Camille Paglia: Art and Spirituality

good afternoon and a beautiful Chicago day gorgeous blue sky and j'espère I've been so much enjoying it I've just spent the last five years writing this book on the visual arts under the radar for a very long time my my aim was to produce it a very slim handbook that would help young people and people who are interested in the arts to to appreciate the great drama of Western art the great trajectory of of our art history I would have loved to have extended it into world art but that would have been absolutely impossible I wasn't going was this book were supposed to take two years I'm very lucky to have such a patient publisher simplicity is hard my aim was to produce very short chapters that would be a pleasure to read that would that would contain everything about the background of a particular work the historical contacts and economic factors when relevant the biography of the artist and then finally end with an evocation of what I perceive to be the meaning of each work in other words what I'm what I'm saying is that the arguments of a khadeem this approach or that approach are really dead ends that everything can be combined it's quite possible to do it also in a clear accessible colloquial manner that people can read that's not jargon heavy with a bunch of dreck imported from Europe okay which is things I've been trying to extirpate okay from a khadeem for the last 20 years and the book is is I believe from a very keen readers of my work in the past well now and then recognize my voice coming to the fore the little barbs I may make about frida kahlo and as the great patron saint artists of feminism I mean just but it's very very very slight my voice is confined to the to the polemical introduction after that I feel I was necessary to get out of the way and let the artworks and speak for themselves now the the book is a protest against the coffee table art book a syndrome which has been going on for four decades and I love the magazine Architectural Digest it's a gorgeous but books art books are used there as that core you see them all you know stacked up on the shelves and I mean these books and they're so heavy you maybe you look like look look at them once you know and they just like sit there like like objects to be dusted you know for them for the next 30 years and what you can like sit comfortably with one of these things in your lap you know over like recent you into your into your thigh so I what I was looking for is again something very handy okay something inviting that would have would contain this this would be an open door to the hope the whole history of Western art and yet would be it would be comfortable in the hand actually my vision was of a paperback that would literally fall open in a young person's hands that was my vision and my publishers that know okay now if people want if you're going to have such you know full-page glossy reproductions of works of art people want an object and then in the process of the last five years while doing this book I was thinking am I out of my mind I am trying to write an art book and the age of Kindle I mean what am i doing this is this is like completely out of saying well no they turned out once the manuscript was submitted last fall that Random House or more specifically Knopf Doubleday the fantastic production design team you know that I've been working with know they had this thing yes precisely because it is the age of the Kindle precisely to show how beautiful a book can be to show how a book a book itself can be an OB shade so not only does this book contain hmm you know 29 chapters in focusing on individual object are works of art but the but the book itself as a product of this production design team at Knopf Doubleday it's like you know to die for that mean that the gloss this book is so heavy slim but so heavy because of the glossy paper I haven't seen such a beautifully designed our book in years the printing it was printed in the in in the United Kingdom so another one of my aims okay was to provide something to you know in for the current market after you the the great art source survey books that have been used in universities for for half a century there was a Gardner's history of our very big book that dates from the late 1920s there's a HW Jam since the history of art that's from 1962 that without that was its absolute campus classic this thing is massive absolutely massive I waited okay for this book seven and a half pounds okay seven half pounds yeah you're not gonna have like a quiet after I think I'll curl up okay with with Jansen's history of art you know this afternoon and in the book is Magisterial Janssen was a great scholar of Donatello a scholar of the first order however the book moved so fast in going from cave art all the way down to the modern period that it doesn't pause very long on individual artworks actually I felt more can be said so the I've actually modeled this book on Catholic breviary okay there's in collections of devotional images what I'm trying to induce people to realize is that you can have a kind of a personal engagement really what I'm saying a spiritual engagement with a work of art you don't have to go to the museum for in fact museums today are becoming more and more like circuses okay as far as I'm concerned I mean it's great that museums are doing so well they have great blockbuster shows although the blockbuster shows are always old master or impressionist art never contemporary art that doesn't that doesn't bring our bus loads of people coming you know every every state in the Union but but the atmosphere of the museum's is like it's not conducive to contemplation people run into you there on their audio phones and you know you feel like you're in a bar or sometimes people no I mean what for example for this book for Picasso's lady Moselle d'Avignon which which is the the most important painting of the 20th century okay very very difficult oh here it is over a century later and that painting still has not been absorbed into common culture people interested in the arts know it but people you know most mainstream citizens show that painting to them and they would go this is crap Mike you know my seven-year-old could do better etc all right this is a major work I mean in the process of doing the research for for my chapter on it I was noticing like the details that I have been mentioning in class when I've been talking about this work for decades weren't in the scholarly that huge scholarly literature you know about it and so I've got to get up there and really look at this painting I went up well how can you look at the painting that the crowds in front of it I mean people were like shoving me aside their German tourists like slaps and he's snapping pictures like this and so on I mean this is like just it's wonderful again wonderful box office for the museum's but again what I'm saying is you don't have to be going to a museum to have this personal engagement with art and this idea that somehow you know young people are going to benefit you know take them to and put the pile them into a school bus take them to a museum it's like I'm great outing for them no I'm saying this group always this group thing no this is it between yourself and a great work of art you couldn't you can you can get this you're in in a book so the one of the themes of this book is and this is going completely against current academic orthodoxy completely okay what the theme of this book is the spirituality of art and okay