Camille Paglia Unbound

Camille Paglia is out selling her soon-to-be-released book, Glittering Images. To promote it she did an extended and fascinating interview with Salon. 

In it you can hear a different, and in many ways more sensible voice from the radical left. Paglia is her own woman; she does not toe anyone’s party line; she is not a knee-jerk apologist for liberal Democrats.

Sometimes her views shock; sometimes they surprise; sometimes they provoke. Often she addresses topics that I have posted about on this blog. Strangely, her views are often similar to mind.

Here are a few samples.

Talking about Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth Paglia makes a point that others have made:

I detested “The Beauty Myth” because I felt it was such a poorly researched and argued book. To address the topic of beauty required research into aesthetics and the history of modern media and Hollywood. But she just waded into the subject with the most PC second-wave feminist ideology — even though she herself was profiting enormously from her own good looks. If Naomi Wolf didn’t look the way she did, she would never have gotten any attention for that book. So it seemed hypocritical of her to be denouncing the beauty myth even while she was profiting from it.

Currently, Wolf is out selling her new book, Vagina.

Apparently, the book is not doing very well in the marketplace. Even feminists, Paglia observes, are horrified at Wolf’s latest excursion into shamelessness. For her part Paglia questions Wolf’s self-aggrandizing portrayal of her sex life.

Paglia said:

First of all, the sheer number of negative reviews, as well as the tone of derision and contempt coming from fellow feminists, was unprecedented. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember in my entire career any book receiving more negative reviews than this book has — and yet all that press space not resulting in sales. It was as if feminism was shaking itself and reassessing itself and reconsidering its history. 

I found many of the major U.S. reviews … swallowed wholesale her tall tales of her fabulous sex life and didn’t seem to notice how viciously castrating to men the entire book is. 

Wolf’s exhibitionism appalled Paglia as it should appall all sentient human beings. Identifying any human being with his or her genitalia is intrinsically demeaning.

In her interview Paglia calls out Wolf’s absence of self-respect, to say nothing of her total lack of awareness of who she is:

Because the first thing I said when the Australian contacted me (while the book was still under embargo and I had only seen a short summary in Publishers Weekly) was that I was shocked at the grotesque sexual exhibitionism here of a woman who is turning 50 this year and who is the mother of two teenagers. Why would anyone do this to herself and her family? Shouldn’t it be obvious that anyone who is genuinely enjoying a wonderful love life would never expose those tender intimacies to the harsh spotlight of the world?

Not until the tail end of the review process did I see in a relatively obscure British blog a woman saying, “In this book Naomi Wolf is having a nervous breakdown.” And I thought, finally! Someone with insight!  

Then, the Salon interviewer veered onto questions concerning contemporary politics and policy.

Most topical was the question about how the Obama administration has handled the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Surprisingly, Paglia is utterly hostile to the Obama-Clinton foreign policy team. She calls out the mainstream media for coddling the president:

And what is the administration’s response to the murder of our ambassador? Nothing. Do we have a presidency or not? The ambassador’s journal was lying on the floor for CNN to find, and it took weeks for the FBI to get there and spend a day — after sensitive documents were stripped long ago. The State Department has clearly become a morass of political correctness. Hillary and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice should resign. Of course the mainstream media were mum for weeks about the Libyan scandal. And that just empowers the right-wing in the country. The media’s pampering and protection of Obama over the years simply led to his weakening — which was on excruciating public display at his first debate with Romney, who landed blow after blow.

From the first weeks of the new administration Paglia opposed Obamacare. As someone whose liberalism grants a crucial role to freedom, Paglia feels alienated from today’s Democratic party. At one point she asks:

Why has the GOP become the freedom party?

More substantively, she comments:

I began denouncing the Obamacare bill in my Salon column within two months after Obama’s inauguration. And I was also criticizing the President’s imprisonment within an insular circle of advisors who were not of sufficient quality and experience as administrators or strategists to sustain his presidency.

The way liberals lay down flat to accept this massive, totalitarian takeover of the American medical system was shocking to me. 

She continues:

What in the world has happened to the Democratic Party? Its passivity towards this awful takeover of our lives by a know-it-all government, as shown by the way Obama has governed by constantly going around Congress — appointing czars and one new layer of bureaucracy after another. And hardly a peep of protest from liberals. It’s like the movie of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” — Democrats have turned into the Eloi; they’re like sheep. They hear a signal, and it’s like pre-programmed spin in their heads — they just trot like sheep in one direction. I am voting Green in protest against the systemic corruption of my party.

It gets worse:

As someone who listens to talk radio, I must tell you that the issue of personal freedom and resistance to a swollen totalitarian government has become primary on the Right. 

….one of my target audiences is home-schooling moms — whose powerful voices I heard calling into conservative talk radio at the dawn of the Tea Party. They are formidable and capable personalities whom feminism has foolishly ignored.

As I posted the other day, Paglia is highly critical of contemporary art. In her interview she says that contemporary visual art has failed because the art world, has adopted a “knee-jerk hostility to religion.”

In her words:

One of the themes in my book is the current impoverishment of the art world because of its knee-jerk hostility to religion, which is everywhere. That kind of sneering at religion that Christopher Hitchens specialized in, despite his total ignorance of religion and his unadmirable lifestyle, was no model for atheism. I think Hitchens was a burden to atheism in terms of his decadent circuit of constant parties and showy blather. He was a sybaritic socialite and roué — not a deep thinker — whose topical, meandering writing will not last. 

She continues:

But spiritual quest was one of the great themes of the ’60s that has been lost and forgotten — that reverent embrace of all the world religions. This is why our art has become so narrow and empty. People in the humanities have sunk into this shallow, snobby, liberal style of stereotyping religious believers as ignorant and medieval, which is total nonsense. And meanwhile, the entire professional class in Manhattan and Los Angeles is doping themselves on meds and trying to survive in their manic, anxiety-filled world. And what are they producing that is of the slightest interest? Nothing. 

