{"id":21795,"date":"2013-08-23T09:03:08","date_gmt":"2013-08-23T13:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21795"},"modified":"2019-05-19T11:54:38","modified_gmt":"2019-05-19T15:54:38","slug":"the-avant-garde-is-dead-dead-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/08\/23\/the-avant-garde-is-dead-dead-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"The avant-garde<\/em> is dead, dead, dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Salon<\/em>, Tracy Clark-Flory<\/a> talks to Camille Paglia about themes in her new book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars<\/em>:<\/p>\n

In Glittering Images<\/em>, you argue that the avant-garde<\/em> is dead. Are there any artists \u2014 be they painters or pop stars \u2014 who are making innovative work right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The avant-garde<\/em> was a magnificent and revolutionary phase in the history of art, but it\u2019s completely over. Artists and galleries must (in Ann Landers\u2019 immortal words) wake up and smell the coffee! The avant-garde<\/em>, whose roots were in late-18th-century Romanticism, was a reaction against a strong but suffocating classical tradition. The great modernist artists, from Picasso to James Joyce, were trained in that tradition, which gave audacity and power to their subversion of it.<\/p>\n

But then modernism began to feed on itself, and it became weaker and weaker. As I argue in \u201cGlittering Images,\u201d there has been nothing genuinely avant-garde<\/em> since Andy Warhol except for Robert Mapplethorpe\u2019s luminous homoerotic images of the sadomasochistic underground. Everything that calls itself avant-garde<\/em> today is just a tedious imitation of earlier and far superior modernist art. The art world has become an echo chamber of commercially inflated rhetoric, shallow ironies and monolithic political ideology.<\/p>\n

In the past year, the only things that sparked my enthusiasm and gave me hope for an artistic revival were in pop music: Rihanna\u2019s eerie \u201cPour It Up,\u201d which uses a strip club as a hallucinatory metaphor for an identity crisis about sex and materialism, and the Savages\u2019 slam-bang \u201cCity\u2019s Full,\u201d which channels the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith to attack (with gorgeously distorted, strafing guitars) the urban parade of faux<\/em>-female fashion clones. The visual arts, in contrast, are being swamped by virtual reality.<\/p>\n

Video games and YouTube.com<\/em> are creatively booming, even though Web design, as demonstrated by the ugly clutter of most major news sites, is in the pits.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, you wrote a highly critical article<\/a> about recent academic books on the world of kink. What do you wish that these academics would say about BDSM?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My principal complaint about those three books, all from university presses, was that their intriguing firsthand documentation of the BDSM community was pointlessly shot through with turgid, pretentious theorizing, drawn from the slavishly idolized but hopelessly inaccurate and unreliable Michel Foucault.<\/p>\n

In this tight job market, young scholars are in a terrible bind. They have to cater to and flatter the academic establishment if they hope to survive. Furthermore, they have not been taught basic skills in historical investigation, weighing of evidence, and argumentation. There has been a collapse in basic academic standards during the theory era that will take universities decades to recover from. I was incensed that none of those three authors had read a page of the Marquis de Sade, one of the most original and influential writers of the past three centuries. Sade had a major impact on Nietzsche, whom Foucault vainly tried to model himself on. Nor had the three authors read The Story of O<\/em> or explored a host of other crucial landmarks in modern sadomasochism. No, it was Foucault, Foucault, Foucault \u2014 a con artist who will one day be a mere footnote in the bulging chronicle of academic follies.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re such a beloved and divisive figure, I had to solicit questions from folks on Twitter. Here\u2019s a funny one: \u201cWhy do you come down so hard on skinny white girls? Your views on sexuality leave so much room for individuality, so why is it so bad if I am attracted to Meg Ryan or Gwyneth Paltrow?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

When have I ever criticized anyone\u2019s fetish? I am a libertarian. Go right ahead \u2014 set up plastic figurines of 1950s-era moppets to bow down to in the privacy of your boudoir. No one will scold! Then whip down to the kitchen to heat up those foil-wrapped TV dinners. I still gaze back fondly at Swanson\u2019s fried-chicken entree. The twinkly green peas! The moist apple fritter! Meg Ryan \u2014 the spitting image of all those perky counselors at my Girl Scout camp in the Adirondacks. Gwyneth Paltrow \u2014 a simpering sorority queen with field-hockey-stick legs. I will leave you to your retro pursuits while I dash off to moon over multiracial Brazilian divas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory talks to Camille Paglia about themes in her new book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars: In Glittering Images, you argue that the avant-garde is dead. Are there any artists \u2014 be they painters or pop stars \u2014 who are making innovative work right now? The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,28],"tags":[102,909,1288,86,140],"class_list":["post-21795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media","tag-art","tag-bdsm","tag-camillepaglia","tag-criticism","tag-design"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Fx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21795"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21797,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21795\/revisions\/21797"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}