the spirituality of the artistic mission now no one can get away with talking like this but me you know because I because I am because I am a professed atheist okay so I I have a law career as a defender of pornography and prostitution which I still will you know absolutely still have defined oh I'm not sure if that's from the pornographers of the prostitutes of what the artist but however I accept your your support I mean I would love to have put Tom of Finland the great the great gay illustrator in this book but then they would have driven away the homeschooling moms I'm actually trying to reach I mean I was careful how much sex you know what's in the book very there's very little lady Moselle davon yo you know in Picasso's painting is is obscene in a brothel there's no way to get around that I have a petition node I have run xenos portrait Andrea Doria with a hint of a penis okay and so on I have Renee Cox a fabulous african-american photographer with a photo montage of herself wearing dominatrix boots you know from a trash pump to shop etc but on the on the whole I tried to I try to expand the potential audience of this book okay to people who are not accustomed to looking at the arts and who have a very low opinion of the artists tonight so on the one hand in a period of extremely cynical modes of analysis in the humanities in part of the wake of post structuralism and post-modernism I what I'm flying in the face of that okay I'm what I'm objecting to this reductive approach to art in often naked ly ideological fashion over the last you know it's really thirty years going on 40 years now okay what the the ideological approach to art there it I mean I would say that's probably the dominant concept in at the elite schools that the elite universities in the United States okay that art is ideological there are is a tool of ideologies and so the students at the undergraduate level and at the graduate level are encouraged to approach the art work in terms of what the artwork is doing wrong okay what artwork is hiding the artwork as a symptom of a power play by a certain group in a society or certain caste or class in a society the the artwork is merely the product of economic forces and so on right this is a consequence aesthetics or the ability to to appreciate art kind of syrup cultivation these things are not being taught in in the in the Universities right now it's extremely depressing so it's really no surprise why is this the state of cultural criticism is so low and the state of the Fine Arts is so low right now there's a the proof of the sterility of post structuralism and post-modernism is that we have know after several generations of this now there are no major culture critics young cultural critics they haven't emerged from this it whom the act of the people figures from whom a khadeem thinks are of culture critics are simply mirroring back to the senior professors the same fads and trends and jargon filled discourse you know over the last thirty years it's really it's really a tragedy okay it's absolute tragedy the the the potential professor's potential critics who were most enthusiastic about art were driven out of the graduate schools because enthusiasm was considered naive okay I bet I started getting letters about this from the moment I came on the scene in 1990 finally after my you know my first book finally was published and everywhere I go I hear the same stories I too wanted to go into literary studies I too you know left Berkeley or the University of Chicago or or Harvard or Johns Hopkins okay because there was no I was forced to read all this labyrinth in theory and to spout it out in any product you know any professing of enthusiasm for the artwork was um it was considered reactionary so I I'm trying as an Italian American I'm trying to bring enthusiasm back okay as a mode of approach because that's the way I was raised my family it came from Italy they came from the farm for heaven's sakes to work in the shoe factories in Endicott New York industrial town and in the Italian peasant attitude toward the arts is completely reverential I mean art is not elitist in Italy art belongs to the people at every possible level so everywhere and they in might know what their word many objects that my grandparents had but they would have liked souvenir ashtrays you know from the Vatican with like you know Michelangelo you know sculptures on it and a little bit like painted ceramic plaques in the bathroom and it'll be like the Pieta or something so there was there was never the sense that art was somewhat some was you know was this conspiracy being forced by an elite and and the reason the Italians have this attitude is because of their of how seriously they take the crafts okay Italian immigrants were you know several generations all for my grandparents and my mother were born were born in Italy but every everyone worked in the crafts I mean you'd like work all day at the job in the way you'd relax come home weave a basket you can make a nut bowl you know they could turn steal make a fence whatever it was always hammering going on and constantly making crap be sewing okay you know everything okay it's another reason why I've never had that animosity toward fashion that so many other feminists have had I am not fashionable but I've always seen fashion as a craft as an art form because that's the way I was raised in Italian culture people would come up to you okay I mean I'm just used to this as a small child people just come up to you and start fingering your clothing going oh this lapel is so it look at this lapel how nice look at this hem people and just pick up your hems and ambient and be looking at them and so on okay so so tailoring and sewing and that's the reason also why the only place that you know that I've been comfortable in or would hire me but art school is all these years I'm a career teaching art schools for 40 years now and just you know a few years in in the middle when I when I was not and the reason is because I feel very comfortable with with with artists artists understand art as making okay they aren't they understand art as materials as something ground didn't you know in in in the body in the physical world and this is why all of those ideologies of a khadeem don't work for the arts or the humanities they actually will say everything is mediated through language we can know nothing except that one of course the language is flawed so we can we can't know anything okay all right that's what that's what you end up you get a PhD in not knowing anything okay if you got in this time I mean this is ridiculous because I've you know dancers okay for heaven's sakes no dancers don't know all right knowledge of the world is not mediated through language it's absurd they're so completely physically grounded have such rapport with dancers always have my students are you know working metals and fibers and you know the jazz musicians and actors and and so on okay and so it's sort of that the the physical world is a very important component of you know the academic environment that I've been existing in so that's another theme of my book I'm always careful every single artwork I'm talking about every single chapter I'm always talking very specifically about the materials and the you know the profit your the limitations and possibilities of those materials and I'm also always in this book stressing the fragility of art objects and in how you know sometimes how miraculous it is that they that that they've survived the case in