Art history professor and author Camille Paglia believes that an unfettered capitalism is good for art. Xavier Pontoon has a different idea -- one much closer to the real world.
Reading Camille Paglia always assuredly provides something of a head-scratcher. Here is a writer who identifies as a feminist and then celebrates rape culture among high-schoolers, who claims the mantle of sexual liberation and then adopts a repugnantly transphobic line that transsexuality is a “trend.” She endorses progressive candidates like Ralph Nader and Jill Stein then lets her libertarian flag fly by declaring capitalism can save us all.
Which is exactly what she does in her recent column for the Wall Street Journal. It’s right there in the freaking title: “How Capitalism Can Save Art.” If you’re groaning and rolling your eyes already, just wait a little bit.
The basic thrust of this article is that the avant-garde is dead, that capitalism killed it, and while we should perhaps mourn this death, there is, after all, no alternative:
“It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.”
Which is exactly what she does in her recent column for the Wall Street Journal. It’s right there in the freaking title: “How Capitalism Can Save Art.” If you’re groaning and rolling your eyes already, just wait a little bit.
The basic thrust of this article is that the avant-garde is dead, that capitalism killed it, and while we should perhaps mourn this death, there is, after all, no alternative:
“It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.”
Camille Paglia
This is the first mistake; yes Warhol skewered what consumer capitalism might do to art, but the pedestal on which he simultaneously put this process made him more akin to the post-modernism he ushered in. One wasn’t quite sure which way the irony pointed, whether it was at capital or the ‘60s aspiration that we could do away with capital altogether, or the way in which this rebellion was re-appropriated back into the system.
Eventually, the event gets detourned so and recreated so many times and in so elitist a manner you just say “screw it” and move on to someone who doesn’t get off on insulting your intelligence. Perhaps I should have taken this advice by not endeavoring to read Paglia, however, let alone read too much into Warhol.
The second mistake made by Paglia is seeing the avant-garde as necessarily tied up with industrialism, and the third is re-hashing the tired notion that America is a middle-class, post-industrial nation:
“Warhol, for example, grew up in industrial Pittsburgh and borrowed the commercial process of silk-screening for his art-making at the Factory, as he called his New York studio. With the shift of manufacturing overseas, an overwhelming number of America's old factory cities and towns have lost businesses and population and are struggling to stave off disrepair.”
And the fourth mistake? Projecting her own ivory tower insularity as being shared by all of those artistically inclined.
“Unfortunately,” she says, “too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy -- an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s. (I am speaking as a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.)”
Note that she needs to remind us of her self-perceived liberal cred. Paglia doesn’t seem to realize that her apparent coolness is really covering up an anxiety inherent in liberalism between loving the system and “understanding” the plight of us lowly proles.
Which brings us back to the arts’ salvation -- a term that Paglia may mean in more sense than one given the way in which she harps on a supposedly dead reverence for spirituality among creatives, but we’ll get to that later.
“For the arts to revive in the U.S.,” she says “young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds.” What exactly she means by this is explained shortly:
“Among my students at art schools, for example, have been virtuoso woodworkers who were already earning income as craft furniture-makers. Artists should learn to see themselves as entrepreneurs... The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.”
For Paglia, this new, inevitable wave of capitalist creativity is best personified in the iPhone, or in the Beijing’s state television headquarters building and the London Aquatic Center built for the 2012 Olympics, which she claims reflect “bold originality and stunning beauty.”
Eventually, the event gets detourned so and recreated so many times and in so elitist a manner you just say “screw it” and move on to someone who doesn’t get off on insulting your intelligence. Perhaps I should have taken this advice by not endeavoring to read Paglia, however, let alone read too much into Warhol.
The second mistake made by Paglia is seeing the avant-garde as necessarily tied up with industrialism, and the third is re-hashing the tired notion that America is a middle-class, post-industrial nation:
“Warhol, for example, grew up in industrial Pittsburgh and borrowed the commercial process of silk-screening for his art-making at the Factory, as he called his New York studio. With the shift of manufacturing overseas, an overwhelming number of America's old factory cities and towns have lost businesses and population and are struggling to stave off disrepair.”
And the fourth mistake? Projecting her own ivory tower insularity as being shared by all of those artistically inclined.
“Unfortunately,” she says, “too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy -- an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s. (I am speaking as a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.)”
Note that she needs to remind us of her self-perceived liberal cred. Paglia doesn’t seem to realize that her apparent coolness is really covering up an anxiety inherent in liberalism between loving the system and “understanding” the plight of us lowly proles.
Which brings us back to the arts’ salvation -- a term that Paglia may mean in more sense than one given the way in which she harps on a supposedly dead reverence for spirituality among creatives, but we’ll get to that later.
“For the arts to revive in the U.S.,” she says “young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds.” What exactly she means by this is explained shortly:
“Among my students at art schools, for example, have been virtuoso woodworkers who were already earning income as craft furniture-makers. Artists should learn to see themselves as entrepreneurs... The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.”
