Glittering Images a Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars
Paglia on Art
Camille Paglia's new personalized "journey" through Western fine art history was born of her deep-seated business organisation that Americans today are then overwhelmed past the constant onslaught of visual images that we are in danger of losing altogether our capacity for contemplation. "Culture," she writes in the introduction to "Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to 'Star Wars,' " "is now largely defined by all-pervasive mass media and slavishly monitored personal electronic devices." The digital revolution has heated upward our social interaction to the betoken where information technology has severely damaged our ability for sustained belittling thought, making the aesthetic meet fraught with jarring interruptions and the chatter of competing visual and aural stimuli. Looking at art, so, is a subject field Paglia believes will assist united states of america retrieve the necessary stillness that tin can "realign our senses and produce a magical quiet." Hence "Glittering Images," a primer of sorts that takes its reader on a tour of 29 of Paglia's favorite artworks, a list that includes the "Laocoön"; Donatello's "Mary Magdalene"; paintings by Jacques-Louis David, Monet and Picasso; every bit well as examples of more recent trends like Pop, Conceptual, Land and Performance Art.
Anyone who has been following the body count of the culture wars over the by decades knows Paglia for her scrappy public persona, her pungent opinion pieces and bouncy TV interviews. She is nonetheless start and foremost an educator, having taught for the better part of xxx years at the Academy of the Arts in Philadelphia, and thus it'due south not surprising that "Glittering Images" has the feel and tone of a class overview.
Written with the proverbial common reader in listen, "Glittering Images" comprises a historical sequence from the ancient Egyptian funerary images of Queen Nefertari to George Lucas's "Revenge of the Sith" episode of "Star Wars." Each work is located in its historical and stylistic context and and so subjected to Paglia's "reading." This format follows the programme of her 2005 collection of commentaries on English-language poems, "Break, Blow, Burn," which spans several centuries from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell.
Whatsoever book that encourages us to read more closely and to look more imaginatively has to be a expert thing, but "Glittering Images" is then agenda-driven and and so riddled with polemical asides that its potential to persuade is forever beingness compromised. The volume'due south premise is to chart the history of Western art in "an try to reach a general audience for whom fine art is not a daily presence." At that place is humility and sincerity in such a goal, and one is reminded of the work of Carl Sagan, or Bertrand Russell's layman's introduction to relativity, or Aaron Copland's "What to Listen for in Music," books intended to demystify of import subjects in science and fine art for those who might otherwise exist too intimidated to engage with them. Simply Paglia'due south choice of examples, coupled with her frequent broadsides on everything from New York gallery pricing to feminist politics to "the in-grouping of hip cognoscenti" and those wickedly subversive postal service-structuralists, damages her argument and leaves one wondering exactly to whom she is talking.
Choosing 29 examples to sum up several m years of artistic activeness is a hopeless chore for any critic, and such an arbitrary sampling can work merely if it is framed as a confession, as an act of love — "These are the artworks that I cannot imagine living without, and I desire to tell y'all why." Paglia communicates such intensity at times in "Interruption, Blow, Burn," when she writes near the poetry of Dickinson or Donne or Wallace Stevens. Only bated from its polemical heat, "Glittering Images" feels chilly and too caught up in the parsing of styles and historical epochs to generate the kind of enthusiasm to which it aspires. Occasionally she tin can go on a practiced curlicue, as when discussing female person Egyptian figures, Picasso'south "Demoiselles d'Avignon" or Andy Warhol. Only also often she just appears to be going down a checklist of stylistic categories. The consequence is that some of the deepest and nearly profoundly human artists of all, painters and sculptors similar Giotto, Michelangelo, El Greco, Rembrandt, Vermeer and van Gogh, are pretty much ignored, while others like Agnolo Bronzino, René Magritte and Renée Cox receive total chapters, presumably because each represents some unique stylistic advance. Thus Bronzino'due south chapter checks off the Mannerism box, while the Parisian Hôtel de Soubise embodies Rococo and Eleanor Antin's "100 Boots" installation piece illustrates Conceptual Art. These are not uninteresting works, only their inclusion is unlikely to kindle the kind of flame that would turn an uninitiated reader into a zealot.