point being the charioteer of Delfy okay because although the bronze was extremely valuable just like today when there's been a great upsurge nationwide with economic crisis of people going around and tearing you know air conditioners out of office windows and to take the copper wiring out I mean there have been cases of people going into McDonald's and like in taking the you know in my area and your Philadelphia and removing the pipes infinitely to resell the pipes in stone so metal was always valuable that's why so few bronze statues have survived from antiquity so that the the miracle of the survival of this gorgeous statue of the charity of Delfy simply that there was an earthquake Adelphia an avalanche that buried it so people never didn't discover it until you know until this past century and so we have this gorgeous object we can of the few that survived antiquity a bronze that still has its eyes and it remnants of the silver on it and so on and then the same thing with the the tomb painting from the tomb of queen nefertari that opens opens my book again you know over the centuries the seepage of water had done such damage to the tomb in the Getty Institute in based in Los Angeles in in collaboration with Egyptian organization that this phenomenal job of of a consolidation okay and rescue of those of those beautiful wall paintings with with no additional pigment added what they did was it was an absolutely microscopic they don't want to add anything to it so it's a nautical question of life of filling in with with with modern paint it just what they did to clean and I have just have such such respect okay for archaeologists and for conservators including who like who helped you know to save all these very important artifacts from human history so alright so and the one hand this book is attacking a khadeem for its soullessness okay for its for the dead end of secular humanism right now okay I I'm a secular humanist but I wanted I want to save it from itself because what's happening is that it's very this become a you know into the cultural atmosphere in the United States a very chic and snide kinds of atheism that I associate with Christopher Hitchens okay Christopher Hitchens who knew nothing about religion who never lifted a finger to do any research into religion whose life okay was not a model of what an atheist should be whose you know psychological life was it so it was such turmoil and and yet he made fashionable a sneering cynical style okay of referring to religion okay that I think is absolutely ethical atrocity I am a product of the 1960s multicultural movement even though I'm an atheist I rejected organized religion I have enormous respect for all of the world religions that's a huge element of spiritual quest in the 1960s that's been forgotten it wasn't just about politics the politics were very important the civil rights movement the protest against the Vietnamese War the the reawakening of feminism the gay liberation movement all these things were very important okay but there was this other thing this movement outward toward other cultures its embrace of these tremendous poetic forms that the great world religions are they're like they're their poetry they contain art and iconography that they're they're a collection of tremendous wisdom about human life this is taken thousands of years okay for this decline and to get this kind of snide stuff coming from Christopher Hitchens a writer for Vanity Fair a socialite okay whose wife and his memoir posthumous memoir boasts of the eight-hour drunken dinner parties they would have with everybody there what kind of an atheist them is that No okay I'm sorry I'm sorry okay no if you if you're going to approach young people you know from the position of atheism or secular humanism you have to give them something else you cannot just trash religion okay and also trash art okay what I'm what my atheism says okay I reject you know the orc I don't believe in a personal God right however I see in the enormous force of nature okay in material nature is very similar to that of Native Americans in fact that's my next project I'm I'm my next project is about Native American and art and archaeology precisely about this I think that the religious view of the elemental forces of nature in the Native American code okay it's magnificent has many parallels to that of Wordsworth or Ralph Waldo Emerson and so on alright I see nature okay and I see art okay the incredible beauty and power of art and my attitude to art is reverential okay the same thing okay these urban pseudo sophisticates okay are incapable of reverence okay alright alright and so what what and so what what what kind of thin gruel is being given to our young people nothing absolutely nothing then we wonder why the entire professional class in Manhattan in Los Angeles they're on meds they're all they're all doping themselves on tranquilizers okay antidepressants okay baby why because there's nothing there their worldview is nihilistic okay absolutely nihilistic conventional thinking right they've rejected religion but instead they've made a religion out of the Democratic Party okay I'm a registered Democrat okay but but but but democratic politics of a particular conventional kind okay that is the substitute okay for the apron or for the atheistic professional class now okay right it's it's what sort of what I wrote in years ago about post structuralism that post structuralism was a new religion you know for these faithless in academics and and and I said this was 20 years ago I said Oh better Jehovah than Foucault the Bible is a magnificent body of Hebrew poetry right if you like you're if you're washed up on a desert island whether you believe in God or not the Bible is a fabulous thing to have with you okay because there's the the you know the power of it in artistic terms and it's the and the great stories in it based you know the archetype old dramas couldn't quest stories and legends it's it's absolutely magnificent right so I've been saying for 20 years that the that the the troupe Horak ulam for the world should be comparative religion okay that is that ever what every young person in the world should know the sacred texts okay and in belief system everyone else in the world and that's the only way we're ever gonna get any kind of political understanding okay so everybody knows the Bible everyone knows the Quran it knows what you know it knows what these things are based on my generation was inherited the interest in Zen of the beatniks okay the the beats you know Gary Snyder prominent very important the poet went off to be actually become a Buddhist monk in Japan and then my generation made the movement toward Hinduism toward India that's why there were so many sort of CTR motifs you know in in 1960s rock music Ravi Shankar was playing at you know in Monterey the Beatles went off chasing their false guru you know in India the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi huh so I and and that that particular elements in the 60s quest okay has been forgotten because you know because of that disillusion with gurus but also unfortunately the people the the my peers of my generation who are most interested in these themes were also the ones who were taking too much too many psychedelics okay so LSD okay on the one hand open doors for people to walk through but then the the door kind of closed behind them I don't so so I'm just um I feel fortunate you know that I had like this this wariness okay I thought what is this you know