Camille Paglia - Religion and the Arts in America

Thank You professor Mason for the wonderful introduction and I am honored to be here giving this lecture for Colorado College my subject tonight is religion and the arts in America fasten your seat belts at this moment in America religion and politics are at a flashpoint conservative Christians deplore the left-wing bias of the mainstream media and the saturation of popular culture by sex and violence and are promoting strategies such as faith-based homeschooling to protect children from the chaotic moral relativism of a secular society liberals in turn condemned the meddling by Christian fundamentalists in politics notably in regard to abortion and gay civil rights or the Mideast where biblical assumptions it is claimed have shaped US policy there is vicious mutual recrimination with believers caricatured as paranoid apocalyptic Crusaders who view America's global mission as divinely inspired while liberals are portrayed as narcissistic hedonists and godless Alicia's --tz-- relics of the unpatriotic permissive 1960s a primary arena for the conservative liberal wars has been the arts even while leading conservative voices defend the traditional anglo-american Canon which has been under challenge and influx for 40 years American conservatives on the whole outside of the New Criterion magazine have shown little interest in the arts except to promulgate a didactic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism liberals on the other hand have been too content with a high visibility of the Arts in metropolitan centers which comprised only a fraction of America furthermore liberals have been complacent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining Creed for the young and liberals have been have done little to reverse the scandalous decline in urban public education or to protest the crazed system of our grotesquely overpriced cafeteria-style higher education which for 30 years was infested by sterile and now fading post-structuralism and post-modernism the state of the humanities in the u.s. can be measured by present achievement would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity American genius currently resides in technology and design the younger generation with its mastery of video games in its facility for ever evolving gadget tree-like video cell phones and iPad iPod has massively shifted to the web for information and entertainment I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American Fine Arts lies through religion let me make my premises clear I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat but based on my college experiences the 1960s would interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was strong I have been calling for nearly two decades from massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum though I shared the exasperation of my generation with immoral ISM and prudery of organized religion I view each world religion including Judea Christianity and Islam as a complex symbol system a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe now of the Bible one of the West's foundational texts is waning among aspiring young artists and writers when a society becomes all consumed in the provincial minutia of partisan politics as has happened in the u.s. over the past 20 years all perspective is lost great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it but a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism in self-absorption and gradually goes slack without leaving an artistic legacy the position of the Fine Arts in America has rarely been secured this is a practical commercial nation where the arts have often been seen as wasteful frivolous or unmanly in Europe the arts are heavily subsidised by the government because art literally embodies the history of the people and a nation whose roots are pre-modern and in some cases ancient even in the old Soviet Union the commute the communist regime supported classical ballet America is relatively young and has never had an aristocracy the elite class that typically Commission's the fine arts and dictates taste in Europe the Catholic Church was also a major patron of the Arts from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Counter Reformation partly because of the omnipresent greco-roman heritage furthermore continental European attitudes toward nudity in art are far more relaxed in Europe voluptuous nudes in painting and sculpture and on public buildings fountains and bridges are a mundane fact of life conservatives often speak of the US as a judeo-christian nation a formulation that many people including myself find troublesome because of the absorption by our population over the past century and a half of so many immigrants of other faiths the earliest colonization of America by Europeans was certainly Christian and in New England specifically Protestant the Spanish Catholic settlements in Florida in California as well as the French missions in the Great Lakes in central New York were eventually abandoned Maryland established in 1634 as a refuge for English Catholics was the exception and out of it would come the dominance of the bishops of Baltimore on American Catholic doctrine the Puritans who arrived in New England in the early 17th century brought with them the Calvinist hostility or indifference to the visual arts a motivating principle of the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation was its correction of Roman Catholicism 'he's heavy use of images in medieval churches in statues paintings