"Why Beauty Matters"

An anonymous commenter offered a link to this BBC show, "Why Beauty Matters," as a follow-up to my post about Camille Paglia. The link does not seem to be working in the comments section, so, here's the show, in its entirety:

Camille Paglia on the Death of Art

Who killed art?

The mystery is all around us. Happily,  Camille Paglia is on the case.

In a recent column Paglia noted that the visual arts have lost their aesthetic. That is, they have lost their soul.

Architects are producing buildings of surpassing beauty. Industrial designers are filling everyone’s homes and pockets with exquisitely beautiful objects. Opera, theatre and dance are doing wonderfully.

But then, a young visual artist drags a lump of coal across a piece of paper and declares that he has deconstructed humanity’s carbon footprint.

Don’t believe me? Check out Bravo’s reality series, Gallery Girls. By now the show has mercifully been put to rest, but you can probably find it online or on On Demand.

As soon as you get past the personal dramas of the aspiring young gallerists, you will notice two things: first, that aesthetically interesting and engaging art is being produced… in China; second, that young American artists are more interested in their ideas than in their art.

Paglia summarized the trouble with  contemporary visual art:

Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Yet work of bold originality and stunning beauty continues to be done in architecture, a frankly commercial field. Outstanding examples are Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, Rem Koolhaas's CCTV headquarters in Beijing and Zaha Hadid's London Aquatic Center for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

She continues:

What do contemporary artists have to say, and to whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s.

Paglia is quite correct to say that visual artists need to learn to work with their hands. They need to get their hands dirty and to engage with the stuff from which they make art.

To me this means that they have abandoned the aesthetic in favor of ideas. It beats working.

Astonishingly for anyone who knows anything about art, young visual artists seem to believe that they should be using their art to communicate an idea… or better, to disseminate the jejune politically correct insights that inhabit their minds.

Amazingly, young visual artists have come to believe that their ideas have some kind of surpassing importance.

Yet, when art conveys an idea, when it has a point of view, when its values lies in your ability to grasp the idea, then it is just stealth propaganda.

When gazing on such works it is impossible to be engaged by the work or challenged by it. Forget about enjoying it. You are more likely to feel that you are being assaulted, if not insulted by it.

For my part, I question whether it really is art.

If you want to think through the issue, ask yourself what Homer’s idea was in the Odyssey? When Homer spoke about “rosy-fingered dawn” was he making an environmental impact statement? Was that other great metaphor, “the wine-dark sea” an invitation to break away the chains of custom in favor of Dionysian revelry?

Was Giotto deconstructing theology when he painted his altarpiece of the Madonna and child? Or was he prefiguring the rise of capitalism?

Unless you live in Neo-Platonic hot house, art is not a vehicle for communicating great ideas. If anything, it dramatizes moral dilemmas in a way that is aesthetically engaging and compelling. It invites you to think; it does not tell you what to think.

If, as Paglia correctly notes, today’s artists are more interested in producing shock than contemplation, their work lacks all but commercial value.

In her words:

Artists can now win attention by imitating once-risky shock gestures of sexual exhibitionism or sacrilege. This trend began over two decades ago with Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine, and was typified more recently by Cosimo Cavallaro's "My Sweet Lord," a life-size nude statue of the crucified Christ sculpted from chocolate, intended for a street-level gallery window in Manhattan during Holy Week.

As for Paglia’s larger question for contemporary visual artists: what are they saying and to whom are they saying it, the answer is not very difficult.

The work of contemporary visual artists does have a rationale. It is making a mockery of the people who buy it.

Visual artists are saying that the wealthy capitalists who collect their works have no aesthetic, have no sense of beauty and will buy any piece of  junk as long as it has been exhibited in an art gallery or museum.

Artists have found a way to exploit the insecurities of the 1%. 

Rich collectors do not know very much about art. They are unable to appreciate great art, but wish merely to enhance their social status by becoming patrons of the arts. 

Artists are perfectly happy to enable them.

It’s not about what capitalism is doing to art but about what today’s young visual artists are doing to capitalists.

Of course, many collectors are having a few laughs of their own. For them, buying fine art is like buying penny stocks. Most will turn out to be junk, but it only takes a few to make the investment worthwhile.

For the collectors out there, it’s a good time to trade in your Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman for some Old Masters.

You do not want to be left holding the empty bag when the world discovers that its emptiness has only meaning: you don't know the difference between great art and a great scam. 

Trendspotting in the Art World

I’m not sure what we should make of it, but it bears mention: the center of gravity of the world art market seems to have set down in China.

Roger Denson is correct to point it out. Link here.

Why would it be historically significant? Perhaps because it offers a snapshot of one moment in the competition between civilizations. (Note, I did not say clash of civilizations.)

Civilizations compete. So do nations and empires. They compete to see who can provide the best life for their citizens and subjects.

A good life does not merely mean a life filled with riches. A good life involves providing psychological capital, pride and confidence to each and all. True happiness comes from the pride we take in our achievements, but that is not merely individual achievements. The nation’s or the civilization’s achievements contribute mightily to forming and maintaining a positive identity.

Civilizations also compete to establish dominance and influence in world politics and world markets. They compete at war and they compete in business. The latter was famously called by William James: the moral equivalent of war.

Military victory grants the winners a boost of pride and confidence, to say nothing of the other advantages that accrue.

Influence is easy to understand. Every American citizen gets one vote in the presidential election. Every citizen of Bolivia, to take a random example, gets one vote in the election for the president of Bolivia.

One might argue, with no prejudice to the people of Bolivia, that an American citizen’s vote counts for more, in terms of influencing the course of history and the direction of events in the world, than does the vote of a citizen of Bolivia.


Not all votes are created equal.

Of course, the art market does not create massive wealth and does not contribute to military or economic victory. Yet, if we limit ourselves to the market for fine art, it is certainly a very small market-- miniscule when compared to the bond market or the Forex-- but its higher echelons are inhabited by some very savvy players.