For Paglia, this new, inevitable wave of capitalist creativity is best personified in the iPhone, or in the Beijing’s state television headquarters building and the London Aquatic Center built for the 2012 Olympics, which she claims reflect “bold originality and stunning beauty.”
The London Aquatic Center
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Extensive quoting from Paglia’s piece might be exhaustive and a bit tedious, but they merit recounting because if the words were only slightly rearranged, the article might read as an indictment of capitalism’s effect on culture. Not to Paglia. To her, the most restrictive elements of this system are what make it so great. One last quote:
“Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.”
What she willingly misses is that it is not some gang of latte leftists who have constricted the cultural sphere, but, of course, capitalism itself. It’s not hard to confirm this; in fact one can even find it in Paglia’s own examples.
Behold! The beauty of Beijing’s TV headquarters and London’s Aquatic Center! Paglia’s notions of “beauty” are so warped and insulated by her sense of privilege that she seems oblivious to the main way in which most ordinary people relate to them. No doubt she sees something graceful in China’s tight-fisted, censorship-heavy control of media, or that thousands of working class Londoners were evicted from their homes to make way for a glorified swimming pool.
At their core, these are monuments to late neoliberal capitalist excess with a bloated dose of security-state paranoia thrown in. Their aesthetics, while no doubt reflecting mastery over concepts of engineering and manufacturing, are ultimately the kind of bloated vapidity that one might expect.
If they are the epitome of anything, it is Orwellianism: overbearing behemoths that force you to marvel at the angles and streamlines, demanding your attention but ignoring your questions under the pretense of ever-skyward freedom. Never mind that the ones closest to heaven are in the penthouses or box seats. The rest of us either sit in the bleachers or have to take the damned stairs.
For whom are these entities a creative endeavor? The actual manufacturing and construction workers who actually build these things (and who, remember, don’t exist in Paglia’s post-industrial world) certainly don’t have much control over the process. In fact, right as Paglia’s piece went live, Chinese workers in the Foxconn manufacturing plant -- which makes the iPhone 5 -- struck precisely because of their lack of control over the process.
It’s at the very location where things are actually made, that our creativity matters precisely the least. The only overarching directive here is whether you can create profit, and your supervisor cares not a lick whether you have a more attractive, fun, or even more efficient way of doing things. Those who fetishize manual labor clearly haven’t done much of it themselves.
When Paglia speaks of artists needing to think of themselves as entrepreneurs, what she’s in fact embracing is the pauperization of artists. And unfortunately, it’s a process that’s all too real. Even students at the elite institutions that Paglia inhabits have to fight it. It’s precisely what puts them in the same bag as the rest of young working people the world over.
As Max Haiven writes:
“That Subway (one of America’s largest fast-food joints) insists on calling their underpaid workers ‘Sandwich Artists’ tells you a lot about just what sort of ‘creativity’ is in store for most of us. Even if most workers don’t believe this creative bullshit there’s no denying that, in our current ‘Age of Austerity,’ where social programs and the welfare state (health-care, pensions, employment insurance, schools, etc.) are being cut to the bone, we have all had to get a lot more ‘creative’ just to survive the new ‘creative’ economy!”
And so, far from being “dead,” today’s avant-garde are those who have sought to bring artistic creation back into the public realm from the neoliberal vice-grip. Has Paglia ever heard of Banksy? One would imagine so seeing as he’s probably the world’s most recognized graffiti artist, but it’s frequently surprising what doesn’t make it to the hallowed halls of the academe (of which Paglia is herself a part).
That Banksy is so obvious a go-to merely confirms how out of touch comments like Paglia’s are. Even in his pieces, there is an endless amount to say about the way in which modern urban areas are shaped, the alienation of our current era, and more oblique themes from militarism to financial collapse to the current role of art itself. Tellingly, Banksy’s murals were specifically targeted by metropolitan police in the run-up to the London Olympics whose buildings Paglia lauds in such starry-eyed prose.
There many more unsung and often anonymous artists inspired by the vision of a better world aside from Banksy. Some of them are lucky enough to have encountered the expressionists, Dada, pre-Raphaelites, surrealism, situationism or other upstart artistic movements. Many others haven’t, but have garnered the guts to draw outside the lines.
What exactly, motivates this young generation? Simple: a straightforward knowledge that something is very wrong here; they’re getting a raw deal and deserve something better. They may not know what that “something better” might look like, but they can imagine. And a funny thing about the human imagination is that it has a nagging tendency to want to put it into practice. It can be seen in the outpouring of artistic support for the Occupy movement and in the revolutionary scrawlings on the walls of Cairo.
Paglia’s insights are little more than reheated “end of history” flotsam -- a twenty-year-old concept that never even vaguely rang true -- applied to art. In the end, it’s capitalism that’s run out of new ideas; a truth that is being painfully illustrated as austerity’s toll radiates through the south of Europe.
But then, maybe Paglia sees the devastation being visited upon Greece right now -- complete with fascist attacks on queer-friendly plays -- as some kind of masterpiece. In reality, it’s the exact opposite of creation. It’s destruction, and anyone who wants to see their own potential blossom would do well to stop it in its tracks.
