instead, universities today are dominated by the field of cultural studies, which Paglia called “completely uncultured”—a mix of genres with some references to Hegel and late capitalism thrown in.

It’s also grown unfashionable for professors to express enthusiasm for art, said Paglia, decrying the tone of snide cynicism that pervades not just the academe but the professional class. She used Rachel Maddow as one example of someone who emits a superior tone—a hallmark, she said, of liberalism. Liberalism used to present itself as a populist voice, but today it’s the voice of the upper middle class—and it’s part of the enormous gap that exists between them and the working class.

Although she is an atheist, Paglia also believes that the diminution of religious studies has contributed to the decline of the study of art. The great religions of the world are enormous systems that contain profound truths about human existence, she said—and moreover, there is a spiritual mission to art. She thinks that artists need to be rescued from the “very brittle kind of chic atheism” that’s popular today. She’s not against artists being atheists—but they should, she said, recognize the spiritual thirst for meaning in the history of mankind.

After criticizing Marxism for its neglect of a metaphysic and psychology, Paglia declared, “I think the entire academic establishment from coast to coast is utterly corrupt.” Professors have a leftist pretense—then retire as millionaires to condos in Boca Raton.

Paglia’s love of AM talk radio has also shaped her views about the art world today. Listening to conservative shows over the past 20 years, she’s been alarmed at the denigration of art and artists. She attributes this to a series of controversies over sacrilegious art that began in the mid-1980s. She mentioned Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (a photo of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine) as well as the Brooklyn Museum’s 1999 “Sensation” show featuring a Madonna figure that incorporated elephant dung. The only important art in the eyes of the art world, she said, is shocking or transgressive. But the transgressive gesture has become “fraudulent and empty”; artists used to pay a price for creating shocking work. Today, those who create transgressive work are rewarded with glowing reviews and grants instead.

Paglia thinks that the answer lies in moving “toward a recognition of the spirituality of art.”

“In the 21st century, people are looking for meaning,” she said. “We’re not trying to subvert meaning.”

In the question-and-answer session, Paglia talked about why she thinks George Lucas is one of our great living artists. He’s not taken seriously because he’s been commercially successful and because he’s seen as a purveyor of entertainment to children. But she finds herself enraptured by his technological prowess as well as the drama and passion of his work—and its visual splendor. She pointed to the climax of Star Wars Episode Three: Revenge of the Sith as an example of one of his bold gestures.

Paglia also spoke about why she thinks primary school students should be exposed to more great art. The visual environment we live in today is cluttered, fragmented, and chaotic; the brain has to shut down various parts of itself to survive a constant visual onslaught. Paglia thinks that art can give young students a sense of serenity and balance—helping kids to focus and pay attention while exposing them to culture at the same time.

In response to a question about her appreciation for The Real Housewives reality TV franchise, Paglia said that she derives a number of different pleasures from the series (the Beverly Hills, Orange County, and New Jersey editions in particular). The shot-making and editing offer technical pleasures, she said. But she also likened the shows to watching the Discovery channel—seeing a cheetah stalk a gazelle. These shows show “the authentic ferocious energies of female sexuality,” she said.

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PRIMARY EDITOR: T.A. FRANK.

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