"Sensation" and lack of sensation
Dr Kamikaz
Gore's weightlessness is sinking him; applause for Giuliani's stand against the
arrogant, pretentious, parasitic arts establishment; and praise (praise?) for
Paltrow.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Camille Paglia
As the once wooden and now manic, overbouncy Al Gore sinks week by week in the
polls vs. his still shadowy rival for the presidential nomination, Bill
Bradley, I wonder whether the big bosses of the national Democratic Party are
starting to regret their strident defense of President Clinton during last
year's impeachment crisis.
If he had had any conscience or class, of course, Clinton would have resigned
at the first hint of scandal. But if Democratic leaders had followed principle
rather than partisanship, they would have gelled behind the scenes to force
Clinton out, allowing Gore to assume the presidency and to gain stature and
experience in office -- after which he would have breezed through the 2000
election against the relatively untested Gov. George W. Bush, the likely
Republican nominee.
Former New Jersey Sen. Bradley is gaining on Gore because the latter, with his
newly sandblasted owl eyes and his weirdly bulging, gym-hewn mammaries, seems
slicker and slicker, a weightless creature of the Washington anthill despite
his recent emergency eviction of campaign headquarters to his home state of
Tennessee. Bradley's drowsy, shambling style looks increasingly attractive to
registered Democrats (like me) who are fed up with the narcissistic Clintons,
but time will tell whether Bradley can re-create America's aw-shucks Gary
Cooper past or whether he will founder under the massive daily media
bombardment that is politics today.
Other news of the past two weeks includes the official announcement of his
candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination by Arizona Sen. John
McCain -- who has given me the willies since his TV appearances in the months
leading up to the impeachment vote. I continue to be dismayed by the coddling
that McCain is getting by liberal Democratic journalists -- a suspiciously easy
ride that suggests he is being strategically used by the opposing party to help
derail Bush's onrushing electoral train.
The disciplined but darkly guarded McCain would make a good captain of the
Praetorian Guard, but I just don't see him in the Oval Office except in a
"Doctor Strangelove" or "Fail-Safe" scenario. With his baleful eyes and
unnervingly phoned-in smiles (always a beat too late), McCain utterly lacks the
expansiveness, relaxed charisma and formidable managerial aptitude of Dwight D.
Eisenhower, whose record as supreme commander of the Allied forces in World War
II led to his elevation to the presidency.
As for the speech given by actor Warren Beatty at a Los Angeles awards ceremony
last week, the televised excerpts were banal in content and nauseatingly coy in
style. The man is a walking pair of parentheses, and his putative presidential
candidacy is a very bad joke. All those filthy-rich Hollywood stars and moguls,
with their smug, dated liberal rhetoric, should stop preaching to Washington
about expanding the bureaucracy and endow their own private foundations instead
for charity as well as arts grants.
The frontier between politics and art was commandeered for the past two weeks
by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in his attack on the "Sensation" show at the
Brooklyn Museum of Art, a once dignified institution that has in my view
disgraced itself by this detour into the tacky. Of the behavior of some museum
curators and library directors, Salon reader Carl A. Moore writes to ask "why
liberals charged with the public trust go out of their way to incense the
public."
The rote attacks on Giuliani have been deafening. While the mayor certainly
exceeded his authority in demanding that the entire show be stopped (rather
than simply denouncing individual works that did not merit public funding), I
am frankly enjoying his assault on the arts establishment, which is in dire
need of a shake-up. I have nothing but contempt for Brooklyn Museum director
Arnold R. Lehman, who was hired two years ago and whose suitability for that
position, on the basis of the present debacle, seems questionable.
"What a whiny slug!" I declared as Lehman nervously defended himself on TV. He
struck me as an affected provincial oblivious to the fact that the zenith in
campy collections of 1950s Tupperware and Formica kitchen tables was about, oh,
15 years ago. The liberal casuists who sprang to unqualified defense of Lehman
and his show (which includes not just Chris Ofili's dung- and porn-adorned
Madonna but a rotting cow's head and a formaldehyde-suspended bisected pig)
seem to have lost sight of the larger question: What should be the role and
status of art in the United States?
Since the Puritan hegemony of three centuries ago, it has been a struggle for
art to win acceptance here. Each of these incidents of religious desecration or
of ostentatious decadent display (I speak as a sympathetic theorist of
decadence in "Sexual Personae") simply poisons the cultural atmosphere and
ensures popular hostility to art and artists.
The price for this pointless provocation will be paid by schoolchildren whose
arts programs are gutted for lack of funding. Sure enough, Republican
presidential candidate Elizabeth Dole has just responded to the Brooklyn
exhibit (which she calls "highly offensive") by calling for the complete
abolition of the National Endowment for the Arts, which had nothing to do with
this show.