these chemical things I'm not gonna experiment you know I thank heavens all right I didn't know my grandfather made wine in his cellar everything like he grew grapes wine was considered you know maybe this ancient dyneisha thing what's wrong with a wine beer okay you know what really sufficient no things at any rate I we I think we can blame the psychedelics you know for the fact that the you know that they the spiritual seekers okay who are most adventurous of my generation then through their experiment with all these things as well as natural in a peyote and mescaline and so on in effect they you know they pickled their brains so that they they never were able to write the books they should have and I regret this not only because of the cultural loss but because it's why my work look so odd okay I look oh they say they no one can categorize me they what is she what side is she belong i what it's because all did all these missing books okay and the missing people okay I really mourn them now all right on the one hand okay I'm a sailing you know the the liberal side of the cultural landscape in the United States gay for for it's it's it's snide cynicism about religion and it's and this is kind of snarky tone that's now everywhere sense of superiority on the one hand claiming to speak for the working class but but feeling so superior to do their actual belief systems of the working class I mean I just despise you know that default snarky tone on the other end I'm also criticizing conservatives and saying that conservatives cannot go on claiming to uphold the the Western tradition and calling for a return to traditional educational you know content and so on at the same time is ignoring art the history of art but but the scholars and intellectuals have not made it an easy okay for mainstream Americans to to learn about the art so there's a I say in the introduction to glittering images that that people who live in in in cities with major museums suffer from a tragic complacency about the condition of the of the arts sorry I mean you know I been a great listener to talk radio for the last 20 years I love talk radio as a populist medium and I regret the fact that so few liberals have succeeded as hosts in that medium the the home of liberal thought is actually at NPR there's a certain kind of a style of a you know a vocal style okay and a tone on NPR that is that you know I think okay has become very genteel okay it's the same thing as on the BBC the be be the BBC is is is extremely liberal as well are the arts find a home in both NPR and BBC but but but that tone I mean like I have to do it if I have to do an NPR interview I have to like really you know focus and I have to get very mellow it's almost like a kind of seance of gentility I'm sorry you see Bora as my natural mode is AM radio okay AM radio I is this barking abrasive you know colloquial style it descends from the DJ's of the 1950s the one sort of like these crazy weirdo guys who likes listen this platter they would spend the night on and that in that is that is the secret okay of AM radio it's not it's not just that it's conservative versus liberal that we're talking about okay but but honestly the the AM radio format with its many callers and people who call in from all over and I would include off by the way also sports radio which are us also listen to a lot ok AM radio has provided in a forum okay for voices which who are not heard anywhere else in the culture I mean like I'm Philadelphia sports radio I mean people will call in you know from construction projects until I feel like talk about the problems with the Eagles game yesterday and this very learn and analysis of everything that's wrong with the front line and it goes on and on and on and on people are calling from their trucks it's absolutely fantastic medium okay alright so at any rate over the last 20 years on talk radio I have been hearing this disrespect for art and for artists and it was really alarming me as a career teacher you know in art schools and I really and I know the reason for that is because of that stupid series of controversies over over sacrilege and art that was inaugurated in the 80s with Andrea serranos piss Christ which for those who don't know okay this is a third or fourth rate work okay which is a it's a large-format photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass beaker of the artist urine now Andres Serrano is such a weenie okay that he never would even admit that he had any kind of transgressive or subversive intention instead he like back tractor no no what I was really talking about was the cheapening of Christ's image that's why you called it piss Christ right okay now you know it's one thing if we're talking about a masterpiece okay I mean my favorite work of sacrilegious art is by Salvador Dali I named it in the introduction to the book but I will not I cannot even profane this August group okay by telling you what the what it is it's a parody of the Annunciation okay it is hilariously x-rated in fact it was in the Playboy Mansion collection until very recently I don't know I don't know where it is now but that is my favorite work of sacrilege so this is a very wonderful work it is learning it is cheeky it's audacious for that the art world location it should be you know to be you know having a country it's not over piss Christ so and there was a whole series of them now as far as I'm concerned okay though the last authentically avant-garde work okay or body of work okay was done by Robert Mapplethorpe in the late 1970s his photographs of the game centre masochistic underground in New York and I that to me was that was the end of the avant-garde right right I'm saying to the art world is that Mithen garden was essentially killed by my hero Andy Warhol from the moment he took in Campbell's soup cans and in the iconography of capitalism okay into his work that was really the end of the very noble 200 year oppositional tradition of the avant-garde that began in the late 18th century okay with with Romanticism okay and I when I what I'm saying is that for the last 30 years post-post Mapplethorpe okay this the the subversive or transgressive gesture is completely Hollow and has become utterly corrupt because once if you made you know an avant-garde gesture there was a price to be paid for it okay the impressionist painters starved okay they had no way of showing their art you know if there were no art galleries back then okay if they did not toe the lime and produce the kind of art that the salon jury would show on the in there either yearly or sometimes every two years massive shows these artists have no way of reaching potential clients potential patrons right so the Impressionists you know and other such avant-garde artists going all the way down to the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950's who had terrible depression and suicides and so on okay a price was paid what price has been paid okay and in this era of piss Christ okay since the eighties what's what is the prices paid right you do something that you you take up something from catholic iconography always catholic right never a jewish never never muslim okay always catholic okay okay take something catholic and like and do something scandalous to it and and you will be written up okay and celebrate it in the new york times okay all right you will get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts okay you will be hired by the University of Chicago okay or Berkeley or UCLA okay this absolutely