and stained glass windows the protestant reformers reasserted the prohibition in the ten commandments against graven images idolatrous objects that seduced the soul away from the immaterial divine the Puritans a separatist sect that seceded from the to Catholic Church of England followed the Reformation imperative of putting the Bible at the center of their faith direct study of the Bible made possible by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the 15th century was the means by which believers opened a personal dialogue with God this focus on texts and close reading helped inspire the American literary tradition both poetry and prose in the form of Diaries were stimulated by the Puritan practice of introspection a Puritan had to constantly scrutinized his or her conscience and looked for God's hand in the common and uncommon events of life oratory embodied in Sunday Sermons was very strong literary historian Perry Miller identified the Jeremiah or Hellfire sermon as an innately American form the most famous example of which was Jonathan Edwards sermon sinners in the hands of an angry god which was delivered in 1741 in connecticut during the religious revival called the Great Awakening this enthusiastic style of denunciation and call to repentance can still be heard on evangelical television programs and it is echoed in the fulmination z-- of politically conservative talk radio which I have been listening to with alternating admiration and consternation for over 15 years the visual arts on the other hand were neglected and suppressed under the Puritans the Puritans suspicion of ornamentation is symbolized in the sober black dress of the Pilgrim Fathers depicted every year in the Thanksgiving direct decorations of American schools and shops the Puritans attitude toward art was conditioned by utilitarian principles of frugality and propriety art had no inherent purpose except his entertainment a distraction from duty and ethical action the Puritans did appreciate beauty in nature which was read like a book for signs of God's providence the social environment in England from which the Puritans had emigrated to America either directly or indirectly via the Netherlands was overtly iconoclastic destruction of church art was massive during the Reformation in Switzerland and Germany as well as England were destruction of churches priories and Abbey's fouled Henry the eighth's severance of the English church from control by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the 1530s crowds smashed medieval stained glass windows and wooden ultra screens and decapitated the saints statues carved on church facade walls were whitewashed to cover sacred murals politically incited damage to churches was even more severe during the English Civil War when Puritan soldiers dispatched by Parliament attacked even the Cathedral at Canterbury which the leader of the Ravagers described as quote a stable for idols Puritan iconoclasm was a pointed contrast to the image mania of the contemporary Counter Reformation the Vatican's campaign to defeat Protestantism would fill southern Europe with grandiose Baroque art the first serious body of painting in America was 18th century portraiture documentary works commissioned to mark social status by the time professional theatre started here Puritanism had faded so there were no replays of the battles the English Puritans had waged against the theatre world in Shakespeare's time but if American drama and the visual arts languished in the wake of Puritanism music was tremendously energized the first book published in the American colonies was the bay Salter book which was released in Massachusetts in 1640 and went through 27 editions as a collection of Psalms for singing in church it belonged to a century long line of British and Scottish Salters before the Reformation hymns for the Catholic Mass were in Latin and were sung only by the clergy not the laity but Martin Luther a priest in poet who admired German folk song felt that hymns should be in the vernacular and should be sung by the congregation of worshippers this emphasis on congregational singing is one of Protestantism x' defining features imitated in recent decades with varying success by American Catholic parishes through its defiance of medieval religious authority Protestantism helped produce modern individualism yet Protestant church services also promoted community and social cohesion the intertwining of capitalism and Protestantism since the Renaissance has been extensively studied but perhaps the congregational esprit of church-going may also have been a factor in the Protestant success in shaping modern business practices and corporate culture the Protestant reformers were bitterly split however over the issue of music in church Luther encouraged the composition of new hymns and was the author of a famous one a mighty fortress is our God in contrast John Calvin the father of American Puritanism maintained that only the Word of God should be heard in church therefore songs had to strictly follow the biblical Psalms like his fellow reformer Ulrich zing swingley Calvin opposed the use of organs or any instruments in church organs were systematically destroyed by Protestant radicals furthermore Calvin condemned the complex polyphonic music endorsed by the more artistic Luther Calvin rejected harmony or part singing so that the holy scripture could be heard with perfect clarity therefore the American style of Protestant church song based on Calvin's principles was simple slow serious and in unaccompanied