Camille Paglia has a rather distressing piece up at Salon today called "Art movies: R.I.P.". Not only does she pronounce art film dead, but also rock music and she takes some nasty & unwarranted swipes at a few prominent atheists.
Ms. Paglia's views the world through Dionysian-tinted glasses. She wants to see a world of sexual liberation and equality adorned by art whose taproot is religion, even if she rejects the tenets of its supernaturalism. It's a passion-at-all-costs philosophy where our Apollonian sides are to be chained by our natural energies, imagination, and romanticist pursuits. By way of slander she writes:
As a professed atheist, I detest the current crop of snide manifestos against religion written by professional cynics, flâneurs and imaginatively crimped and culturally challenged scientists. The narrow mental world they project is very grim indeed -- and fatal to future art…My pagan brand of atheism is predicated on worship of both nature and art. I want the great world religions taught in every school.
Just as one decodes "American Pie", I'll give this a go and suggest that here she's attacking Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins specifically and, no doubt, others such as Daniel Dennett. While I can't recall if Sam Harris has espoused this, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett have all said they are quite in favor of teaching the great world religions in school. Hitchens takes it upon himself to do the teaching since schools don’t do so while Dennett made his position clear at the TED Conference earlier this year and you can watch his presentation at this page. These people want religion to be studied – that's the entire argument behind Dennett's last book, in fact. They want people to know the history of the great religions; they want religion to be seen as genuine topics for inquiry and studied; they want religion to be looked at and treated as another genuine part of the human experience. What they don't want is for religion to be privileged or for kids to be indoctrinated with the notion that Yahweh actually exists whereas Zeus and Thor don't; they don't want science to be displaced by religion; they don't want the religious to impose their views upon the non-religious nor for public policy to be predicated upon a goofy, irrational belief that a fictional deity actually exists.
As far as I can tell from reading their works and interviews, none of these folks deny the profound influence of religion on art and the humanities at large. To say that Dawkins is "culturally challenged" is patently ridiculous. I don't doubt for a second that he knows next to nothing about the latest pop music acts or hit TV shows. But, if you listen to an interview which isn't just a collection of sound bites that are sure to be controversial, you will almost indubitably hear him extol his tremendous love for music and poetry. Hitchens: "I couldn't do without devotional music and architecture and poetry I must say. I've never thought it was eradicable, or that anyone should try [to eradicate it]..." I can't see what's so narrow about their mental worlds nor what is so expansive about religion. Besides, these authors do not expect their books to eradicate religion but rather see their screeds as an attempt to push religion out of the public sphere and into the private where no artist would be deprived of religious contemplation to inspire their work. And being non-religious didn't keep Percy Shelly, Mark Twain, or Ernest Hemingway from being creative. Paglia builds up a straw man and then tears him down thusly avoiding any of the arguments that the above gentlemen present.
This self-described "pagan atheist" is now 60 years old – a crone. But instead of dispensing wisdom here, she just bloviates about how things were better in her beloved Age of Aquarius in the 1960s & 70s. She goes on about seeing films by Bergman, Antonioni, and Truffaut but has all of two sentences about art film today. Seriously, all she can say about it is "But art movies are gone, gone with the wind." and "Now, in contrast, aspiring young filmmakers are stampeded toward simplistic rejection of religion based on liberal bromides (sexism, homophobia, etc.)." That's all. She never bothers to talk about any contemporary makers of art films or their films themselves. Ms. Paglia has apparently watched every art film in the whole of the world and, not having found the proper reverence for the "cosmic vision" (whatever that is) of religion in this corpus, pronounces it dead. Art films may not pack the houses like it did when Paglia was in college – after all, nudity can now be found in mainstream domestic movies – but it is still very much alive. Do you miss Antonioni? Then watch Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo) by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas. Lynch, Sokurov, von Trier, and many others keep making art films. The problem is that, unless the films appeal to her sensibilities about religion as artistic inspiration, then they're worthless; unless the art film scene mirrors that of her beloved college days, it is dead.
From film she moves on to rock music which, for her, is also dead:
Rock music, which exploded in the artistic renaissance of the '60s and '70s, seems to have exhausted its formulas, At the moment, hip-hop and disco-derived dance music enjoy far greater prestige everywhere.… It's no coincidence that the geriatric Rolling Stones are still going strong: Their style is grounded in African-American rhythm and blues…"
Again we have the old fart mentality – "Everything was better in my day!" No, the reason why The Stones are "still going strong" is because Baby Boomers like you have no qualms with paying $500 for a nosebleed seat at their concerts. I say this as a Stones fan as well as someone who enjoys their latter-day albums. While not groundbreaking, Voodoo Lounge is a great album. Hip-hop and disco-derived dance music have far greater prestige everywhere? What does this mean? The much ballyhooed festivals – SXSW, Pitchfork, Lollapalooza, etc. - feature mainly rock bands. The highest grossing touring acts this year include Rod Stewart, The Police, Kenney Chesney, Roger Water, and Eric Clapton. Hip-hop album sales are declining. Some are pronouncing it dead for a myriad of reasons including that the main consumers of it are kids from the "bland white middle class" which Paglia derides later in her article. Music blogs = indie rock blogs.
Is there any hasty generalization that Ms. Paglia won't use? Rock is still very much alive and well.
Paglia trots out the tired argument that folks like Dave Marsh, Simon Frith, and Lester Bangs used as the foundation of rock criticism back in Ms. Paglia's salad days. She points to a video of Naomi Mather doing Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning" and then declares:
In general, aspiring young performers emerging from the bland white middle class in America seem to be having trouble expressing or controlling emotion, with its myriad of subtle gradations. Unless they hail from the gospel-rich South, they lack direct experience of the vocal authority and operatic dynamics that most young African-Americans automatically absorb from church.
Marsh, et al promoted the notion that rock music had a "genuineness" to it because its taproot was folk music, most prominently, the blues (i.e. – "black music"). For them, rock becomes dislocated when it eschews its blues roots and looks towards music such as Western art music (i.e. – "white music"). For them, having blues roots allows rock musicians to adopt a process which allows feelings & emotions to be directly transcribed into music without mediation. By looking towards other sources for inspiration, this process of transcription is mediated and thusly the result is not "pure". Simply and crudely put, black music appeals to the foot while white music appeals to the head. The upshot of this way of thinking is to posit with black people a certain simplicity with rhythm being favored and white people being scorned for getting all complicated by favoring melody.
Paglia merely dresses this old argument (which is potentially girded by racism) in new clothes by shifting things to locale and, unsurprisingly, the influence of religion, which she seeks to protect and place on a pedestal. Despite the sleight of hand, her conclusions are the same – white people make "inauthentic" music while blacks make music that is "genuine". "Rock will be spectacularly reborn by a faithful return to roots," she says. Same bullshit, different clothes.
Apparently there just aren't enough rockers in tight leather pants ala Jim Morrison leading faux bacchanalias in concert halls these days for her.
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