Paradigm 
Why "Glittering Images" would confine itself near exclusively to Europe and Due north America is as inexplicable as it is inexcusable. How tin any serious survey published in 2012 slight the attestation of the human condition as expressed in artworks from the globe's other civilizations? Such cultural tunnel vision is just made worse past her passing over two millenniums of European art without including a single representation of Christ. Paglia seems distinctly uncomfortable with this most archetypal of all images in Western art, and her stubborn omission is exacerbated by her preferring to empower 2nd-tier artists (or worse) like Magritte, John Wesley Hardrick and the Art Deco celebrity portraitist Tamara de Lempicka. She praises Lempicka for being "one of the most strong-willed and fanatically industrious women artists in history," most of whose paintings are privately endemic, often by motion-picture show stars, a fact that, in Paglia's judgment, "has compromised her reputation amid art critics." She prefers Lempicka, "a liberated new adult female with her ain agenda," to Frida Kahlo, whose self-created "symbolic martyrdom" clearly annoys her. Kahlo'due south current popularity amidst liberals and feminists only confirms Paglia's suspicion that political orthodoxy has succeeded in distorting the valuation of certain artists, punishing them considering they practice non arrange to accustomed left-wing anti-institution behavior standards. Lempicka has thus been ignored because she belongs to a class of artists that "does not support the ruling image of fine art as leftist resistance."
Nearly half of "Glittering Images" is devoted to the 20th century, and as the book approaches the present it becomes increasingly agitated and punctuated by conversation-enders: "Painting has never recovered from the birth of Popular." "Pop Fine art projects an innocent child's view of the world." "No i has closed the gap betwixt art and engineering more successfully than George Lucas." Describing the decades bridging the 20th and 21st centuries, she writes that the fine arts "steadily shrank in visibility and importance," leaving only Lucas equally the major voice of pioneering boldness. The book is full of similar noisy art-historical proclamations that are better suited to the blogosphere than to a denoting historical survey that hopes to expose its readers, and peculiarly immature readers, to the immensity and subtlety of artistic creation.
Simply the greatest burden that the reader of "Glittering Images" must carry is knowing from the commencement that the history of Western art volition reach its apparent apogee with "Star Wars," virtually which Paglia writes, "Nothing I saw in the visual arts of the past 30 years was as daring, cute and emotionally compelling as the spectacular volcano-planet climax of Lucas's 'Revenge of the Sith.' " Lucas's importance lies in his ability to turn "dazzling new technology into an expressive personal genre."
There is something deeply depressing about having to argue over the cultural dominance of an immensely successful and dear filmmaker like George Lucas in the context of fine art history. In anointing Lucas, Paglia has signed on to a currently popular thesis that blames serious artists who, because of their arrogance, have lost touch with the general public and brought about their own marginalization. This argument claims that the conventional fine arts accept diminished in significance, leaving only those innovators who take "embraced technology" as worthy of our attention. This is a thin thread on which to hang the appraisement of a living artist. A "engineering" is no more than a mode of doing something, a means to an finish, and throughout history artists accept been stimulated by new technological and conceptual ideas. There is nothing shockingly modern almost the dynamic betwixt creative cosmos and technological innovation, be it an intellectual discovery like perspective or a new piece of hardware similar the picture camera or the electric guitar. Art and technology accept always moved paw in mitt from one epoch to the side by side. The staggering advances in engineering that enabled the building of the medieval cathedrals and the introduction of the hammered piano, which allowed Beethoven to excogitate a music of immense concrete and emotional force, were both the effect of technological advances. What matters is not the engineering science itself (and your 9-year-sometime will tell you that the original "Star Wars" films look fairly clunky by today's standards). What speaks to us in a work of art and makes it resistant to the passage of time is the depth of the humanity it expresses. There is amusement, and then in that location is something infinitely richer: what we call "the sublime," the true record of our spiritual status that we get from serious and complex artworks. The films of William Kentridge, the serene State Art of Andy Goldsworthy, the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, "Einstein on the Beach" — all these are sublime. "Star Wars" is not.
Earlier in her book Paglia states that art "expresses our soul." If her claim for Lucas'southward importance is valid, nosotros might well ask what kind of soul we Americans at present have that is expressed not past Oedipus, or by Krishna, Lear, Faust, Tristan or Leopold Bloom, simply rather by Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Have nosotros reached a point in time where the very best we have to offer is "Star Wars," a creation that, for all the enjoyment it may have afforded us in our youth, has all the soul and emotional resonance of a video game and ponders the mystery of our beingness at the level of a toddler?
The achievement of Lucas, like that of Disney, is indisputably a defining element of American culture. But no amount of apotheosis and breathless encomium volition elevate it to be other than exactly what it is — amusement. To see George Lucas as the "greatest living artist" is to repeat an error especially mutual among Americans, which is to mensurate an artwork'southward importance by its attain rather than its depth. Paglia, who knows her Emily Dickinson and her Kafka (both artists with zero "fan base" in their lifetimes), has journeyed to the wrong continent, and what she has constitute glittering in that location is fool's gold.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/glittering-images-by-camille-paglia.html
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