unison that intense focused group sound has descended through the centuries and can be heard in the majestic hymns that have been adopted as anthems by American civil rights groups such as Amazing Grace and we shall overcome the Quakers who were pivotal to the abolitionist movement against slavery were even more restrictive about such matters the Quakers found our music altogether even at home because they believed and encouraged thoughtlessness and frivolity but the German and Dutch who emigrated to America from the late 17th to the mid 18th centuries held a more expansive Lutheran view of church music the German influence was especially strong in Philadelphia - its German pietism port elite church organ in 1694 by the start of the 19th century him writing exploded in America over the next hundred years hymns of tremendous quality poured out from both men and women writers in many cases they were simply lyrics pure poetry that was then attached to old melodies a famous example from the Civil War is Julia ward house Battle Hymn of the Republic which how wrote overnight in a fever of inspiration after visiting a Union Army camp near Washington where she heard the soldiers singing John Brown's body a tribute to the executed abolitionist rebel several other songs would become political hymns to the nation such as my country tis of thee written in 1832 by a Baptist minister Samuel Francis Smith and America the Beautiful a lyric written by Katharine Lee Bates a Native Americans whose father was a Congregationalist pastor Bates saw the Rockies for the first time when she came to teach here at Colorado College in 1893 she wrote America the Beautiful after a wagon trip to the top of Pikes Peak when it was published in 1899 it became instantly famous and has often been described as America's true national anthem the huge nineteenth-century corpus of Protestant songs became part of common American culture for people of all faiths thus the tragic power of that final scene on the sinking Titanic in 1912 when the ship's band struck up the hymn nearer my God to thee hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum one of the most brilliant products of American creative imagination human Dee has had a massive global impact through popular music wherever rock and roll is played a shadow with gospel roots remains rock which emerged in the 1950s from urban black rhythm and blues of the late 1940s had several sources including percussive African Polly rhythms and British and scots-irish folk ballads but a principal influence was the ecstatic prophesying body-shaking style of congregational singing in the camp meetings of religious revivalists from the late 18th century on all gospel music including Negro spirituals descends from those extravaganzas which drew thousands of people to open-air worship services in woods and groves the most influential camp meeting occurred at Cambridge in Bourbon County Kentucky in 1804 for three days and well past midnight a crowd estimated to be between 20,000 and 30,000 sang and shouted with a great noise that was heard from miles around worshipers transported by extreme emotion writhed and fell to the ground or went catatonic this Kentucky revival called the Second Great Awakening spread through the inland regions of the south and eventually reached western Pennsylvania but the movement never flourished in the North because of its harsher weather collections of gospel music for use in revivals were published a huge success throughout the 19th century from gospel melodies released in 1821 and spiritual songs for social social worship 1832 to IRA D Sankey 's multiple volumes of gospel hymns and sacred songs 1875 91 a defining characteristic of such songs is their subjectivity that is their use of the first-person pronoun to attest to an intimate relationship with Jesus as in I love to tell the story or he leadeth me out of this gospel tradition also came Negro spirituals which would powerfully counter the degraded stereotypes of african-americans circulated by minstrel shows spirituals began on the antebellum plantations where Bible stories were ingeniously adapted to carry coded political messages as in go down Moses a dream of liberation where Pharoah represents the white slave-owner in collusion with American law a major addition to the gospel repertory was slave songs of the United States published in 1867 in the 1870s an african-american choir the Jubilee singers of Fisk University in Tennessee traveled the country performing Negro spirituals in a concert setting to help endow black educational institutions the songs made a sensation not only for their melodious beauty and religious fervor before the residual African elements such as blues the flat notes and offbeat's the syncopation that would later surface in jazz the brilliant folk hymns of 19th century camp meetings were inherited by modern revivals such as the Billy Graham crusade in popular music the spasmodic undulations and ecstatic cries of camp-meeting worshipers were borrowed by performers like Little Richard Elvis Presley and the late great James Brown whose career began in gospel and who became the Godfather of Soul as well as a funk reggae and rap gospel music passionate in history onic with its electrifying dynamics is America's grand opera the omnipresence of gospel here partly explains the weakness of rock music in other nations except where there has been direct influence by American rhythm and blues as in Great Britain and Australia the continuing impact of gospel music on young African Americans in church may