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History
The Rape of the Masters
How Political Correctness Sabotages Art
By Roger Kimball
Review by Courtney Rosenbladt
About three years ago it was reported by several conservative
think-tanks that at a majority of American universities,
left-leaning professors outnumbered right-leaning professors—in
most
cases, 10-1. This was and still is a shocking statistic
considering
the fact that an otherwise apolitical profession in a country
split
almost 50/50 politically could be so dominated by one side.
When
David Horowitz spoke at UC-Irvine two years ago, he told the
audience that when he was in college (at UC-Berkeley of all
places),
students never knew their professors' political views. In light
of
this, a professor's political affiliation would seem irrelevant
if
it weren't for the fact that the politics of today's professors
make
it into their classrooms and their scholarship all too often.
I wish I could tell you, as a current student in the
humanities,
that what Kimball discloses in The Rape of the Masters: How
Political Correctness Sabotages Art isn't true. But, the
unfortunate
fact is that this book could have easily been written about
almost
any (if not all) of the humanistic disciplines and those who
“rape”
them in today's modern university.
According to Kimball, “When someone tells you that the moon is
made
of green cheese, you don't argue about it, you just put the
chap
down as a crackpot and move on.” This is how Kimball often,
cleverly
and effectively, deals with the infamous professors he exposes
in
his book. However, if it's no longer just one or two people who
are
saying that the moon is made of green cheese, but everyone
around
you, you may have a problem. Unfortunately, this is what has
happened in today's university: the kind of scholarship that
used to
be the exception has become the rule.
Roger Kimball is the Managing Editor of The New Criterion, “a
monthly review of arts and intellectual life,” and an art
critic for
The London Spectator. In addition, he is a prolific author
about a
variety of subjects including academic corruption. Kimball,
from
experience, is a man who understands the role of art
historians.
The Rape of the Masters shows how modern art historians have
distorted artists and their paintings to the point that they
are
hardly recognizable. In fact, sometimes it's so bad that it
often
seems they really hate the art and the artists they are writing
about, and that their actual purpose behind their “scholarship”
is
to discredit them. Paintings are not interpreted on their
merit,
their obvious content, or what the artist, and those close to
him,
have said about the artwork. On the contrary, artwork is seen
through the lens of Marxism, Freudianism, gender conflict, and
race
conflict, where applicable (and even where not applicable).
For those of you who are hoping to land a job in the art
history
field, here's a few guidelines that are guaranteed to secure
employment:
Everything is a metaphor—and usually for the artist,
everything
can be sexualized (if you disagree, you haven't looked hard
enough);
There is a theory for everything;
Your politics come before the artwork; and
If you don't know what you're saying, put it in verbiage that
no
one can understand.
And if you are not quite sure how to do all this, don't
worry—there
are lots of examples to follow.
Instead of reading Gustav Courbet's The Quarry as “an ordinary
hunting scene that depicts a moment of rest after a successful
hunt,” try:
...the Quarry calls attention to the roe deer's undepicted
genitals and to their exposure to the hunter or at least to
his
point of view invites further discussion in terms of the
Freudian
problem of castration.
Don't be bothered by the fact that the genitals are
undepicted—it's
perfectly okay to insert items that the artist never intended.
Even though the young girl sitting toward the front of The
Daughters
of Edward Darley Boit by John Singer Sargent may appear to be
innocently holding her doll on her lap, which you probably
thought
was a common practice for girls her age, look again:
[the doll] forms a sort of buffer zone that obstructs…from
our
gaze and from the revealing light…J's pudendum…J may thus…be
characterized as thoroughly presexual and wholly unavailable
to
sexual investigation.
If Professor David M. Lubin can be published by Yale University
Press with such comments, so can you.
The Rape of the Masters will be both an enlightening and
horrifying
experience for those who have not dared to darken the doorstep
of a
university in the past ten years. Roger Kimball is a brilliant
writer and ought to be emulated. One of the elements that makes
this
book so successful is that Kimball simply doesn't take these
academics very seriously, and it is a good reminder that
neither
should we.
Courtney Rosenbladt is the Editor of Irvine Review and a fifth
year
Classics major at UC Irvine.
Further Reading:
"Look and See" by Chuck Colson
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