People who bid and collect fine art tend to be very, very smart. They tend to be very sophisticated investors. No one spends $20,000,000 on a colored piece of canvas if he does not see it as an investment.

A great work of art is more than a pretty picture.

The people who determine the direction of the art market are not aesthetes. They are patrons of he arts, modern day Medici, who pay very high prices for objects that they believe, correctly, contain intrinsic value.

Great art is a store of value, of value that transcends the guarantees offered by central banks.

For some time now people have noticed that great art is not produced haphazardly and at random. Great artists come in groups. At a moment in time a group of great artists seemed to emerge together in Italy during the High Gothic period or in France during the Impressionist period.

Hegel examined the phenomenon and concluded that the movement of the art world’s center of gravity corresponded to the movement of the World Spirit.

From pharaonic Egypt to the Golden Age of Athens to the Roman Empire to the High Gothic period in medieval Europe, to the Renaissance, up to and including the abstract expressionist and pop and conceptual art in New York City after World War II... the World Spirit has been on the move.

There are other ways to see this. A nation wins a war, forms an Empire, collects wealth and power... and people look up to it. They want to emulate its example. They adopt its cultural habits, among which is its aesthetic.

Empires seem especially apt to produce great art. Perhaps only an Empire can afford to support great artists, or perhaps it takes an Emperor to believe that his claim to authority rests in some part on his ability to make his world the center of art historical gravity. Or perhaps an artist needs to be at the center of economic and political action to be inspired to his true greatness.

High art is not the province of the masses. We no longer have princes and princesses, but we have hedge fund tycoons, people who have built financial empires and who want to influence the culture's value system by placing value on art.

But, what value system is at work when you see a tiger shark in a vat of formaldehyde, or a colorful collection of encased vacuum cleaners, or a picture that looks exactly like the design of a soup can?

And what is the value system when art denounces the collector as a mindless cog in the capitalist machine.

If as James Goodwin and Roger Denson suggest, great art gives people a feeling of pride in their culture and their nation, what are we to make of these modern works that make a mockery of our civilization?

These artists do not expand the great tradition of Western art, because they do not respect it. They do not respect collectors, because the collectors are buying the stuff as though it had some kind of transcendent aesthetic value.

After all, anyone who stares in awe at a household object because it has been exhibited in a museum is more concerned with looking like a member of the in-crowd than  in gaining any aesthetic satisfaction from the viewing.

I am sure that this will make me sound like the last of the Philistines, but there is a significant aesthetic difference between a picture of a soup can and a Vermeer.

And yet, I do understand that these great modern art works are not supposed to be about the object anyway. They want to elicit a cultural critique, a subversive gesture that would undermine, not build on, national pride.

And that is the strange part. If Goodwin and Denson are correct to say that the current Renaissance of Chinese art, coupled with the ascendance of the Chinese art market, have been produced by people who are taking increasing pride in their country, their culture, and their civilization, what does it say about America when we see that artists who are lauded beyond reason are telling us that we should not take pride in American culture or civilization?

What does it say when the wealthiest and most successful among us are feeding this valueless system.

One finds it difficult to imagine how our nation is going to compete effectively against China or any other civilization if we repudiate our past and only find things to criticize in our present.

Here is Denson’s analysis of the potential fallout that might be about to hit the American art world: “In China's case, at least if we consider the top earning Chinese artists named here, the artists signify that the Western predilection for the new and trangressive art that has dominated the art market and art history for the last two centuries might face their eclipse by a culture still favoring artistic traditions. Could the shift in markets translate to more traditional contemporary Chinese artists--and possibly even more traditional Western artists, growing in esteem? That is, receiving more representation in museums, feature articles in trade publications, and internationally distributed monographs-in-translation--at the expense of the artists who represent what's left of an increasingly threadbare avant-garde? The challenge that Western curators face is how to assimilate artists who appear traditional in relationship to the Western post-postmodern-garde without falling back on eurocentric values that once marginalized non-Western art as ’ethnic,’ ‘regional‘ and ‘traditonal.’"

I have my own doubts about whether the past two centuries of Western art have been as transgressive as Denson believes. Still, it is worth noting that American and British art has become less and less representational, and that it no longer has anything that resembles an aesthetic.

Perhaps,  Manet was avant-garde at his time, but he certainly had an aesthetic, as did the other great artists of his period.

It may have been a different aesthetic, but it was intended to give the viewer an aesthetic experience.

Denson is right to see that the newer Chinese artists are going to become increasingly influential and that this is going to cause us to see art in a very different way.

Keep in mind, somewhere around the year 1900 someone did a survey of educated Parisian opinion. He asked which contemporary artists would be most admired a century hence. It wasn't Manet or Monet or Cezanne or Renoir.

The winner was: William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

Art as Shock Therapy

Surely, the late 19th century was not the first time that decadent artists discovered they could make a living by shocking the bourgeoisie.

It takes a certain amount of gall to prey off of the insecurities of your patrons, but artists do it all the time, and have done it for centuries.

Such is art, and such is life.

Of course, the pursuit of decadence is a reactionary force in society. The forebears of decadent artists were the aristocrats who did not have to work for a living, who lived comfortably off of their rents, and who had the time and money and leisure to perfect the sensual and sensuous arts.

Bourgeois values like work and decorum,  propriety and respectability seemed to be an affront to everything that decadent artists and aristocrats held sacred.

Around a century and a half ago, Edouard Manet painted his famous picture of “Luncheon on the Grass.” It shocked sensibilities at a level that we will never be able to imagine.

In Manet’s painting a nude woman was turning away from her picnic lunch with two clothed men to join one of her male companions in returning the gaze of someone who seems to have interrupted their festivities.

A naked woman with two clothed men… it affronted dignity and propriety. It mixed sexual and alimentary appetites. It suggested the possibility of two men having their way with one woman, or of one woman having her way with two men.