also account for the current greater vitality of hip-hop as opposed to hard rock which has been in creative crisis for over a decade there was a second great confluence of religion with the arts in 19th century America the Bible in its poetic and indeed Shakespearean King James translation rather than to rather than today's flat pedestrian versions had a huge formative influence on the language imagery symbolism and allegory of such major writers as James Fenimore Cooper Nathaniel Hawthorne Ralph Waldo Emerson Emily Dickinson Walt Whitman and Herman Melville the American literary Renaissance was produced by the intersection of the nation's residual Calvinism with British romanticism which was hostile to organized religion but which had transferred its concept of spirituality to nature pantheism helped inspire transcendentalism which was suffused with aspects of Hinduism by Emerson a refugee from strict Unitarianism this view of nature which saw God as imminent in creation was spectacularly embodied in the 19th century Hudson River School of landscape painting in such works as Thomas Cole's River in the Catskills or Frederic churches Niagara these artists showed America's mountains and monumental cataracts glowing with the numinous Catholic immigration in the 19th century brought a radically different aesthetic to church architecture and decor the typical American church had been in the Protestant plain style white and rectangular with a steeple formed the picturesque apex of countless villages a style descending from the British Architects Sir Christopher Wren and James Gibbs originally American churches were often simply a meeting house a word still retained in quaker practice also used for local government the meeting house was a boxy space with exposed Timbers and benches but no ornamentation a template that was borrowed by town halls across the nation Catholic taste was far more lavish the influx of Irish immigrants in the 1840s which caused anti-catholic violence was soon registered in New York st. Patrick's Cathedral designed by James Renwick and constructed from 1850 to 1877 with his soaring spires delicate stonework and stained-glass windows it exemplified the current Gothic Revival a grand style that was also adopted in America by Episcopalian churches polish and Italian Catholics arrived on mass in the closing decades of the 19th century Eastern European parish churches followed the ornate Byzantine model Italian American churches installed a profusion of polychrome statuary as was customary in the old country a flamboyant style that continued until after world war ii when the liturgical movement from germany introduced a stripped-down modernist design with open spaces and little imagery except for abstract crucifixes this development resulted in a genteel privatizing of American Catholicism which erased its vestiges of working-class ethnicity when aging Catholic churches were renovated in the 1950s and 60s the Saint statues were displaced or banished altogether I mourn this loss because it has impoverished the cultural environment for young people my interest in the arts was first kindled in childhood by the gorgeous stained-glass windows and theatrical statue weary of my baptismal Church Saint Anthony of Padua in Endicott New York perhaps America's rising Hispanic population will restore the great imagistic style of Latin Catholicism though there was a long tradition of censorship in Roman Catholicism typify by its voluminous index of prohibited books American Catholics made few attempts to influence public policy during the 19th century that role was taken up with gusto by the Protestant led temperance movement which called for a ban on the public sale of alcohol a long campaign that finally succeeded with the adoption 1920 of the 18th amendment to the US Constitution which began prohibition major groups in the temperance movement which included leading feminists like susan b anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were the women's Christian Temperance Union and the anti-saloon League the anti-saloon League was heavily financed by Methodists and Baptists Episcopalians in contrast kept their distance from the temperance crusade Catholic surveillance of American public life would come with the rise of Hollywood at the start of the studio era movies were still viewed as vulgar in the roaring 20s the Jazz Age there was a new rule breaking energy and sexual adventurism in urban areas responding to audience demand movies began pushing the limits with bare flesh and sexual innuendo small communities across the u.s. felt they were being invaded by an alien cultural force resistance came from a collaboration between the Catholic Church and local Protestant women's groups speaking from the perspective of concerned mothers there were tinges of anti-semitism in this protest because so many of Hollywood's early producers in financiers were Jewish a series of guidelines were instituted in moviemaking throughout the 1920s but compliance was uneven finally with the creation in 1933 of the Catholic National League of decency which threatened a nationwide boycott Hollywood responded with a strict production code to be administered through the Hays office by an Irish Catholic Joseph I bring this code which wasn't officially abandoned until the 1960s requires scripts to follow a moral formula crime had to be punished and marriage respected with homosexuality and miscegenation forbidden though long disbanded the Legion of decency lingers on today in our lettered rating system for movies GE PG