As an arts educator, I think that the behavior of the Brooklyn Museum has been
self-interested and shortsighted. I want to raise the prestige of art in this
country; I want to expand opportunities for young artists and to radically
increase funding for community arts projects. The entire future of American art
is at stake.
How ironic that Jane Alexander rejoined her actor friends on the barricades
last week to support the Brooklyn Museum, since in "American Canvas," her
valedictory report as she left the NEA chairmanship two years ago, she sharply
criticized the elitism separating American artists from the communities they
should serve. The Brooklyn show is a perfect example of the improper diversion
of public monies -- in this case to aggrandize a single British collector, an
obnoxious advertising executive of dubious taste.
At the end of the 20th century, when popular culture has triumphed, the mission
of museums must be to evangelize for art, to demonstrate art's higher meanings
and continuing relevance to a mass audience that will otherwise be consumed in
the blood-and-guts literalism of slasher films and shoot'em-up
action-adventures. The Brooklyn show illustrates the utter bankruptcy and
sterility of the avant-garde, which collapsed 30 years ago and is now
desperately grasping at straws to get a reaction, even of disgust, from an
indifferent public.
Great works of art, like the monumental "Laocoön" (with its giant serpent
strangling the agonized Trojan priest and his two sons), can be made out of
Hellenistic sensationalism -- coincidentally a focus of my advanced seminar in
aesthetics this semester at the University of the Arts. But the most lurid
works in the Brooklyn show are pure kitsch. If I want to see carcasses or body
parts floating in formaldehyde, I'll go to the Mütter Museum of the College of
Physicians of Philadelphia -- a spectacular and grisly 19th century medical
collection that I recommend to everyone.
Contemporary art, with its postmodernist gimmicks, is so divorced from science
that Damien Hirst's high-school-project rot-and-fly cycle strikes some
museum-goers as a profound revelation. (Wow, nature exists! Rise and shine,
Manhattan!) We're back to Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," which four decades ago
showed the cul de sac of modern intellectualism in scenes where chic partygoers
raptly listen to nature sounds on a tape recorder and where an erudite,
angst-dazed father murders his children in their beds.
Let's get past this adolescent wallowing in slack "oppositional" art. The
Romantic era of "subversive" gestures is over. As I have consistently
maintained since my 1991 defense of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in Tikkun
(where I derided his sentimentalizing liberal supporters), no self-respecting
avant-garde artist should be on the government dole. Free speech protections in
the United States do not extend to financial support of "cutting-edge" new art
by taxpayers. Commissioned projects -- whether by the Pharaohs, the Medicis,
the popes or the French kings -- always require the artist's subordination to
the values and publicity needs of the patron.
And I'm just as sick of "Catholic-bashing" as Giuliani himself. I may be an
atheist, but I was raised in Italian Catholicism, and it remains my native
culture. I resent the double standard that protects Jewish and African-American
symbols and icons, but allows Catholicism to be routinely trashed by
supercilious liberals and ranting gay activists. Missing from media accounts
was that this Brooklyn Museum flap disastrously broke in the midst of a furor
over the alleged anti-Semitism of the Irish Catholic presidential wannabe Pat
Buchanan.
That a Jewish collector and a Jewish museum director had no compunction about
selecting a parodic image of the Madonna from the whole of Chris Ofili's
dung-bedecked oeuvre shows either stupidity or malice. The Brooklyn show has
fomented hatreds in this country -- as witnessed by the placard of a defaced
Star of David carried, according to the New York Post, by a demonstrator
outside the museum on opening day. Is this the destructive train of thought
that the contemporary arts want to foster?
As I wrote last year in the progressive London magazine Index on Censorship,
culture has shifted as we approach the millennium. Through "over-repetition and
feeble imitation," I asserted, transgression and subversion have lost their
once-potent charge: "We should be concerned now not with defiling and defaming
traditional beliefs but in reconstructing out of the nihilistic ruins left by
modernism and post-structuralism some enlightened new system of affirmative
spiritual and political values."
I oppose Mayor Giuliani's arbitrary and needlessly inflammatory use of city
power to intimidate and harass an arts institution, but I applaud the position
he has taken against an arrogant, pretentious, parasitic arts establishment
that has made a mockery of art and injured its reputation in the eyes of the
nation at large. The Brooklyn Museum has turned itself into Madame Tussaud's
Wax Works -- a collegiate carnival and tinny video game for desensitized
poseurs who fiddle while Rome burns. Retired U.S. Army Maj. Richard Rail writes
to ask my view of the ongoing controversy about literary critic and Palestinian
spokesman Edward Said, whom the September issue of Commentary accused of
fabricating details of his childhood and adolescence in Jerusalem. Rail
observes that "today's Left seems even more dishonest than the old Left of
Stalin's day" and that it is "increasingly comprised of those who force fit
'reality' to their ideology, inventing and lying as they go."