At a safe historical distance, we are not even remotely shocked by Manet’s painting. Yet, we all know that it was great art. For whatever the reason, the painting provides an aesthetic experience; it is much more than its shock value. 

You cannot, as Eric Felten reminded us yesterday in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, say as much about Duchamp’s work “Fountain,“ a picture of a urinal signed R. Mutt. Link here.

By transporting a urinal from the vulgar space of the men’s public rest room to the semi-sacred space of the museum Duchamp produced a seminal moment in art history.

One suspects that the work has provoked far more art criticism than aesthetic pleasure.

Felten is hardly the first to have noticed, but when artists aim only at shock  value they eventually arrive at the point where nothing is shocking any more. We become perfectly numb, utterly desensitized.

Artists often claim a right to absolute freedom. And yet, the freedom to shock people is anything but absolute. It seems to have its own internal limitations.

In Felten’s words: “But things are so far gone that shock rarely registers in the first place. This is the natural result of decades—the better part of a century, really—of artists using up the public's reservoir of indignation. And if transgressive art can't shock, what does it have to offer? After all, once you've seen Duchamp's ‘Fountain’ and gotten the joke, is there anything worth revisiting in it? Whatever frisson it might once have delivered was used up in its first display. Once the shock is gone, all that's left is a urinal.

“Who knows how long it will take for the one-trick transgressives to realize that they don't have the impact they imagine, and soon may have no impact at all. I look forward to the day when—like the Grinch, straining to hear the boo-hoos from Whoville only to hear singing—the artists who fancied they could shock with their trite antics discover their targets are unperturbed, unfazed and uninterested.”

By noting that some people are in on the joke Felten is suggesting that these offensive images have little aesthetic value, but function to allow a select group of people to feel that they are part of the art world in-crowd.

Duchamp’s urinal is one among many such objects. Lacking aesthetic value, unable to provoke an aesthetic emotion, they seem to be secular versions of religious relics, talismans, sacred objects. Like the Holy Grail....

It is fair to say that no one ever launched a crusade to find the Holy Grail because it had great aesthetic value.

Yet, where believers attribute divine powers to the Holy Grail, no one believes that Duchamp’s urinal will every cure you of more than your bourgeois respectability and good sense.

For art to be art, it needs to attract, interest, and engage the viewer. You are interested and engaged by whatever is or is not going on in Manet’s painting. You are neither interested nor engaged in the composition of Duchamp’s urinal; it’s artistic value lies in its being placed in a museum or gallery, thus in your willingness to ask what it is doing there.

For those who seem to believe in artistic license and who pretend that if only they had complete freedom to express their creativity they would all paint like Manet, the history of art says otherwise.

In the Middle Ages artists did not choose their subject matter. They painted what their papal and ducal patrons wanted them to paint.

Yet, many extraordinary art works were produced at that time. Take the simple example of the three altarpieces of the Enthroned Madonna, that are exhibited in a room of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. If you haven’t seen them, they are well worth the trip.

Painted by Giotto, Duccio, and Cimabue, three of the greatest artists of the time, they are, for all intents and purposes, the same painting. They represent the same theme. They depict the same story.

No matter what your beliefs, no matter what religion you do or do not belong to, they are great art. No one would ever doubt it. However well they embody the sacred, they are aesthetically extraordinary.

As you know, twentieth century totalitarian dictators envied the artistic successes of Christianity. They wanted their own artists to create works that would serve the revolution as well as Giotto and Duccio and Cimabue served Christianity.

The patron saints of Communism were, of course, Marx and Lenin, Stalin and Mao, Che and Ho Chi Minh. In many quarters their images became as iconic as they were ubiquitous. They are not great art.

You might find Andy Warhol’s images of Mao Tsetung visually compelling, but it is essentially a parody of Maoist efforts to make Mao into a great cultural icon. However expensive his paintings, Andy Warhol is not another Giotto.

But why did Communism never produce or inspire great art? Perhaps it was too concerned with trying to force people to believe what it wanted them to believe. Its greatest successes were in the realm of propaganda, not art. 

Communism broke decisively with the Judeo-Christian tradition, not only by deriding the sacred, but in replacing free will with determinism.

You might not think of medieval Christians as basking in the kinds of freedom we routinely enjoy today, but free will has always been as central a doctrine in Christianity as historical determinism has been in Communism.

As for the role of freedom in art, Giotto's example will serve us well. Not only did Giotto break free of the traditions of the Byzantine art and the early Middle Ages, the better to pave the way for the Renaissance, but he did exercise freedom in a famous story told by Giogio Vasari in his: The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)

IN 1302 or thereabouts Pope Boniface VIII sent an emissary to Florence to ask Giotto to submit a few drawings as an application for a papal commission.

Giotto took out a sheet of paper and dipped a brush in red paint. He then drew a perfect circle on the paper, freehand. The courtier did not understand and replied: “Is that the only drawing I’m to have.”

Giotto replied: “It’s more than enough…. Send it along and you’ll see whether it is understood or not."

As you might know, the Pope did understand and awarded Giotto the commission. 

Now, imagine an art school where students were taught to draw perfect circles freehand. You would need a great deal of imagination to do so. Nonetheless, we have gotten to the point where, if any artist today were to perform Giotto's feat, that, indeed, would shock the art world.

Enhance Your Creativity

Two decades ago I was chatting with a well-known and highly successful artist at a cocktail party that was being held in the salon of an art collector.

As we were getting acquainted, our eyes fell to a work of art on prominent display. It looked very cutting edge, to the point where it made no sense to me at all.

Yet, the hostess who had chosen the piece knew far more about it than I did, so I decided to keep my opinion to myself. Besides, I was not going to offer an uninformed judgment it to a world-renowned artist.

My problem solved itself when the artist turned to me and said, a propos of the piece we were examining: “He needs to work harder.”