pg-13 or n c---seventeen the Legion attached descending grades of a B or C to each film released in the US when I was a child the group was still a formidable force after mass one Sunday I was transfixed by the official list posted in the church foyer that showed the Legion of decency had slapped AC on the 1956 film baby doll meaning it was condemned and that no Catholic could see it without pain of sin the title baby doll seemed inscribed in smoking red hot letters from hell the film based on a Tennessee Williams tale about southern decadence was being provocatively advertised by kiddie porn images of blonde Carol Baker a lounge in a nightie and sucking her thumb it was 40 years before I finally had a chance to see baby doll on cable TV in the 1990s it still retains its mythic subversive significance for me indeed baby doll is emblematic of the quarrel between religion and the arts in America as avant-garde modernism triumphs in the first half of the 20th century it was only the movies that addressed or expressed the religious convictions of the mass audience with few exceptions most modern artists and intellectuals were agnostics or atheists above all in Europe where anti-clericalism has arranged since the Enlightenment in its search for ticket sales Hollywood returned again and again to the spectacular Bible epic one of my favorite genres sessile B DeMille for example may the Ten Commandments twice in 1923 is a silent film and then as a widescreen Technicolor extravaganza released in 1956 the latter is regularly broadcast on religious holidays and remains a masterpiece of heroic narrative and archaeological recreation of Egyptian life the best-selling American religious novel of the 19th century was general Lew Wallace's Ben Hur a tale of the Christ published in 1880 and widely imitated Ben Hur was also made into two films the first a 1925 silent in the second yet another widescreen masterpiece released in 1959 the dynamic star of both the Ten Commandments and Ben Hur was Charlton Heston who afterward became a conservative activist and president of the National Rifle Association because of the divergence between religion and the prestige finance in the 20th century overtly religious American art became weaker and weaker one of the most disseminated images of the 20th century was William Solomon's head of Christ a 1940 oil painting inspired by Victorian precedence that showed a long-haired Jesus bathed in light and gazing rapidly toward heaven in his intriguing 1996 book icons of American Protestantism David Morgan notes that the head of Christ was reproduced 500 million times over the next four decades the image was beloved among evangelicals but not among mainline Protestants many critics even believers rejected the painting as sentimental kitsch and denounces portrayal of Christ as quote effeminate as well as overly Nordic Caucasian sallman was in fact the son of Scandinavian immigrants head of Christ shows Jesus as the gentle benevolent Good Shepherd the forgiving friend with whom born-again Christians such as President Jimmy Carter claimed to walk and talk if there were few open conflicts in America between religion and the fine arts through most of the 20th century it was simply because the two realms rarely overlapped but that uneasy truce ended with the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s under the conservative presidencies of Ronald Reagan whose goal was to reduce big government there was close scrutiny of cultural agencies considerable impetus came from William Bennett the new director of the National Endowment for the Humanities whose budget he cut when Bennett was appointed Secretary of Education he was succeeded as director of the neh by Lynn Cheney wife of the future Vice President Dick Cheney she targeted deconstruction on campus and liberal bias in government-funded public broadcasting programs a focus of controversy soon became the National Endowment for the Arts whose authorization was approved in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson but which had to struggle for congressional funding from the start with vehement opposition even to its creation coming from Strom Thurmond the conservative senator from South Carolina a variety of groups mobilized outside government in the 1980s to counter what was perceived as a moral degeneration in the media environment these included dr. James Dobson Focus on the Family pat robertson's Christian Coalition and the Reverend Lewis Sheldon's Coalition for traditional values in 1985 the parents music Resource Center led by Tipper Gore lobbied in Senate hearings for content labeling of popular music because of concerns about sex and violence in 1985 evangelical protestant organizations led by Jerry Falwell and Donald Wildmon allied with anti-pornography feminists whom I strongly opposed to pressure 7-eleven in other national chains of convenience stores to ban the sale of Playboy in penthouse magazines that effort succeeded but may have been a Pyrrhic victory insofar as it immediately stimulated the market for pornographic videos introduced into homes by the then new technology of the VCR in 1988 Wildman's lobbying led to the US House of Representatives passing a resolution that called for universal studios to cancel the release of Martin Scorsese's controversial film The Last Temptation of Christ Wildman's activities expanded to the Finance when in 1989 his group publicized an apparent example of blasphemy in an exhibition that had been partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts the show had opened