Camille Paglia - Art Quotes

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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
Gautier says, Baudelaire abhorred philanthropy, progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians and utopianists. In other words, Baudelaire condemned Rousseausism in all its forms. Today, Rousseausism has so triumphed that the arts and the avant-garde are synonymous with liberalism, an error enforced by literature teachers, with their humanist bias. I follow the Decadents in trying to drive Rousseauist benevolence out of the discourse in art and literature. The Decadents satirized the liberal faith in progress with sizzling prophecies of catastrophe and cultural collapse.

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
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
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