corrupt how dare these people how dare these worms tell it less worms okay borrow from the great avant-garde tradition of people who who really died okay for their art it's an outrage we cannot tolerate this anymore okay yeah the idea that art by definition in text speaks truth to power oh it interrogate summary assumptions oh really okay that this is utterly stale only a only a fraction of art in the whole history of art whole history of world art has been oppositional only a fraction okay and it was it was a great run it was a great run from the late 18th century down to Andy Warhol okay all right with a little bit of a blip into Mapplethorpe okay and that's it okay it's a time now to go cold turkey on this stupid can't okay that is everywhere okay oh wait this is the signs I have five minutes okay otherwise I take off you know audiences hostage and it goes on for hours and and you have your own lives to live after all okay all right oh wait wait let me go fast you all right so all right what what group have I not offended let's see all right oh all right so so here's here's the thing okay I listen to talk radio I realized that the low opinion that mainstream Americans still have of the Arts in a particular of abstract art so I was determined to write a book that I hoped would reach again you know church-going homeschooling moms who haven't heard not who have no way of supplying art in the history of art okay to their to their home curriculum alright and it in order to do that okay I what I've you know what I what I've done again is to I'm trying I'm trying I've tried to create a continuity of this spiritual theme so that might hurt my chapter titles are like resurrection mystic vision you know God's snare like that okay we move through the centuries until finally I want you know the person who's been very skeptical about modern art modernist art to suddenly feel by the time he or she gets to Picasso oh it's the same thing it's absolutely the same thing Picasso Mondrian Pollock I that's it we get this like same kind of dreamy sense right and and by the way also it while I was doing the research for this book it's absolutely scandalous Mondrian okay who was considered the ultimate formalist with his with his grid of black lines and his hanging blocks of color and so on right I couldn't believe when I did the research for that for that chapter how much Mondrian had written right in his own words in letters in essays in journals about the spiritual nature of every single thing he did every one of his black lines every one of his blocks of color had a spiritual meaning to him okay in fact he had it early in his career been a practitioner of theosophy okay yeah which was which was a spiritualist movement of the late 19th century as late as World War 1 Mondrian had hanging in his in his house a picture of Madame Blavatsky okay who was the leader okay of theosophy Jackson Pollock also was a student of theosophy okay and in early pictures of him show him in his teens imitating the dress even kind of ironic dress and long hair of Krishnamurti who was a spiritualist so there's I mean Mark Rothko my wanted to be in the book but you know just finally to end the book it would have gone on and on for another five years Mark Rothko was always overt about the spiritual nature of his own artistic you know vocation and you often will find fun the snide sense although you know the Rothko is always claiming a spiritual meaning to into his you know big hanging blocks of color and so on so the nature of current discourse about the arts okay Arts and Letters is that it is very inhospitable okay to these spiritual themes and that's what I bet what this book this book is you know the first step in the direction of trying to totally reform a commentary on the arts and eventually the practice of the arts but then my next step is is I want to get the the study of art history into primary schools right now what's called art class okay in American schools is do it yourself John Dewey ight okay express your inner creativity okay teachers hand construction paper and glue pots to the citizen this is art no okay that's fine but but real art history needs to be mminton to students in a very early age so they they learn how to look at pictures so they know the names of major artists and in the European culture you know the great artistic tradition is part of their national identity so this is not such an issue but America is still very young very very young nation the arts have always struggled to survive here we're practical in utilitarian so there are people who are who are followers that you know of the arts but but but the majority of the American population has no way of ever contact in the arts it's an absolute scandal okay that most young people are graduating from high school without ever having seen a major painting or understand understood in any of the history of Western art so that's my next point this in this book is the first step there okay to try to encourage people to you know really plan on a national way okay for before students ever kids at college they should already know something about the history of the arts and by the way once they're in college with this cafeteria style menu you know that's out there now okay there's no core curriculum I mean you can take an art history class but it's not required I mean what parents are bankrupting themselves assuming their kids are getting a wonderful you know introduction to the humanities you know in the Universities and they're emerging may I encounter these you know these these graduates of Harvard Yale and Princeton in the media okay you know in New York now are ordinary when they didn't have to interview me about something and they know nothing they know absolutely nothing they know a Schmitt ring of this and a smattering of that and they have a snarky tone and I could just kind of you know that that they've mastered okay you know they have degrees and snark okay you know apparently all right okay so yes so and then finally you know my aim also it is to I'm saying that the the problem with our very diminished arts funding in in this country is that most Americans don't understand the rationale for the Arts okay and so instead of the art world you know snorting away and it's in its sense of superiority it's supercilious you know sanctimonious sense of how it's so much better than all those church-going people out there okay what we need to do is like to actually if make a crusade going out to conservatives to demonstrate to them you know the centrality of the arts to civilization and the necessity for massively increased funding for the Arts not in the way that it used to be carelessly done it judgements being made by the government about grants to individual artists no it should be you know much more funding to communities to States and let them you know if they devise the ways to distribute the money but I'm particularly concerned about dance with dance we requires support okay especially in in in our cities where over the last 2025 years rents have a skyrocketed you know in terms of adequate rehearsal space now you know a painter dissident painter or a dissident poet or writer can suffer on and quietly in silence and solitude but the dancers absolutely require now only a physical space and or in order to practice there are but that that vital connection of the you know of the teachers students okay via the transmission down the generations it's only only you can't just you can't just be a dancer you know on your