at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in winston-salem North Carolina in conservative senator Jesse Helms home state and closed after a short tour in Richmond Virginia the point of contention was New York artist Andre Serrano's piss Christ a five foot high blow up of a misty photograph of a plastic crucifix immersed in a Plexiglas vat of the artists urine without that deliberately and perhaps gratuitously provocative slangy title of course no one would have known how the photos golden glow had been produced the outcry over pissed Christ began with local letters to the editor and spread to Congress where New York senator Alphonse D'Amato called for Ana's photo quote filth and quote garbage and punctuated his remarks by tearing up the exhibition catalog and fleeing the pieces to the Senate floor another bitter controversy broke out in 1989 over an exhibit of robert mapplethorpe opened the gay and sadomasochistic photographs this show was assembled by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and was partly funded in the amount of $30,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts there were no problems in Philadelphia but negative publicity exploded just before the Mabel show before show was to open in Washington's venerable Corcoran Gallery of Art located only a block from the White House the director of the museum of the gallery preemptively canceled the exhibit an arbitrary move that caused outrage in the art world she resigned under fire by the end of the year the Mapplethorpe show was quickly taken by a local progressive venue the Washington project for the Arts where it drew huge crowds when it moved to the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center however there were serious repercussions police entered the gallery and the director was charged with obscenity he was put on trial but was later acquitted by a jury political activism on the left was unusually intense during the 1980s because of the AIDS epidemic which Reagan which the Reagan was accused of having initially ignored Mapplethorpe who had died of age of AIDS at age 42 in 1989 was viewed as an apostle of sexual liberation as an admirer of maple for I argued at the time that this was a sentimental miss reading of his work whose dark punitive hierarchies were partly a residue of his childhood Catholicism another seething ex Catholic Madonna was also challenging taboo taboos at that time in 1989 her video for Like a Prayer was showed her making love to the animated statue of a black saint and dancing her slip in front of a burning cross cause Pepsi Cola to cancel her five million dollar endorsement contract though work offensive to organized religion constituted only a fraction of the projects annually supported by the National Endowment for the Arts conservative demands for the total abolition of that agency escalated the NTAs administrators and peer review panels were denounced for left-wing bias and anti Americanism as a career teacher at arts colleges I was very concerned about the stereotyping of artists as parasitic nihilus that was beginning to take hold in the popular mind in America while most people in the arts community viewed the Serrano and Mapplethorpe controversies as assault on free speech I saw them is primarily an argument about public funding I feel that no genuinely avant-garde artists should be taking money from the government a view also expressed at the time by the legendary beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti another Italian America Mapplethorpe certainly was no struggling artist he was rich and famous by the time of his death and I would question whether Mapplethorpe school elegant torture and mutilation scenarios were an ideal advertisement for gay male life after acrimonious congressional debate the National Endowment for the managed to survive but it was now regulated by an obscenity clause grants to individual artists also decreased though controversy has subsided the NEA disturbingly remains at the top of every list of government agencies that many citizens across the nation want abolished what I found agonizing about the Serrano Mapplethorpe episodes was that they ruined any prospect for a vastly increased federal support for the Arts in this country and furthermore that they would inevitably undermine arts funding of the state and local levels where budgets are limited dance companies are particularly vulnerable because they require high quality rehearsal space and depend on a sustained continuity of teacher and students almost a decade past in America without a major conflict between government and the arts in 1999 however the Brooklyn Museum of Art mounted an exhibit called sensation emerging British artists from the Saatchi collection when this show had appeared at the Royal Academy of Arts in London controversy had mainly focused on a large image of an infamous child murderess which was vandalized with ink and eggs the work that caused trouble in the u.s. however was the British Nigerian artist Chris ofili's mixed-media painting the Holy Virgin Mary it depicted a black skinned Madonna with a protruding breasts sculpted of lacquered elephant dung from the London Zoo to other lumps of dung supported the paintings base in England no one objected to the affiliate work but in New York City with its huge constituency of ethnic Catholics there was an immediate reaction fermented by the new york-based Catholic League for religious and civil liberties yet another italian-american Catholic politician Mayor Rudy Giuliani expressed outrage and