Artistic emptiness

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

When Camille Paglia was introduced last week at the American Enterprise Institute, Christina Hoff Sommers noted that the lecture had the “characteristically modest in scope” title of “Art, Politics and Religion in America Today.”

A professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Miss Paglia’s fifth book, “Break, Blow, Burn,” is a discussion of 43 of what she deems the greatest poems in the Western canon. The following are excerpts from her lecture and her responses in a question-and-answer period:

I just spent five years on this book “Break, Blow, Burn,” keeping a very low profile because I felt it was absolutely necessary to go directly to the general audience on a question of art. I’m trying to put in front of general readers examples of art.

I go from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” at the very end in order to encourage a kind of direct engagement with art which I feel that campus ideologies have not permitted for a very long time. …

I am a secular humanist. I am a lapsed Catholic and an atheist. However, I believe, as much as the new pope, that secular humanism is sick, it is spiritually empty. Part of the problem is that the left has tried to elevate politics … over all other aspects of culture. Particularly for me as a humanities professor, art has been the victim of this over the past three decades. …

What I would say to conservatives is that it’s really incorrect for you to laud the canon and demand for its reintroduction without embracing the other part of the canon in Western culture, and that is the visual arts tradition in the Greco-Roman line … where the nude and where the eroticism of the body are very, very important. What I see coming from conservatives is a tendency to censor, and a kind of sanitization of what the history of art means, which means you have to edit out an incredible amount from the canon, from Donatello and Michelangelo’s nudes through Titian, Caravaggio to the 19th century Delacroix, Manet, Renoir, et cetera. Is that what conservatism means in education?

But then to the left, I want to say, you have vandalized art in this period of identity politics, another part of the legacy of the 1960s. Politics began to feel that art was merely a servant of its own agenda on campus. That is when the universities went very seriously astray, when the humanities began to become corrupted, and that’s how they marginalized themselves. …

Art lasts. … It’s a spiritual resource. But no, no, no — over the last 30 years on American campuses, the idea of the best or the greatest was just thrown out as relative, subjective, based on political considerations and so on.

Identity politics has to go. We’ve got to bring back the idea that all of art belongs to all people. And that we don’t want a situation where young women are being encouraged to read only works by women. What is the end result of that? A lot of bad poetry. …

I have poems by Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer that are from the Harlem Renaissance at its height. These are African-American poets who saw the whole history of poetry as part of their property, their intellectual property. They drew from it, they were inspired by it. And that’s why those poems are as good as they are, because they did not confine themselves simply to writing by African-Americans.

But now today, you have young people, aspiring writers, aspiring artists who are being given very, very thin porridge. They are not being exposed to the best that has been written, to the best that has been created in the visual arts. So I’m very, very concerned about the future of the American arts. Art defines a civilization, and I do not see where our future artists are going to come from.

At the present moment, young people are surrounded by a popular culture that’s in a very degraded state. I no longer have the kind of evangelical fervor that I had for pop when I first sprang on the scene in the early ‘90s because I watched it decline over the last almost 15 years. Something has gone very, very wrong, even at the level of simple craft in the movies that are coming out of Hollywood. …

But what exactly is culturally nourishing in young people’s environment? Design has become a substitute, but design has no spiritual message, it has no spiritual content to it. And I maintain that art has a spiritual dimension, and that is what has not been acknowledged in the way literature has been taught in this period of deconstruction for the past 30 years. And this is terrible and crippling for young people.

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