Given that the man who uttered those words produces works that seem effortless in their grace and beauty, I understood that he was saying that it takes a lot of very hard work to make art look easy.

It’s the art world version of Dolly Parton’s line: “You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap.”

Great art, then, is more perspiration than inspiration. Perhaps this allows us to overcome the idea that if we destroy the Protestant work ethic we are going to give rise to a world filled with brilliant manifestations of spontaneous creativity.

Since we have already done significant damage to said work ethic, we should know that when a culture overcomes it, it produces jejune splatterings and pompous psychodramas that pretend to be art.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published an article by the superb novelist, Allegra Goodman. In it she describes a moment when, as a teenager, she came to realize, from reading Aileen Ward’s biography of John Keats, that talent and inspiration were not enough to make great poetry. It was more important to engage the hard work of editorial revision. Link here.

In her words: "Like many literary teenagers, I believed that art was a matter of instinct—that the artist's first impulse is the most authentic, that revision is something you do to essays but hardly applies to poetry or fiction. I pictured revision as drudge work, spoiling all that was fresh and original. But what if revision actually improved ideas?"

The key to good writing is the writer’s ability to edit his writing, to step back from it, and to look at it objectively with fresh eyes.

To achieve greatness, a great writer will have to know how bad initial drafts are, and will be able to overcome the chagrin he feels when he recognizes that the good feelings he had while writing the draft did not translate into supple or even interesting prose.

A great writer will go through many, many drafts. Coleridge notwithstanding, no one produces great lines of poetry without reworking them over and over again.

[FYI-- I am referring to Samuel Coleridge’s contention that he dreamt his poem “Kubla Khan” and simply wrote it down when he woke up. Whether this is true or false, the notion has surely led many young artists astray.]

This is not just about art: being able to step back from your work, and to look at it with fresh eyes, is crucial in other occupations.

If you are an executive or a professional you should try to step out of yourself to see how you look to others. Do you look like you are in charge or do you look like you are scared? Do you look like you grasp the situation or do you look like you are in over your head?

This is not introspection. It does not involve empathy. It requires a harsh objectivity, an ability to judge your work  without thinking that you are judging yourself.

Perhaps you will be surprised-- I was not-- to learn that if we follow the advice that the therapy culture has been meting out, we will all become bad artists, unsuccessful executives, and probably not very good people, either.

As Goodman says: "We grow up hearing that we should just be ourselves, and listen to our inner voices. But what if your authentic self won't shut up? What if your inner voice is boring? In revision you cut excess verbiage. Revising, you can experiment with other voices."

As for those therapists who believe that artists are in closer touch with their unconscious minds, Goodman writes: "It's great to tap into your unconscious, but remember how impressionable the unconscious can be, how quick to absorb the tropes of television and romance and life-affirming or cautionary memoir. Revision means testing and questioning conventions, forging a path through the cultural clutter that we mistake for our own creativity."

It’s not just about prose stylings; it’s also about ideas. Goodman is saying that many of our most dearly held beliefs are unexamined ideas that we pick up willy-nilly from television or the movies. Once we discover that these ideas have some value as cultural currency, we adhere to them with conviction.

It is essential to test one’s beliefs, to question them, to look at them as though they might not be gospel truth, as though they might not be the perfect expression of the warm feelings we had when we thought them up.

For Goodman the process of revision is more science than alchemy, more experimental than inspirational. She concludes: “Like a scientist, I test my ideas and hone the words I use as instruments. Revision is a form of experimentation, art a method for discovery.”

Camille Paglia on America's Sexual Malaise

Few prose stylists can match Camille Paglia for raw energy and spirited excitement. And yet, the more Paglia gives free reign to her Dionysian instincts, the more her arguments flounder in the heat of her rhetorical fireworks. Link here.

Since Dionysius was the god of wine and theater, it is not surprising that that his cult followers often sound as though they are drunk.

Everyone knows that America is in trouble. The economy is not generating jobs; political leaders have been ignoring public opinion; our president has been ingratiating himself with our enemies while snubbing our allies; and the Afghan war has been going poorly. America has seen better days.

Some of us feel that America will have to work its way out of the ditch it has fallen into. We want people to recover their work ethic, treat their friends and neighbors with civility, act with decorum and propriety, and show more respect for others.

Those of us who favor working our way out of our problems have been critical of the new American decadence that has helped put is there. Over the past few decades America has suffered a cultural revolution that has made us into sybarites, lotus-eaters, and pleasure seekers. When unemployed young people complain most loudly about their unwillingness to work more than the required minimum, you know that something important is afoot.

Camille Paglia sees things differently. For her decadence is not the problem; it's the solution. She does not want us to work our way out of our problems; she wants us to lust our way out of them.

You may think that America is more sexually liberated than it has ever been. For Camille Paglia, it's not good enough. Our distinctly American sensuality simply does not live up to the fine example that was set by the European continent, by Nietzsche and perhaps even the Marquis de Sade.

In Paglia's world, I imagine, we are all going to become like Zorba the Greek, drunk with wine, dancing on the beach, without a care in the world. Until, I must add, the money runs out.

As it happens, today's version of Zorba is likely to be mounting an insurrection against a government that can no longer pay for retirement at age 50. Camille Paglia's spiritual cohorts want to retire with full pensions so that they can enjoy life without having to work for it.

Paglia never considers the possibility that people can enjoy working, that they can feel satisfaction from a job well done, and that there is considerable happiness in being a responsible parent and a respectful neighbor.

In her confused New York Times op-ed Paglia diagnoses the nation's sexual malaise from the fact that the FDA just rejected an application for a new medicine that would enhance female sexual desire.. a Viagra for women.

Paglia considers this rejection to be something of a tragedy, but she goes further and tries to analyze why so many women have diminished libidos. I would mention that Paglia never offers any evidence for the fact that many women feel less lusty than they used to.