before the show it even opened at a fiery press conference Giuliani who had not yet seen the affiliate painting called it quote sick and quote is disgusting the mayor unilaterally impounded the Brooklyn museum's city funding and threatened to evict it from its century-old lease this extreme political intrusion diverted the discussion from one of art to that of censorship while the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Philippe Montebello criticized the handling of the show by Arnold Lehman the director of the Brooklyn Museum most people in the arts community instantly rallied to the museum side but unease remained especially after Lehman openly lied to the media about the pivotal financial role played in the show by Charles Saatchi a British advertising executive notorious for his speculation in the art market a direct intervention was made at the show by a 72 year old devout Catholic who evaded security guards to squeeze washable white paint all over a Phillies painting and act that some viewed as racist but that oddly paralleled the whitewashing of Catholic images by early Protestant iconoclasts the man who told police had attacked the painting because it was quote blasphemous was charged with violating the city's ordinance against graffiti when the controversy first erupted I publicly questioned the double standard operative in the art world in regard to artists manipulation of religious iconography the desecration of Catholic symbols was tolerated in American museums in ways that would never be permitted if the themes were Jewish or Muslim second I denounced the total failure of curatorial support of sensation at the Brooklyn Museum which simply passively mounted the London show much of the misunderstanding of the ophélie painting might have been avoided if the museum had framed it with historical context about First African Christian and particularly Ethiopian art second tribal African fertility cults third the Catholic doctrine of the virgin birth and forth the long southern European tradition of the black madonna commentary by the tabloid press and furious conservatives who had never seen the painting referred to dung being quote thrown or quote flung at the madonna which was completely false but with all candor no defense of this painting could have totally exonerated it from scandal since Sophie Lee had pasted around Mary a cloud of small cutouts of female genitalia culled from pornography magazines from a distance they look like butterflies or hovering angels emissaries of nature rather than the Christian God that there was indeed unprofessional indifference to curatorship in this case would be confirmed just last year by honored Lehman's shocking demotion of his principal curators in a reorganization of the brooklyn museum that demonstrated the unscholarly diversion of the institution from public education toward commercial buzzes the automatic defense of the brooklyn museum during the sensation imbroglio sometimes betrayed a dismaying snobbery by liberal middle-class professionals who were openly disdainful of the religious values of the working class whom liberals always claim to protect supporters of the Arts who gleefully cheer when a religious symbol is maltreated act as if that response authenticates their avant-garde credentials but here's the bad news the avant-garde is dead it was killed over 40 years ago by pop art and by one of my heroes Andy Warhol a decadent Catholic the era of vigorous oppositional art inaugurated 200 years ago by romanticism is long gone the controversies over Andres Serrano Robert Mapplethorpe and Chris Ofili were just fading sparks of an old cause it is presumptuous and even delusional to imagine that goading a squawk out of the Catholic League permits anyone to bow the glory of the great avant-garde rebels of the past whose transgressions were personally costly it's time to move on for the fine arts to revive they must recover their spiritual center profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent thank the New Age movement to which I belong was a distillation of the 1960s multicolored cultural attraction to world religions but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts the search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction as in George Lucas's sixth film Star Wars saga with is evocative master myth of the force but technology for its own sake is never enough it will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts to fully appreciate world art one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms art began as religion in prehistory it does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine icon or Scripture hence art lovers even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion should always speak with respect of religion conservatives on the other hand need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the Arts progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and re-examine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms if conservatives are serious about educational standards they must support the teaching of art history in primary school which means which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy without compromise we are heading for a soulless future but when set against the vast historical panorama religion and arts whether in marriage or divorce can reinvigorate American culture thank you very much for your attention [Applause] [Music] yes come how are you doing is that better is that better is this better all right I have to do this well thank