Camille Paglia - Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars

Copyright 2012 by Camille Paglia

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paglia, Camille, [date]
Glittering Images: a journey through art from Egypt to Star Wars / Camille Paglia
pages cm
eISBN: 978-0-307-90780-6
1. ArtHistory. 2. Art and societyHistory21st century. I. Title.
N 5303. P 29 2012 709dc23 2012005220

www.pantheonbooks.com

Cover illustration and design by Peter Mendelsund

v3.1

Modern life is a sea of images. Our eyes are flooded by bright pictures and clusters of text flashing at us from every direction. The brain, overstimulated, must rapidly adapt to process this swirling barrage of disconnected data. Culture in the developed world is now largely defined by all-pervasive mass media and slavishly monitored personal electronic devices. The exhilarating expansion of instant global communication has liberated a host of individual voices but paradoxically threatened to overwhelm individuality itself.

How to survive in this age of vertigo? We must relearn how to see. Amid so much jittery visual clutter, it is crucial to find focus, the basis of stability, identity, and life direction. Children above all deserve rescue from the torrential stream of flickering images, which addict them to seductive distractions and make social reality, with its duties and ethical concerns, seem dull and futile. The only way to teach focus is to present the eye with opportunities for steady perceptionbest supplied by the contemplation of art. Looking at art requires stillness and receptivity, which realign our senses and produce a magical tranquillity.

Members of the art world and residents of metropolitan regions with major museums suffer from a tragic complacency about the current status and prestige of art. The fine arts are shrinking and receding everywhere in the world. Video games, digitally animated movies, and televised sports have far more energy and variety as well as manifest impact on younger generations. The arts are fighting a rearguard action, their very survival at stake. Museums have embraced publicity and marketing techniques invented by Hollywood to attract large crowds to blockbuster shows, but the big draws remain Old Master or Impressionist painting, not contemporary art. No galvanizing new style has emerged since Pop Art, which killed the avant-garde by embracing commercial culture. Art makes news today only when a painting is stolen or auctioned at a record price. Furthermore, with the heady proliferation of mediums available to artists, the genre of painting has lost its primacy and authority. Yet for five hundred years after the dawn of the Renaissance, the most complex and personally expressive works of art ever produced in the world were executed in paintfrom tempera and oil to acrylics. The decline of painting has cut aspiring artists off from their noblest lineage.

In most leading countries, art is regarded as central to national history and identity and is routinely funded by ministries of culture. Art is omnipresent in Europe, which is littered with three millennia of monuments and ruins. European museums are treasure troves of cultural patrimonyworks commissioned by church and state and later amassed by royal collectors, whose estates became public property after the rise of democracy. In the still relatively young United States, a practical nation founded by Puritans, the arts have never taken deep root. Much of the general public has fitfully regarded the fine arts as elitist or alien and chronically begrudged them government funding, which remains minuscule and is recurrently threatened with extinction.

Because the American political experiment was launched in the late eighteenth century, the age of European neoclassicism, government and bank buildings, as well as private dwellings, often resemble Greek or Roman temples. Public art in the United States throughout the nineteenth century usually took neoclassic form in county courthouses, graveyards, and war memorials, with which the United States overflows. Both neoclassic and Victorian-era art were strongly content-driven, full of uplifting messages about virtue, piety, patriotism, and dutya moral view of art still maintained among many conservatives. Only a minority in the largely agrarian United States had any exposure to the arts, except at fairs and expositions. The central institution of Americas small towns was the church, plain and unadorned in the Protestant style. Bible study and hymn singing were the central cultural activities, amplified by poetry, both read and recited.

After the Civil War, businessmen who had made huge fortunes in oil, steel, railroads, or high finance helped build museums, opera houses, libraries, and universities, partly to assert their own power against an old social establishment but also to vie with Europe, which still overshadowed American culture. Middle-class women were often arts boosters, giving an aura of high-toned gentility to arts appreciation, which sometimes repelled their husbands. In America, where masculinity was identified with the hardy frontier spirit, the arts have often suffered from a reputation for urban effeteness.

While the crafts always flourished in America, from pewter and silver to furniture and glass, painting remained conventional, focusing on portraiture, history, or landscape. The three thousand miles of the North Atlantic crossing were no impediment to a brisk book trade, but traffic in radical new paintings was quite another matter. The United States was isolated from the turmoil and scandal accompanying rapid changes in artistic style that began in 1819 with the lurid Romanticism of Gricaults Raft of the Medusa and continued to the early twentieth century with the brash colors and spatial distortions of Fauvism and Cubism. Aspiring American artists needed independent wealth or outside support to travel to Europe to see the latest trends. Hence the general public was woefully unprepared for the shock of the International Exhibition of Modern Art, held in 1913 in a National Guard armory in New York, where over a thousand works by three hundred avant-garde artists triggered a storm of incredulity and ridicule from the press.

With the founding of New Yorks Museum of Modern Art in 1929, avant-garde art gained a major beachhead in the United States, helped along by an influx of refugee artists such as Mondrian and George Grosz, who were fleeing the advance of Nazism. Steadily, the tenets of modernist art became basic cultural assumptions for Americans oriented toward the humanities. But the general public has never completely accepted abstract art, especially in heartland towns lacking the oversized, abstract steel sculptures common in plazas of so many large cities, including Chicago. For two decades after World War II, American movies and TV shows portrayed the abstract artist as a weirdo, criminal, or psychotic. Like the Beats, the artist was perceived as a slacker, rou, and Communist sympathizer. A suspicion that the art world is anti-American lingers today, exacerbated by a series of bitter controversies over sacrilegious art in the late 1980s and 1990s that nearly led to termination of the National Endowment for the Arts by the U.S. Congress.