Without bothering to demonstrate the point, Paglia goes on to blame it on Queen Victoria. Apparently, our Great American Cultural Revolution has not fully succeeded in overcoming the oppressive weight of Victorian culture. To Paglia we remain a group of respectable middle class burghers who have refused to measure out our lives in orgasms.

The affront... the indignity... the horror of it all.

Based on her op-ed Paglia does not seem willing to grant that biology might have something to do with diminished libido in some cases. Nor does she consider that depression is one of the more common causes of a loss of sexual appetite. Finally, she does not consider that in a culture where sexual stimuli are readily available for anyone who wants it, then people are going to become desensitized to such stimuli. The more you are densensitized to sex the more you are going to have to go to extremes to find sexual pleasure.

Worse than even that, Paglia does not consider the possibility, however remote it may be, that some women may be perfectly contented with the diminished lust that comes with age. You do not have to have been around too much to know that the advent of Viagra was not greeted with open arms by the wives of its first users.

Paglia knows full well that sex is everywhere now. For her, that is not good enough, because, after all, she believes that Madonna was a Dionysian goddess while the current version of Madonna, Lady Gaga, is, to Paglia, "a high concept fabrication without an ounce of genuine eroticism." Take that, Gaga.

I believe that it is honorable for members of one generation to refrain from criticizing another generation's taste in music. Trashing Lady Gaga does not make you sound clever and witty; it makes you sound old.

Paglia's larger point is interesting enough to merit some attention. She defines clearly the nature of the culture wars that have been raging for the past few centuries. She sees that there is a great cultural disparity between Anglo-American culture and continental European cultures, primarily French and German. I suspect that she would happily include the rest of continental Europe in the cultural stew... from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the countries that are currently called the Club Med or siesta countries.

Paglia is happy to regale us with the standard litany of the cultural values that, to her mind, continue to repress our sexual vitality. You have surely seen this list before: bourgeois propriety, Victorian prudery, middle class conformity, British respectability, desexualized white actresses, and that tense, toned Pilates look. All of these horrors have been visited on us by our Anglo-American culture. They have dampened our ardor and made us into chronic consumers of Viagra.

It's easy enough to criticize. Offering an alternative is something else. And Paglia does not seem to recognize that the ongoing assault on Anglo-American culture has produced a number of political, social, and cultural alternatives.

If you want to say that the art and philosophy produced on the European continent during the 19th century was superior to that produced in England and America, be my guest. But keep in mind that there is more to life than art and philosophy.

You can rail all you want about the horrors of Victorian England, but it did, truth be told, produce a Winston Churchill. The great philosophers and artists of Germany produced a failed painter who wanted to make all of
Europe a canvas wherein he could express his aesthetic vision.

[For an excellent study of the way an aesthetic was transformed into a political movement, I recommend Modris Eksteins' great book: Rites of Spring.]

It's not so difficult to understand. If you eliminate the dread middle class, what you get is perpetual conflict between upper and lower classes. You have violent conflict between French aristocrats and peasants leading to the French Revolution. And you have violent conflict between workers and capitalists producing any one of a number of revolutionary movements.

Let us not forget the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. That particular form of Maoist delirium wanted to rid China of all vestiges of middle class propriety, respectability, and Confucianism. It was not, dare we say, a grand aesthetic gesture, except in the sense of channeling the energy of itinerant youth into the effort to remake China as a work of art.

All of these clashes do set one's blood aboil, but they also produced some of the most violent destruction that human history has ever known.

I would never suggest that Camille Paglia supports these horrors. Her taste runs more to Elvis than Mussolini. And yet, she ought to acknowledge that many people have tried to make over the world and human nature, to make it fulfill the requirements of an artistic vision.

For the most part such efforts have produced far more horrors than did Queen Victoria and Lady Gaga.

Art Is Forever

We all know that art is eternal. It lasts forever. Or, at least, most of it is supposed to.

And great sculpture was made of materials that were most likely to last forever: bronze, marble, porcelain, etc.

Art's foreverness distinguishes it from mere consumer products, objects that are made to be used, used up, and thrown away.

This was why many of us, myself included, felt a tinge of Schadenfreude when hedge fund king Steven Cohen's $8,000,000 Damien Hirst sculpture began to disintegrate.

You may recall that the sculpture was a tiger shark suspended in a large vat of formaldehyde. Apparently, no one had imagined that sharks would disintegrate in that kind of chemical bath.

To the point that Hirst had to go out and catch a new tiger shark to replace the old one. Only then would it be worth showing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

I first wrote about this in a blog post. Link here.

Now, I read on Slate.com that some of the more cutting-edge works of contemporary sculpture are not exactly forever. These were constructed of the most modern plastics, plastics that everyone thought would be as sturdy as marble and bronze, but which turn out to be entirely vulnerable to the elements.

Sam Kean has written the full story of the perils of plastic art in an article entitled: "Does Plastic Art Last Forever?" Link here.

Tiny Bubbles

Market bubbles, like Ponzi schemes, end when someone takes away the punch bowl or the champagne. As everyone knows by now, the moment when everyone says that things are so good that they can only get better is the moment to look out below. Markets have ups and downs; they rise to levels of irrational valuation and fall to levels of irrational devaluation.

On several posts I have warned about the excess valuations of some contemporary works of art, so I want also to offer a link to an article in "The New Criterion" about the bubble in contemporary art. Link here.

The Crash of '08

To begin, here are two links on how the financial world became undone, one from journalist Michael Lewis (link here), and another from Harvard professor Niall Ferguson. Link here.

Some other articles show the effect the crash is having on everyday life. Call it the human dimension of the crisis.

From Great Britain comes a portrait of the "toxic wife." While New York City seems to have invented the toxic bachelor, London seems to have cornered the market in toxic wives. Link here.

A toxic wife does not stay in her marriage for the children; she is in it solely for the money. Her worst trauma occurs when her husband cuts up her black American Express card.

