The Sheila Variations

Down with Theory

Roger Kimball addresses the debacle which is now art history.

The situation he describes (the hijacking of actual art history by political academic theorists) is one which enrages me, frustrates me, makes me want to pull my hair out.

Today, the study of art history is more and more about subordinating art—to “theory,” to politics, to just about anything that allows one to dispense with the burden of experiencing art natively, on its own terms. This is accomplished primarily by enlisting art as an illustration of some extraneous, non-artistic, non-aesthetic narrative. Increasingly, art history is pressed into battle —a battle against racism, say, or the plight of women or on behalf of social justice. Whatever. The result is that art becomes an adjunct to an agenda: an alibi for … you can fill in the blank by consulting this week’s list of trendy causes.

In a word, what we are witnessing is the triumph of political correctness in art history. Political correctness operates by transposing life to an alien jurisdiction, judging our endeavors by the peremptory diktats of presumed virtue. It is worth stressing that the chief issue, the chief loss, lies not in the particular program being espoused: the war on patriarchy, the struggle against capitalism, the march against “formalist values” or “bourgeois ethics.” Whatever one thinks of those campaigns—love them or hate them—the chief diminishment lies in the displacement of art, its relegation to the status of a prop in a drama not its own.

This kind of thinking will be the death of culture. It is happening. AS WE SPEAK.

More from Kimball (this is one of my own personal pet-peeves):

You hail the mediocre as a work of genius, for example, or pretend that what is merely repellent actually beneficently transforms our understanding of art or life. If art is no longer to be judged primarily in terms of aesthetic achievement, it is vulnerable to usurpation by any importunate bandwagon: the one marked “egalitarianism” just as much as the one marked “anarchy,” “opportunistic nihilism,” or “fatuous revolutionary politics.”

Oh, how I despise the trend of "hailing the mediocre as works of genius".

You're fooling nobody. Mediocre is mediocre. Anyone can tell the difference. This is not subjective.

Do not argue.

I want all the politically correct NONSENSE dominating any discussion of art and literature to just END. I want people to come to their senses and realize how SILLY they are. I want them to lose their fucking jobs. Because they are incompetent - and not only are they incompetent, but they cannot write a sentence that anyone would ever want to read. (Says I, who just utilized a profanity.)

But listen to these bonehead self-important pretentious idiots writing about art:

[Winslow] Homer’s ironic tone carries with it the masculinized aura of the Victorian male who admired risk-taking situations remote from the realm of “ladies,” but it also signifies the opposite of what he stated… Homer’s black man is both hero and victim, collapsing the old categories of triangular formalism into a powerfully condensed metaphor of implicit power blocked.

That's from Albert Boime's "“Blacks in Shark-Infested Waters", an article written on Winslow Homer's rightly famous "The Gulf Stream".

And here's another bonehead:

Gauguin, like Picasso, is regarded as a major father of modern art, a term rich in both reproductive and sexual connotations.

That's Griselda Pollock. Griselda, indeed.

Kimball makes a good point after the quote above:

Thanks for that gloss on the word “father”! Would Professor Pollock be happier if Gauguin were described as “a major mother of modern art”?

No doubt she would be.

Kimball excerpts more of Pollock, and is something wrong with me, but I literally do not recognize her language as English:

[I]n Gauguin’s work as it circulated in Paris, the body of Teha’amana [the woman depicted in the painting] is a fetish doubly configured through the overlapping psychic structures of sexual and racial difference. In art, as the nude, the female body is refashioned fetishistically, in order to signify the psychic lack within bourgeois masculinity which is projected out onto the image of “woman.” The culturally feminized and racially othered body also carries the projected burden of the cultural lack—the ennui—experienced by some of the Western bourgeoisie in the face of capitalism’s modernity.

If I squint I can get her point - although I have to admit, I don't really want to do the work in order to "see where she is coming from". She sounds like the kind of woman who would hate a woman like me. Women like that bring out the most politically IN-correct Sheila imaginable. I do it just to piss them off. I do it just to mess with their preconceived notions. I say random stuff like, "God, I just love men, don't you??" Thankfully, I don't meet many Griseldas.

But the excerpt above tells me more about HER than it tells me about Gauguin. I'll just go to a museum to look at the painting myself, and leave the "over-interpretation" of everything up to you, Griselda.

It is these disgusting "theorists" who are stars of the field, who are emulated - these people are not marginal, or fringe-dwellers - These are the ones leading the discussion. These are the people responsible for how curricula is designed.

They are dangerous. And they are STUPID.

But dammit - they are everywhere.

(Camille Paglia is the master commentator on this issue - she's the one to read. But Roger Kimball ain't so bad himself. Roger Kimball describes the current trend of art history theory, rightly, as "an assault on art".)

Theory is designed to keep you from actually encountering the art. It is designed to make you feel insecure - insecure that your own gut-level response is enough. You need them to "interpret" it for you. You need them to tell you what is "correct", what was not "correct". All the masters come with caveats now - as though their art cannot stand alone.

Everything - whether it be Gauguin, Van Gogh, or the Mona Lisa, is seen through a political filter - Our present-day notions of prejudice, equality, gender roles, are projected backwards through time - Nothing can be appreciated for what it actually IS.

Let's over-praise mediocre work because it was done by limping Inuit dwarfs, and let's draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

It makes me sick.

Thank God there are those out there like Kimball and Paglia who can be articulate about such enraging topics. I certainly can't.

Posted by sheila