Camille Paglia is on a Roll

Camille has a new book out -- on poetry. Its title is Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems [you can order it from Amazon through the links at the top of this page]. She recently gave an interview to Robert Birnbaum for The Morning News. [Read it here.] In it she has a lot of interesting things to say [doesn't she always?]

Excerpts:

CP: I’m on a crusade—it’s to say to the poets and the artists, “Stop talking to each other. Stop talking to coteries. I despise coteries in any form. You are speaking to a coterie, OK. Stop the snide references to the rest of the world who didn’t vote with you in the last election.” This is big. Because we have all separated again. After 9/11, everyone was united. We are separated again thanks to what has happened in politics. People in the art world are full of sanctimonious sense of superiority to most of America. But they must address America, learn to address America. Yes, have your friends, have the people who support what you are doing in the art world, but you have to recover a sense of the general audience and the same thing I am saying to the far right, get over the sneering at art, the stereotyping—

RB: They started it.

CP: Wait a minute. The far right wouldn’t have any opinions about art if it weren’t for those big incidents in the late ‘80s to the ‘90s when some stupid work was committing sacrilege

RB: You’re referring to Andres Serrano?

CP: Yeah, some 10th-rate thing. It’s always Catholic iconography, I might point out. I am atheist, by the way. It’s never Jewish. It’s never Muslim. So I am saying this is a scandal. The art world has actually prided itself on getting a rise out of the people on the far right. Thinking, “We’re avant-garde.” The avante-garde is dead. It has been dead since Andy Warhol appropriated Campbell’s Soup labels and Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe into his art. The avante-garde is dead. Thirty years later, 40 years later, people will think they are avante-garde every time some nudnik has a thing about Madonna with elephant dung, “Oh yeah, we are getting a rise out of the Catholic League.”
....
CP: Now, what is the result of this? Mainstream America looks at art and the artist as a scam and they don’t want to support government funding of the arts. Who pays the price for this are working-class talented young people who don’t have access to arts programs. Across the country school budgets are shrinking, the arts programs are being dropped right and left. I’m saying to the art world and all these coteries in Cambridge, San Francisco, Manhattan, “You have not been good stewards of art. You need to get out of this. You need to be apostles for art.” ....
And I am saying that secular humanism right now by denigrating religion is merely reactionary, is corrupt or whatever, OK. It has cut our best people, our most talented people off from responding to some of the greatest artwork ever done....

[T]his is why they are shrinking. This why they are unimportant. You can make a killing in the arts or you can be struggling but it’s an artificial, hollow world right now. Many people are trying to do art but absolutely it’s subterranean in terms of the culture as a whole.....

Artists, cultural organizations and the universities and primary schools have the obligation to put art more to the forefront. Instead of 30 years of badmouthing Western culture—
....
RB: Is your sense that leftists are Dostoyevskian in that they love humanity abstractly but don’t really like people?

CP: Yes, I love what you say. It’s so right. Leftists are supposedly speaking for the people. But they have disdain for the people....
So the leftist claim that what they are doing is for the people but when the people show what’s on their mind, [in a scolding voice] “Oh no, you are so ignorant.” So all we have are armchair leftists. There is no real leftism. In the ‘60s I knew real leftists. Real leftists were truly proletarian. They had no airs, no airs whatever. They would labor in activist things and get their hands dirty. This whole thing of quoting [French philosopher Michel] Foucault, or [German philosopher Theodor] Adorno and looking down, all full of that—that air—I have been interviewed on radio in the past two weeks. You can hear an academic calling. You can hear it. They have a question and a comment. [adopts a fey voice] “Well, if I can just …it’s obvious…that current project.” Where is that coming from that tone? It’s the tone of what, the mainline Philadelphia elite? These are leftists? Something is seriously wrong. Something has gone very, very wrong. This is why the Democrats haven’t been doing well. There are no authentic leftists left.
....
the people are not voting against their interest. Their interest is capitalism. This is my objection. In my view, comparing the evidence of the 20th century, that socialism in a nation ultimately does lead to economic stagnation and eventually of the creative impulse, in terms of new technology and other things. And that capitalism, despite all its failures, despite the fact that it’s Darwinian, has indeed produced a high standard of living. And, here’s the big one for me, as a feminist: It is capitalism that has enabled the emergence of the modern independent woman, for the first time free from fathers and brothers and husbands—a woman who can be self-sustaining.

Sorry to have so long a post, but there's just so much good stuff in here. Camille is cool! Read the whole thing here. Do it!