own in the Indy either the the modern dance tradition or they or the or the ballet tradition so this is like it's absolutely crucial for that that the American citizens as a whole whether they are the left or the right that they be united in this that this is not in support of the arts it's not something superficial and extraneous that can be easily cut similarly art programs in schools when you have strapped in municipal budgets and so on but rather Mandir stood and believed that's the only thing that ever survives from a culture is its arts political power is transient political power is nothing okay it will vanish the most powerful man of the world okay all right it's like it's nobody okay the only thing the only way we remember any of the powerful men of the world is the way they were captured by artists often anonymous artists in ancient Egypt and Rome okay so the bequest of any civilization okay and the test of its quality is its arts about and I feel that button that the left and the right everyone across the political spectrum is guilty okay of offenses against the Arts and I hope that you now will go forth I feel like okay and be ambassadors well they are [Applause] Kawika could we get some light yeah lights for the question period your column coming back oh this is my salon comm column I was in the you know first issue of salon in 1995 and I'm considered you know found a contributor I guess I should bring it back is this such demand I'm gonna be mean alright I always go on hiatus you know from the column when I'm have to finish a book but my friends would be very grateful I think if I would go back to it because my emails have gotten longer and longer like all videos on room well thank you I'll quote you okay I turn to the editor okay I'm gonna speak to speak to them after the after though the tour okay thank you Charlie Rose just had a group of experts on the future of the book I would love to see your book glittering images include video portions into the glittering image book so what you're saying can be expounded with your love and your passion well I think that's something like this is going to be needed for you know to help to at the primary school level you know if we're gonna have something nationally it's gonna probably is gonna have to be I need this oh you're good smooth but I needed alright I needed okay okay sure okay I was just wondering if you have any advice for anybody thinking of going into academia today what advice for anyone going into it thinking of going into academia today going to acting academia oh I'm sorry academia you're good what field field literature oh dear okay well here's the thing okay is that all the people with you-know-who who should be saving you know the profession have been just fleeing from it and saying oh I can't make any headway but every single generation hits some fossilized ideology that needs to be you know attacked and toppled okay and it seems to me like this is a wonderful moment when there's such a vacuum okay in a khadeem to just go in so I'll hold your nose okay you know just like chalk talk the talk you're selecting to get by them okay and mean why plot you know plot your plot your take over you know I mean I'm because right now there's an absolute wasteland and it's obvious that people realize you that you know that the the constant monotonous quotation of Lacan Derry down Foucault no longer flies but what's left is this kind of chaos of what's called cultural studies that is this not cultured at all and it doesn't know how to study okay but I mean all it is it's like it's like it's just you take what you know some TV show okay a famous novel okay then maybe some reference to a fashion magazine okay and then you mentioned Hegel and and late capitalism and throw it all up in the air like that like popcorn and that's it okay sorry it's completely a historical okay it's so insulting to popular culture because it was popular culture itself has its own tradition its own all right and so what there's nothing I'm saying in this book is that chronology is meaningful alright and this is it's hard to believe that this is dissident right now okay alright because history does not exist for the the major humanities professors and figures and history does not exist okay alright history is a chaos okay and in any any any allegation of a pattern in history is completely specious okay in this this is why I complain in my book is it's just like my first book sexual persona is resolute chronological you know crossing 3,000 years to the present I mean so I complain in the introduction about the way that the word the term Renaissance is being systematically supplanted in a khadeem or their people in the balconies I'm sorry I didn't see you all before the end it was all in darkness hello okay and see you oh sorry okay and the word the Renaissance is slowly being abandoned okay now the Renaissance has its insufficiencies okay that it won't only came into usage in the late 19th century I could see why there could be discussion about the need for something else but what's being substituted if it's been going on now 15 years grand 20 early modern okay early modernist being substituted and because this is a word that's coming now from aesthetics but from economics it refers to the emergence of capitalism from the late medieval period into into you know what we just call the Renaissance okay so so in other words you know even people in Arts and Letters are looking at history in terms of economics alone right now this term or early modern okay makes it actual hash of the visual arts we're accustomed to saying for example that Botticelli was an early Renaissance painter okay Michelangelo a high classic artist okay and in Michelangelo even in his own career experienced the third phase of Renaissance style mannerism okay after the sack of Rome is the his Medici Chapel you know you see like distortion tension anxiety etcetera etc okay all right now you adopt early modern okay so what do I can say about Botticelli Oh Botticelli is an early early modern painter okay Michelangelo is a middle early modern painter all right and then late Michelangelo is a little late it just shows what Philistines I mean these people I mean that nitwits okay the abyssal nitwits okay who have made a hash okay of the great tradition of humanistic scholarship my early influences where the girl was the great school of German philology of the late 19th century in the early 20th century okay these were mostly men like actually Jane Harris and the cambridge anthropologist was tradition it was a true it was an ideal of massive air you dition okay rabbinic you know a addition and and as I was doing the research for this book okay all of my everything all the bad things I had said you know and he thought and said about the you know the way literary criticism and artistic resume has gone downhill in the last 40 it was proved to me right I would begin forth with each chapter you know with the earliest scholarship and move through it decade by decade by decade everything was solid everything was substantive useful until we got to the 80s okay alright a little bit later 80s 90s okay what are following off okay in quality of scholarship and humanities there's been it is a scandal an absolute scandal okay now it's not that there isn't good work being done by younger art historians yeah there is there's good competent work being done but not one of those people if it has the vast learning or the sense of perspective okay of those great scholars that