Camille Paglia - Art Quotes

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Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the best American higher criticism.

Camille Paglia
Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.

Camille Paglia
We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries.

Camille Paglia
Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

Camille Paglia
It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them. One of the main premises was to demonstrate that pornography is everywhere in major art. Art history as written is completely sex free, repressive and puritanical. I want precision and historical knowledge, but at the same time, I try to zap it with pornographic intensity.

Camille Paglia
Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.

Camille Paglia
The truth is that Foucault knew very little about anything before the seventeenth century and, in the modern world, outside France. His familiarity with the literature and art of any period was negligible. His hostility to psychology made him incompetent to deal with sexuality, his own or anybody else's. The elevation of Foucault to guru status by American and British academics is a tale that belongs to the history of cults.

Camille Paglia
Sedgwick has managed to convert pedestrian critical skills and little discernible knowledge in history, philosophy, psychology, art or even pre-modern literature into a lucrative academic career.

Camille Paglia
Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.

Camille Paglia
Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.

Camille Paglia
The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet's Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry.

Camille Paglia
The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.

Camille Paglia
Lesbians, said a lesbian friend wearily to me, are "program heads": "They need the structure. They have all the answers." Hence lesbians' omnipresence in the social welfare industry. Rejecting the father's competitive system, they substitute another that they imagine is based on female "caring" and "compassion" but is, in dismal effect, repressive, totalitarian, and hostile to art and dissent. The same friend memorably said to me long ago that lesbianism is caused by either "too much tit or not enough."

Camille Paglia
Woman's flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man's approach must take the form of rape.

Camille Paglia
Many, perhaps most, very learned people prefer the company of their books to sitting in a crowd listening to history and art being mangled; furthermore, it is unlikely that the venerable scholars will stand up afterward to declare, This lecture was a load of crap. The more profound a professor's distaste with the proceedings, the more likely he is to melt away at the end of the talk.

Camille Paglia
We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.

Camille Paglia
Pornography is art, sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant. Its glut and glitter are a Babylonian excess. Modern middle-class women cannot bear the thought that their hard-won professional achievements can be outweighed in an instant by a young hussy flashing a little tits and ass. But the gods have given her power, and we must welcome it. Pornography forces a radical reassessment of sexual value, nature's bequest of our tarnished treasure.

Camille Paglia
The Orestia shows that society is a defense against nature. Everything intelligible — institutions, objects, persons, ideas — is the result of Apollonian clarification, adjudication, and action. Western politics, science, psychology and art are creations of arrogant Apollo. Through every century, winning or losing, western mind has struggled to keep nature at bay. The Orestia's sexist transition from matriarchy to patriarchy records the rebellion every imagination must make against nature. Without that rebellion, we as a species are condemned to regression or stasis. Even rebelling, we cannot get far. But vying with fate is godlike.

Camille Paglia
I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.

Camille Paglia
In the past fifteen years, Marxist approaches towards literature have enjoyed increasing vogue. To be conscious of the social context of art seems to automatically entail a leftist orientation. But a theory is possible that is both avant-garde and capitalist. Marxism was one of Rousseau's nineteenth-century progeny, energized by faith in the perfectabilty of man. Its believed that economic forces are the primary dynamic force in history is Romantic naturism in disguise. … Marxism is the bleakest of anxiety-formations against the power of cthonian mothers.

Camille Paglia
Marxism is a flight from the magic of the person and the mystique of hierarchy. It distorts the character of western culture, which is based on the charismatic power of person. Marxism can work only in pre-industrial societies of homogeneous populations. Raise the standard of living, and the rainbow riot of individualism will break out. Personality and art, which Marxism fears and censors, rebound from every effort to oppress them.

Camille Paglia
In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.

Camille Paglia
Foucault, like David Letterman, made smirking glibness an art form.

Camille Paglia
The Nefertiti bust is one of the most popular art works in the world. It is printed on scarves and molded in necklace pendants and coffee-table miniatures. But never in my experience is the bust exactly reproduced. The copyist softens it, feminizes it and humanizes it. The actual bust is intolerably severe. It is too uncanny an object for domestic display. Even art books lie. The bust is usually posed in profile or at an angle, so that the missing left pupil is hidden or shadowed. What happened to the eye?

Camille Paglia
Contemporary feminists, who are generally poor or narrowly trained scholars, insist on viewing history as a weepy scenario of male oppression and female victimization. But it is more accurate to see men, driven by sexual anxiety away from their mothers, forming group alliances by male bonding to create complex structures of society, art, science and technology.

Camille Paglia