The current crisis has sent toxic wives scurrying to divorce lawyers. They want to ditch their less solvent current husbands and to find someone new who can support their extravagance.

Frankly, the article reads like a caricature. If it had suggested that New York women are in this situation, I would seriously doubt it. Yet, it describes a condition that apparently pertains in London, so who am I to judge. Besides, the fact that it is a caricature does not prevent it from being true.

In the most recent "Vanity Fair" we can also read Michael Shnayerson's compelling account of how the crash is playing itself out in the lives of some of Wall Street's former masters of the universe. I have occasionally blogged about this topic, and was happy to read Shnayerson's more comprehensive account. Link here.

Also from Great Britain, on a topic I have blogged about, we read an analysis of the pending crash in the contemporary art market. Link here. For my own view, follow the links to the left of this page.

In hindsight we always recognize the signs of manias. We all say today that we would have known that you should not mortgage your house to buy a tulip bulb.

And yet, many of us thought that spending $8,000,000 for a dead fish was normal because a group of very intelligent people had decided that it was art. Why ever would anyone believe that brilliant people cannot be swept up in manias? In any event, the dead fish was put on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

To echo Jim Rogers, it was not normal... and it was not great art.

To look at the bright side, I link Bill Fleckenstein's column, where he predicts that China will come out of the current recession faster than many other countries. Among the reasons, Fleckenstein says that China today reminds him of the United States in the 1950s. Link here.

For those who thought that the 1050s were a cultural wasteland, where entrenched retrograde values hampered the flight of the human spirit, Fleckenstein's comment helps to put the value of values in a larger perspective.

Problem Solving

Several people have asked me to elaborate on the last post, so here goes.

People were mostly interested in the notion that trauma makes everything feel personal. Surely, what applies to trauma also applies to failure and loss.

Trauma makes people feel alone and isolated, lacking in resources. As the old saying goes: "Success has many fathers; failure is an orphan."

When everything starts feeling personal we ask questions like: Why did this happen to me? What is wrong with me?

Trauma makes us turn away from problems. It tells us not to attack the problem but to attack ourselves. If that does not work, it directs us to attack others, beginning with those who are trying to help us to escape the trauma.

Trauma and failure convince us that we cannot trust anyone. We withdraw into our mental sanctum and feel overwhelmed by the anguish. Sometimes we even imagine that if we get fully in touch with the pain, even allowing it to take us over, then it will exhaust itself and we will achieve catharsis.

We might tell ourselves that we will eventually return to the fray, but that currently we are too wounded to compete. We may trot out an overused metaphor and say that by withdrawing we are taking the time to heal.

When we follow this strategy we are doing the trauma's work. We are allowing it to continue to influence our lives. We are making a single failure into a meaningful event, one that tells the world who we are.

Of course, the way to overcome feelings of failure is to start solving problems, the sooner the better.

The trauma has another idea. It wants to control your mind. It will tell you that you will never succeed, that it is too soon, that you are wasting your time trying, and you should get in touch with your feelings and heal your soul. Then, presumably, the world will follow your soul's lead and the sun will shine on all your endeavors.

If you believe that what happens in the world is merely an enactment of an inner mental conflict, then you can change the world by resolving your mental conflicts.

The trouble is: this new healed soul is not going to be solving any problems. No one even suggests as much. What it really wants is to express itself, to create a work of art.

Yet, this theory, which saturates the therapy culture, misrepresents art. Wordsworth notwithstanding the artist's work is not a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion. It is work. It is disciplined and self-controlled; it engages itself in constant problem-solving. Art does not reward laziness and inattention.

Art is in the details. And you do not get the details right, whether they concern a dab of paint or the curve of a line or the color palette... without very hard work. Each of the artist's gestures is like a move in a game; it addresses and solves a problem.

And think about this. We are so enthralled by our vision of art as an expression of the soul that when we think about the artistic process we often ignore the model.

Artists learn to draw by trying to reproduce, even to mimic, the model's form. They develop their art by focusing on the model, not on their own state of mind.

It is hard work and requires a scrupulous attention to detail. Each brush stroke, each line, each word and sentence... receives the benefit of the artist's focus. How to draw a line that renders a curve is a problem to be solved.

The artist succeeds to the extent that he can get out of himself.

And this is even more true when he confronts that other, often neglected, aspect of the creative process: the moment when he steps back from his creation and looks at it through someone else's eyes.

A great artist, like a great writer, is a great editor. The ability to set aside the memory of the mental state that produced the work and to give it a cold objective appraisal is rare indeed.

It is rare because the disparity between the great feelings you had when you were painting or writing and the mediocre quality of your first efforts produces its own anguish, its own sense of failure.

If an artist is captivated by the feelings he felt while he was working he will preaching to the converted. His work will never break outside the very small circle of those to whom his feelings are relevant.

This reflection gives us an insight into how best to solve a problem.

First, choose a model, a situation where someone, perhaps even you, solved a similar problem. Examine the way it was done, focus on the details of the actions that took place. And look especially at the small stuff-- a gracious gesture, a kind remark, an extra effort-- and ask how they facilitated the resolution of the problem.

Second, look at your problem as though it were someone else's. Compare its current state to your model's. Ask yourself how you would advise someone else to deal with the same problem.

Do you need to add a dab of red here or there? Or should you introduce a new form or a new character into the scene? Or does it need a more extensive reworking?

Perhaps the situation is in such bad shape that it is not worth salvaging. If there is no way your new effort is going to achieve something like a payoff, you might do best to walk away. In finance it is called Gresham's law: don't throw good money after bad.

Finally, never expect that your current efforts are going to be an exact replica of the model you have chosen. Every solution is going to have its own integrity; and it cannot have any integrity if you try to repeat exactly what happened in the situation are using as a model.

But Is It Art? 2

Until recently I had never heard the name of performance artist Paul McCarthy. Now, thanks to an act of God, I have. I do not feel better for as much.