My admiration of Edward Said is on the record in my review of his 1993 book
"Culture and Imperialism" in the Washington Post. Said is a true man of the
world, an intellectual who has blended art and politics in a sophisticated way
that makes most American campus leftists look like callow schoolboys. That Said
did embroider elements of his history seems to be so, and he must take
responsibility for it. However, the exaggerations don't fundamentally alter his
brief against the European interventions in the Near East that led to the
creation of Israel and the unjust displacement of Palestinians.
More troubling to me, as I observed in my Sept. 30 op-ed piece on archaeology
and education in the Wall Street Journal, is Said's pivotal role in introducing
Michel Foucault to American literary criticism and, second, Said's slighting of
the enormous contributions to modern knowledge made by Egyptologists and the
great schools of Oriental studies. I also wish that, over the past two decades,
Said had been more forthright in publicly decrying the weak scholarship of his
academic followers, who have little feeling for literature and art and who have
vitiated the humanities programs in this country.
As the current president of the Modern Language Association, however, Said has
indeed tried to swing the profession back to concern with literary values,
though a great deal of damage has already been done. In summary, whatever his
sins of omission or commission, they do not alter my view of Edward Said's
stature as a world-class scholar, whose only peer is my distinguished mentor
Harold Bloom
On the pop front, I must make a terrible confession. I actually liked the
dreaded Gwyneth Paltrow for one fleeting moment -- in her parody of Sharon
Stone on a recent repeat broadcast of "Saturday Night Live." Though Stone
herself denounced the skit (ostensibly because of its jab at her "creepy"
husband), it was clearly Stone's incandescent femme-fatale divinity that
inspired Paltrow to transcend her usual simpering self-consciousness. The
satire was hilarious, and Paltrow carried it off with lighthearted drag queen
flair.
Finally, I must register bitter disappointment with the new female private-eye
series "Snoops," which ABC flagged with tantalizing ads all summer. Its beamish
creator, the overextended producer David E. Kelley, didn't develop this program
a whit beyond its initial hip concept. What stilted writing, limp direction and
muddy camera work! Assignment: close scrutiny of three episodes of Aaron
Spelling's "Charlie's Angels" (1976-81) to see how such sex-and-mystery shows
can be crafted for the ages. Discuss among yourselves!
And there's no excuse for the show's prodigal waste of the mercurial talents of
Gina Gershon. She has a cerebral Suzanne Pleshette directness and intensity
with a tough touch of Ida Lupino and a whiff of the mischievous Juliet Berto
(see Jacques Rivette's "Celine and Julie Go Boating"). For Sarah Siddons' sake,
will someone please write Gina Gershon a decent script? Until then, I'll
continue to revel in the vintage films of the American Movie Classics and
Turner Classic Movies channels. Long live old Hollywood!
salon.com | Oct. 6, 1999
God bless America
Dr Kamikaze
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism."
-- Sir William Osler
"If Darwinism is true, may we hope that liberals will someday evolve into a
higher life form?" Joe Sobran
Rob Robertson
>
> "Sensation" and lack of sensation
>
> Gore's weightlessness is sinking him; applause for Giuliani's stand against the
> arrogant, pretentious, parasitic arts establishment; and praise (praise?) for
> Paltrow.
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
> By Camille Paglia
<hack>
> Let's get past this adolescent wallowing in slack "oppositional" art. The
> Romantic era of "subversive" gestures is over. As I have consistently
> maintained since my 1991 defense of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in Tikkun
> (where I derided his sentimentalizing liberal supporters), no self-respecting
> avant-garde artist should be on the government dole. Free speech protections in
> the United States do not extend to financial support of "cutting-edge" new art
> by taxpayers. Commissioned projects -- whether by the Pharaohs, the Medicis,
> the popes or the French kings -- always require the artist's subordination to
> the values and publicity needs of the patron.
To me, that's the essential backdrop to the entire question of 'funding',
and I would modify Mz. Paglia's statement to read, "no self-respecting
*person* should be on the government dole."
_
RR
laug...@powerfart.com
> To me, that's the essential backdrop to the entire question of 'funding',
>and I would modify Mz. Paglia's statement to read, "no self-respecting
>*person* should be on the government dole."
Unless he's a conservative and can make you believe that he isn't.
laug...@powerfart.com
>"Sensation" and lack of sensation
That would be classed as whether or not your boyfriends use, or don't
use condoms on you divinefart.