you that's been fabulous but I know that we have questions here on any topic I'll take any topic okay on any topic an elastic invitation for questions I have one suggestion normally we line up in the aisle we have been asked not to line up in the aisle so if you have a question come to one of the two microphones at the front and stand parallel to this stage and I'll try to recognize you and questions please let's let's begin hello I'm a little confused by the anecdotes is repression good and if so when is liberation good and if so when okay narc in ours or in culture well I mean if the religion and the state were presses much is it good and one of the best games I like to think it's a very interesting question my generation of the 1960s lived through that particular duality we the baby boomers born after World War two were raised in the restrictive and conformance 1950s and stage its enormous rebellion so the for a very long while there was this overestimation about liberation that is sexual liberation and looking back at this you know historically I think we can see that that our revolt was simply a local phenomenon and that's the-- and that as I argue in sexual persona which is you know which was published in 1990 that ultimately you know sexual liberation leads to sadomasochism into into a kind of dead end that that we were fated to live out the destiny of them the Roman Empire anyway and I I've been presented as unhappy news to people for a very long time I think I think people are starting to see that what the 1960s generation has bequeathed to two younger people is a kind of chaos we our personalities were formed very powerfully by that our parents generation which had lived through the depression and the in the world war and therefore we were we were strong and could survive anything I meant and this and babydoll for me is such a symbol okay of the you know the censorship and the the lies and the all the circumscription zhan expression and an arch that in popular culture that I grew up with i but i know i now look around and i you know at the at current media and I think you know what have we wrought what what have what exactly has you know the sixties generation have contributed in terms of sustaining the creativity of Hollywood things I said in this in the lecture about about the Hays Code the production code there are many books these days about free code Hollywood showing all the very interesting films normal shears you know playing a known in print in the late 20s and early 30s and people are very interested by and right now you know the Hays Code is kind of a joke people say oh all the ridiculous and you know of juvenile compromises that people had to make in scripts of the 1930s however because of the Hays Code you had one of the most glorious moments in the history of Hollywood that is mainstream entertainment movies that you can see fifty nine times over and over and over again right movies that were intended for an audience including multiple generations and grandparents parents and children and that's completely lost in our very segmented and fractured kind of an audience of so now they're just like just a very banal pumping out of you know of media in both TV and and movies a little bit of a sizzle there's a little kind of explicitness now about sex which is an erotic at all okay and there is there is a there is a shocking kinds of literalism about violence that young people find funny okay but that that I still have a problem with and I think is is debasing the aesthetic standards and the you know I think it not that it makes this kind of excessive violence makes people violent about rather it robs young very young children away of their imaginations it makes them jaded it makes them you're not even for example I love I still I love going into your carnival arcades and and shooting those rifles I love it i don't i don't have own a gun i don't want to own guns okay but i just love going and shooting you know those loves the metal sometimes on and I found I no longer can do that because the the video version of that now I think with the guns they what what what the end result of shooting and you know into the in the space that the fictive space there is that incredible mutilations that mutilations and explosions of people's bodies I'm going this is this is what he very young children are being raised with again and I get I don't think it's going to make children violent but I do think it means the end of the American Arts okay if we don't get get a grip on this all young people have now okay is media I am like one of the great apostles of popular culture and media I push that you know pushed that crusade through high school through college through grad school and I know that some of my professors in grad school thought I was you know flaky because of my love of popular culture and so on and in the 90s I've begun to feel okay that's you know the lack of any kinds of circumscription on unexpressed altum Utley finally obtains the imagination this is just one of those paradoxes and culture that that the the stronger the taboo the greater the intensity of pleasure in crossing that line that the borderline the taboo set up thus early Madonna was so much more interesting than later Madonna

Channel: Don Tellahfonne

Views: 18,408

Keywords: Camille Paglia, religion, art, arts, America, Catholicism, Atheism, Protestantism, Puritanism, Music, Bible, Christianity, Education, literature, politics

Id: L0Euz3YkHuw

Length: 58min 13sec (3493 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2018