McCarthy was already famous in certain circles for seminal works like, "Santa Claus with Buttplug," an inflatable work or balloon that was displayed in Antwerp, perhaps as a try-out for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.

Whatever the reason Macy's did not include the work in its parade.
Undeterred the artist has not produced a new inflatable piece, a dog turd the size of a house. Recently, it was placed in the sculpture garden of the Paul Klee Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

I can only guess at the meaning, but I assume that the artist wants us to imagine the dog that produced said turd. And that would point us to the giant Snoopy balloon that we have so often seen floating down Central Park South on Thanksgiving Day.

Anyway, a coterie of curators must have decided that the turd was art. After all, someone chose to put it in a museum.

As a product placement this was intriguing. Did the artist and the curators want to defile the sculpture garden and the work that was exhibited there?

If so, the ultimate meaning is clear. If you cannot create something of artistic value yourself, then you can make a name for yourself by defiling, denigrating, or, dare I say, deconstructing the work of others.

But is it art? Perhaps it is merely inflated art criticism.

We do not need to decide right away. As it happened, God did not think it was art, so He, or one of his pagan surrogates, sent a powerful gust of wind into the sculpture garden. Unceremoniously, the wind picked up the inflated dog turd and flew it 200 meters across the city where it broke a powerline and a greenhouse window before ending up in a schoolyard.

For all you or I know the artist had planned this denouement. Didn't it show us how art could deconstruct capitalist hegemony?

But Is It Art?

Among the dogmas of modern intellectual life we find this one: reality is socially constructed. If you are out of touch with reality, this idea is a godsend.

Applied to gender, it sounds like this: "man" and "woman" only bear the most tenuous relationship to biological differences. They have been constructed by the male power elite in order to oppress women.

If mothering, for example, is a social construct, then the behaviors that constitute it do not derive from any biological functions. Most of them could as easily be provided by non-females. Biology may provide the trigger, but the institution has developed according to an entirely different logic. It might really be a way to express power relationships.

It all resembles Freud's theory of dreams. Even if a dream is triggered by an alarm clock, its meaning has nothing to do with the external stimulus. For Freud dreams have a mind of their own. For social constructionists institutions do too.

Apply the same thought to a work of art. Is an object a work of art because everyone thinks and says it is or is it art because it shares an essential quality with other works of art?

Social constructionists will tell you that the discourse makes the work into art. In principle, and, nowadays, in practice, anything can be a work of art if it satisfies certain predicates:

1. It is hanging or standing (or has hung or stood) in a gallery or a museum.
2. It was signed or produced by someone who is considered to be an artist.
3. It evokes a specific emotional response, one that calms us, questions us, and induces contemplation, but does not incite us to act.
4. It provokes a certain amount of critical writing about what it means, what it does, and what it wants us to think.
5. If it is fine art, its status is greatly enhanced when someone spends a great deal of money to possess it.
6. It has no real use in the world.
7. It is not made to be consumed; thus, it is thought to be eternal.

Apply this to a dead fish. Say an artist takes a dead fish and suspends it in a vat of formaldehyde. He gives it a fancy metaphysical title: "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living." A very important collector buys it from another very important collector for a large sum of money. The new owner lends it to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, thus allowing the museum to consecrate it, to give it an imprimatur. Then the critics pop up to explain the meaning of the dead fish.

As you know, I am not talking about just any dead fish. This one is a tiger shark. It was placed in its vat by Damien Hirst. Hedge fund tycoon Steven Cohen, the head of SAC Capital, bought it from Charles Saatchi for $8,000,000.

Before the transaction was finalized, Hirst was obliged to replace the original tiger shark. The laws of biochemistry had taken out after the fish and were turning it into a pile of mush on the floor of its new aquarium. Reality bites ... even dead sharks.

Doesn't this sound like the Hans Christian Anderson story: "The Emperor's New Clothes?" And isn't that story the definitive refutation of social deconstructionism: the fact that everyone says the emperor is clothed in the finest finery does not make him less naked.

So, was a master of the universe ripped off by a mountebank? Did Steven Cohen exchange part of his vast fortune for a dead fish? Or else, has his action added a new meaning to the artwork?

Does the work not represent a rough justice where ill-gotten gains, amassed in finance and commerce, are redistributed to those who have access to a higher truth.

As a social activity Cohen's purchase resembles contributing a tithe to a church or even buying indulgences. Perhaps it allowed a big fish like Cohen to contemplate the error of his hedging. Perhaps it tells us that hedge fund operators are predators. What could be a better example of the ultimate predator than a tiger shark: this notorious man-eater doubles down on predation: it is both a tiger and a shark. Give Hirst credit for being clever. Give him credit for being brilliant. But is it art?

In the investment world, the question would be: is it a trade or an investment?

In other words, is there an intrinsic difference between a child's doodles and a Cy Twombly, between the Goldberg Variations and Mary Had a Little Lamb? Or does the only real difference lie in the way people have been induced to discuss the one or the other.

Collecting an object that has intrinsic value is surely a good thing. Otherwise, it is all just a trade.

Is It Art?

By definition, when an object is art it does not induce us to go out and do something. Beginning with Aristotle's idea that tragedy produces an emotional catharsis, aesthetics has usually argued that art produces static emotions.

Propaganda tells you what to think and then tries to get you to do something about it. Perhaps to vote for a candidate; perhaps to join a revolution. Advertising tries to get you to buy something. Both try to get you to take action; neither counts as art.

This is why-- in case you were wondering-- psychotherapists, beginning with Freud, have had been so averse to to offering advice and guidance. In their view your life is an unrealized work of art. They would not be helping you to bring it to realization if they were offering guidance about how to conduct your life.

This is why so many therapists insist that life is a story and that cure involves becoming your own fully realized creation... the author of your own psychodrama.

The real question is this: why do therapists need scientific training to produce living theater?