Xavier Pontoon is a pesudonym for a writer and radical living in the United States.
Extensive quoting from Paglia’s piece might be exhaustive and a bit tedious, but they merit recounting because if the words were only slightly rearranged, the article might read as an indictment of capitalism’s effect on culture. Not to Paglia. To her, the most restrictive elements of this system are what make it so great. One last quote:
“Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.”
What she willingly misses is that it is not some gang of latte leftists who have constricted the cultural sphere, but, of course, capitalism itself. It’s not hard to confirm this; in fact one can even find it in Paglia’s own examples.
Behold! The beauty of Beijing’s TV headquarters and London’s Aquatic Center! Paglia’s notions of “beauty” are so warped and insulated by her sense of privilege that she seems oblivious to the main way in which most ordinary people relate to them. No doubt she sees something graceful in China’s tight-fisted, censorship-heavy control of media, or that thousands of working class Londoners were evicted from their homes to make way for a glorified swimming pool.
At their core, these are monuments to late neoliberal capitalist excess with a bloated dose of security-state paranoia thrown in. Their aesthetics, while no doubt reflecting mastery over concepts of engineering and manufacturing, are ultimately the kind of bloated vapidity that one might expect.
If they are the epitome of anything, it is Orwellianism: overbearing behemoths that force you to marvel at the angles and streamlines, demanding your attention but ignoring your questions under the pretense of ever-skyward freedom. Never mind that the ones closest to heaven are in the penthouses or box seats. The rest of us either sit in the bleachers or have to take the damned stairs.
For whom are these entities a creative endeavor? The actual manufacturing and construction workers who actually build these things (and who, remember, don’t exist in Paglia’s post-industrial world) certainly don’t have much control over the process. In fact, right as Paglia’s piece went live, Chinese workers in the Foxconn manufacturing plant -- which makes the iPhone 5 -- struck precisely because of their lack of control over the process.
It’s at the very location where things are actually made, that our creativity matters precisely the least. The only overarching directive here is whether you can create profit, and your supervisor cares not a lick whether you have a more attractive, fun, or even more efficient way of doing things. Those who fetishize manual labor clearly haven’t done much of it themselves.
When Paglia speaks of artists needing to think of themselves as entrepreneurs, what she’s in fact embracing is the pauperization of artists. And unfortunately, it’s a process that’s all too real. Even students at the elite institutions that Paglia inhabits have to fight it. It’s precisely what puts them in the same bag as the rest of young working people the world over.
As Max Haiven writes:
“That Subway (one of America’s largest fast-food joints) insists on calling their underpaid workers ‘Sandwich Artists’ tells you a lot about just what sort of ‘creativity’ is in store for most of us. Even if most workers don’t believe this creative bullshit there’s no denying that, in our current ‘Age of Austerity,’ where social programs and the welfare state (health-care, pensions, employment insurance, schools, etc.) are being cut to the bone, we have all had to get a lot more ‘creative’ just to survive the new ‘creative’ economy!”
And so, far from being “dead,” today’s avant-garde are those who have sought to bring artistic creation back into the public realm from the neoliberal vice-grip. Has Paglia ever heard of Banksy? One would imagine so seeing as he’s probably the world’s most recognized graffiti artist, but it’s frequently surprising what doesn’t make it to the hallowed halls of the academe (of which Paglia is herself a part).
That Banksy is so obvious a go-to merely confirms how out of touch comments like Paglia’s are. Even in his pieces, there is an endless amount to say about the way in which modern urban areas are shaped, the alienation of our current era, and more oblique themes from militarism to financial collapse to the current role of art itself. Tellingly, Banksy’s murals were specifically targeted by metropolitan police in the run-up to the London Olympics whose buildings Paglia lauds in such starry-eyed prose.
There many more unsung and often anonymous artists inspired by the vision of a better world aside from Banksy. Some of them are lucky enough to have encountered the expressionists, Dada, pre-Raphaelites, surrealism, situationism or other upstart artistic movements. Many others haven’t, but have garnered the guts to draw outside the lines.
What exactly, motivates this young generation? Simple: a straightforward knowledge that something is very wrong here; they’re getting a raw deal and deserve something better. They may not know what that “something better” might look like, but they can imagine. And a funny thing about the human imagination is that it has a nagging tendency to want to put it into practice. It can be seen in the outpouring of artistic support for the Occupy movement and in the revolutionary scrawlings on the walls of Cairo.
Paglia’s insights are little more than reheated “end of history” flotsam -- a twenty-year-old concept that never even vaguely rang true -- applied to art. In the end, it’s capitalism that’s run out of new ideas; a truth that is being painfully illustrated as austerity’s toll radiates through the south of Europe.
But then, maybe Paglia sees the devastation being visited upon Greece right now -- complete with fascist attacks on queer-friendly plays -- as some kind of masterpiece. In reality, it’s the exact opposite of creation. It’s destruction, and anyone who wants to see their own potential blossom would do well to stop it in its tracks.
Xavier Pontoon is a pesudonym for a writer and radical living in the United States.
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