An Interview with Camille Paglia

She is an author and critic, a feminist and a Democrat. This interview is full of fantastic insights. I'm serious. A sample:

CP: Wait a minute. The far right wouldn't have any opinions about art if it weren't for those big incidents in the late '80s to the '90s when some stupid work was committing sacrilege

RB: You're referring to Andres Serrano?

CP: Yeah, some 10th-rate thing. It's always Catholic iconography, I might point out. I am atheist, by the way. It's never Jewish. It's never Muslim. So I am saying this is a scandal. The art world has actually prided itself on getting a rise out of the people on the far right. Thinking, 'We're avant-garde.' The avante-garde is dead. It has been dead since Andy Warhol appropriated Campbell's Soup labels and Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe into his art. The avante-garde is dead. Thirty years later, 40 years later, people will think they are avante-garde every time some nudnik has a thing about Madonna with elephant dung, 'Oh yeah, we are getting a rise out of the Catholic League.'

RB: [laughs]

CP: Now, what is the result of this? Mainstream America looks at art and the artist as a scam and they don’t want to support government funding of the arts. Who pays the price for this are working-class talented young people who don’t have access to arts programs. Across the country school budgets are shrinking, the arts programs are being dropped right and left. I’m saying to the art world and all these coteries in Cambridge, San Francisco, Manhattan, “You have not been good stewards of art. You need to get out of this. You need to be apostles for art.” That’s what I’m doing in this book. I chose a range of poems. Some are religious, even though I am an atheist. I made decisions about quality, John Donne, George Herbert. He’s completely unknown in America. Of course, in England he is a huge figure. I am saying in order to respond to great art people on the left have to learn about the religious impulse. That’s my New Age-y side. I really respect mysticism and the spiritual dimension, even though I don’t believe in God. And I am saying that secular humanism right now by denigrating religion is merely reactionary, is corrupt or whatever, OK. It has cut our best people, our most talented people off from responding to some of the greatest artwork ever done—the Sistine Chapel, or you name it. The minute the pope died, I said, “Now, the American audience is going to get an education in art and architecture—there was a full page in the [Philadelphia] Inquirer as I prophesied, there it was, a diagram of the Vatican, the altars. Bernini did this, Bernini did that. I thought, “Oh, OK, this is what the universities should be doing.” The grandeur of religious history, even when you don’t necessarily believe. Just like you can study Aztec culture you learn about the gods, Greek culture you learn about the gods. The same thing. The thing is everything is so inflamed now.

Read the whole thing. Great story. Compelling and rich.

Update: Our friend Rachel works at the American Enterprise Institute and pointed out that Paglia spoke there in May. Here is the video.