led up to they were still working many of them following World War two okay anyone who claims that there was an advance in scholarship because of the introduction of post-racial and post-modernism such ignorance absolute ignorance I mean either there were books from Princeton University Press definitely went that I'd looked at for this book that went like a major artist like dahveed and MANET and so on they were so bad okay shockingly bad okay I mean it is unbelievable okay that those books would've merge okay from from Princeton University Press that haven't have the imprint and people again your parents bankrupting themselves you know thinking a Princeton degree a decal to put on their car that means something give me a break at any rate okay back to your question all right there is an enormous future okay enormous future there okay all right you must put armor on okay all right keep your thoughts to yourself okay do what you need to do to gain position and then unleash your imagination yeah could you comment on your perspective on George Lucas George Lucas oh thank you all right yes now in the process of when I was planning this book George Lucas was never a part of it at all I had planned to end glittering images with some some examples of strong contemporary art okay so I was looking and I was looking I found interesting things but nothing strong enough nothing that could hold up to the many masterpieces and you know that proceeded you know that least the final chapter and and while I was I would like be you know relaxing a night with channel surfing and I kept on stumbling on the Star Wars films being run back-to-back on Spike TV okay which is a man's channel okay all right and I'm and coming into the films in that way you know coming into them randomly in the middle okay without the narrative in a propulsion suddenly made me start to see the the visual components okay and and Lucas's visual virtuosity okay I became progressively obsessed with the finale to Revenge of the Sith which is the last film that was released in 2005 is the last film that was made in the Star Wars series was directed by Lucas himself it narrative Lee belongs to the Midway you know in the story and I'm telling you this finale it's unbelievable his exploits on the Vulcan volcano planet of mustafar and the which is completely you know made-up planet and the this in this episode is a combination of live-action of you know of computer animation okay and also of you know of model-making there's a tremendous model was made I'm an insurer model of the of the you know the landscape of this volcano planet and in what I was researching I was just amazed by what they took them like ten months you know to make this model and then raise it up on a giant platform to tip it pump system to have the lava flowing smoke and Cork and okay I think I'm saying this is a work of installation or the actual model that was used is itself you know belongs you know to be respected for its place in the in arts but the actual finale okay it's how tepid contemporary art seems compared to the passionate quality of this finale with this huge musical score that what that was that was recorded at the Abbey Road studio you know in in London I say it's like a black mass and so on and you're getting this this this tremendous dual that's like Dance Theatre the longest dual ever filmed okay is this dual and it was it is no computer speeding up okay these two actors okay Minh Christensen and Ewan McGregor idea did that and four months they learn this sort place absolutely phenomenal it is dead it is dance this is contemporary dance all right and because you get this music and then passionate emotion the two love-hate between these two men look and then the whole things like a Puccini opera okay going back and there on the right and then it so you have this like huge like it's like romantic nature painting apocalyptic landscape of the lava all right and then and you and you get this this theme that it cross cut Lucas cross cuts there's a destruction of the Senate chamber going on on the planet of course sense okay so you get this theme of the destruction of politics going on in the same moment and you have the destruction of industry going on because as these two guys are wrestling around they like throw off the whole control panels okay and the whole industrial complex of the planet of mustafar especially generating these girders in the lava like this alright and then okay the revelation after 30 years how did Darth Vader get morn who is Darth Vader how did he end up be robot man how did that happen okay there it is we see the hint some okay Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker okay again I mean he loses his arms and his legs then he catches on fire from the volcano he incinerates all these horrors and so on and then he then finally his broken body has taken its surgical droids putting him together okay like a Frankenstein monster cross-cutting to Natalie Portman dying in childbirth okay all right okay it's fine Luke and Leia whom we met we met them she'd I've got born Luke okay they're bored okay and so on and then after all these Horrors okay incredible control unbelievable control of tone alright I the Luke and Leia are separated because no one knows they exist okay two separately and they're taken to distant planets and one is a beautiful planet based on Switzerland okay with with like map with it it is footage of Switzerland with like mountains and valleys you know and the other one is a desert planet but it was Tatooine with it with its double Suns and so on and so you get this amazing thing strong men arriving with baby baby handed off to other strong men strong man sitting with wife okay against great landscape okay it is so beautiful okay so and you know Lucas himself you know after his divorce retired for two years to raise his adopted children okay so it's like an incredible personal reference there I think that it's first of all of it is extremely progressive okay to end with this with this idea of its tenderness of men okay toward babies okay not just children which are babies and it ends with absolutely gorgeous I'm saying my god okay nothing has been produced I'm serious nothing in the last thirty years in any of the arts it has been produced as emotionally compelling and significant as the finale of Revenge of the Sith oh wait am I supposed to go back there what where am I oh wait I'm not to go here are you next oh this isn't a question that's more or less a response to your statement about America's Americans lack of appreciation for art about 500 years ago Luther translated the Bible into German and it was felt that a lot of the Catholic Church's culture was a distraction and a distortion of the truth of the Bible right and America was settled by Puritans who felt that way and I think that's the basis for why we often don't appreciate art this is exactly the point I'm making in the introduction absolutely in fact I also say in the introduction that because American conservatism is so powered by the Southern Baptists evangelical Protestantism that is one of the most I kind of clastic traditions and you're going back to Martin Luther yes that the Protestant reformers Luther and Calvin Knox and Zwingli were iconoclasts and actually actually sponsored destruction of Catholic images of statues and stained-glass windows and even organs even organs in churches okay we're considered be anything that was not biblically based was considered to be in some way a pagan survival or