I adore Camille Paglia and find her writings stimulating and sexy. But I've always found a smart mind a sexy mind. I've read her books and every article I run into. I've given her books as presents to friends I find intelligent or interested enough to understand her whatever their philosophical bent. Her takes on popular culture are always supported by deep historical analysis. So, now with the recent deaths of 60's icons Bergman and Antonioni, she finds the "mystical art-house film experience" a lost 20th century phenomenon.
"Art film as a genre has waned with the high modernism that produced it. The premier modernists -- from James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf to Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and Martha Graham -- were rebelling against a hierarchical, authoritarian tradition that suffocated their youth but whose very power energized their work. They became larger from what they opposed and overcame. Today, anything goes, and nothing lasts."
- Camille Paglia, "Art Movies, R.I.P." - Salon.com
The part of this current article that gives me pause appears when she, a self described 'atheist and libertarian democrat' with new age tendencies, advocates for the teaching of all the world religions at the center of the university curriculum. She references her previous article "Religion and the Arts in America," which details the historic development of American art as a reaction against religious domination. After reading both articles, I can only suppose that her argument for wide scale religious education is in hope that the ignorance once revealed will eventually burn out the current fever for fundamentalism and the human race will find a better way to define their common values and hopes. Her hope is that art will once again flourish through the process.
"For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s' multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts. The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas' six-film Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the “Force.” But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts.
To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts."
- Camille Paglia, "Religion and the Arts in America" - Arion
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