intrusion yes I think this is absolutely the case is that our culture still keeps on returning in some way to that the you know the original Puritan roots in New England rose and and therefore this is why you know visual culture needs to be supplied in America because it's not it's not something that's that's coming up naturally from her from our culture yeah I think thank you that yes that's a great point I'm going to agree they're trying to yeah how are you Oh fine good it's a pleasure to meet you finally you were required reading in my house for many years yes before I could marry my wife I had to read every one of your books no yes so this is a real thrill and a real pleasure I have two questions so if the crowd will indulge me the first ones fairly it's a quick one I think and this comes from my lovely wife after the Sharona you want to waver there we go great after Kirk Varnado after the late Robert Hughes after Simon Schama after you who do you see is the next heir apparent because you mentioned there are no culture critics right who do you say because because I was having my feud with Susanna sonntag back in the like in the early 90s I mean I always said that you know I I wanted to be much more generous and hospitable to the whatever the young culture critic came along compared to something I've been nasty to me alright and I'm waiting I've been waiting and waiting and you know at first I thought in the 90s I thought old Katie Roy Effie you know she's gonna be the intellectual for a generation and then what happened actually she went off to write memoirs and so I mean I just don't it's it's really shocking to me it's absolutely shocking that since I came on the scene in like 1990 okay here it is like 2012 okay so where are they they're thoroughly they've all been evolving you know processed through the academic mill and I'm so lucky I feel that in the 1960s still my professors believed that not in assigning critics to us certainly contemporary critics but assigning the primary text okay and that some of the fundation of my career is my exposure to the works of art themselves whether they're literary or artistic and I think this younger generation this is why there's no cultural critics it's like they that have spent so much time with you have so little time as it is in college they're waste so much time trying to you know decipher those corkscrew bad translations you know English translations of French works that had only relevance to front French culture with us russet heavy rust city and tradition had nothing nothing to do whatever with our culture so then they've adopted this and they've had to unlearn and just that bad prose you know that's the that's the problem they don't know how to write they don't under and then also another problem is you know with with the web okay now I was Iliana iting for the web I believed in the web when it's time when they're still controversial people said oh no the weapons are gonna go anywhere you know now all right but to write for the web you there is a distinct way of writing for the way what I'm concerned about is like the state that criticism is becoming very contaminated you know it's either totally obscured to second academies or it's this like snarky casual you know undisciplined blather of the blogs okay right people don't people are losing any sense of how to shape a voice whereas it's not it's still in Britain okay if people when people are writing for British magazines or British newspapers there's still a sense of like I've snapped and sparked and you know in almost some time something's a little too much I kind of have a kind of fear of emotion there's a there's a lot of like a lot of surface panache in British prose but then a little a little bit didn't it what kind of titter a titter you know they don't want to feel too deeply okay whereas we American so we're like the barbaric yawp you know it's like so Whitman said you know so and we have like you know jazz and Hollywood and we have no problem with emotion so I'm concerned that what's happening today is that is this like it is that criticism you know is like it's now it's like I don't know it's like lost any it's a boneless its boneless right now in the United States so I think I think we're it's a kind of cultural wasteland and another thing is because of the web is that everyone's becomes very niche there's you know there are very few sort of central points like a salon tried to be you know for a long time where you have like a central cultural arena and with the magazine's also the magazines are failing right the newspapers are failing that the book reviews have been dropped altogether like The Washington Post open till they dropped its years ago the news are struggling to survive and so there are very few places for young critics to like to speak to a general audience and I think that's crucial you know you don't just speak to people who agree with you in a niche whatever your niche thing is okay oh what are your favorite blogs these are my favorite blogs oh please wait why it should be like an arena okay you know of things and that and that's what the so I feel lucky like I came on the scene in it at that moment in the early 90s when I could write for a huge variety of places that now they don't even exist anymore okay you know like I was I was the first humanities professor do you ready op-eds you know the the people in political science or economics from Princeton or Harvard they had customarily written op eds of a serious nature but but but humanities professors weren't writing op-eds okay in fact when I was doing that in the early 90s there was a Harvard woman post structuralist okay son who like told a student newspaper from there you know serious people don't write for the newspapers like that okay and it's suddenly within a year okay after the rain you're stampeding after me desperately you know trying to like write write op-eds but that thing of like writing for a general audience okay what does this what voice should wouldn't use what language I would use once they I love that I think it's fabulous I think and now how can we get critics okay when you don't know like this you know so few so few places to in order to write for and um you know and you know another thing is that is that you know students and graduate students are not encouraged to imagine that there are great works of sculpture before the 80s I've I encountered many books where the the actual bibliography in the back you know it starts with the 80s okay they actually honestly believed scholarship was was revolutionized by post-structuralism post-modernism and that all that those books can produce an academia actually contain the whole of human knowledge that you could ever want you have to go earlier than the 80s right when it's the actual opposite you know the 80s on is like dreck okay and you know then Friedrich you know there's sort of the BB and possibly yes oh all right it was actually the best right so I mean that's the I don't know what you know what to do what to say I mean it's horrendous we just need those things like where's that young man before we need him to know that young man okay yeah we need you to revolutionize we'll never get these the cultural critics okay back in there [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: VulgarTrader

Views: 34,078

Keywords: camille paglia, art, religion, spirituality, nihilism, humanism, feminism

Id: lSI5EzGSA3I

Length: 68min 33sec (4113 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 07 2017