The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art

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Summary: Rage against Looking at art through a P.C. Prism...
Review: This book, which was an unexpected gift from a client, was a pleasant surprise! Roger Kimball is a conservative social and cultural critic as well as a man who is interested in the history of ideas and their consequences. His elegantly written essays have appeared in the pages of the New Criterion and other publications for decades. In this well crafted and conside book he attacks the infliction of new types of criticism on the practice of art history that has occurred over the past several decades. Today, a work of art is rarely seen as a painting or work of sculpture to be judged on its artistic merits and as part of its own time. Instead, it is seen through a prism - be it feminism, colonialism, racism, gay studies or a trendy French literary theory. All too many critics and art historians bring their agenda to the museum or gallery and the art is made to fit their ideology or political agenda.
Kimball has fun relating some of the most incredible interpretations of famous works of art and cites a critic's idea that Peter Paul Rubens' "Drunken Silenus" is actually an allegory to anal rape or that Courbet's large, grandiose hunting scenes - which anyone who has visited a major French museum can tell you have a long tradition in French and European painting - really relate a "a castration anxiety." Unfortunately, the author has many other examples of how radical politics and social theory have invaded art.
For the millions of Americans who, in the process of their matriculation, simply attended a survey course or two in art history, this book will be an eye opener. Because of the silly, jargon-filled reviews in the major newspapers, millions of Americans gave up reading about the arts years ago and they will now be able to see why the visual arts no longer resonate with so many viewers. For those of us who are involved in the arts and have had an intimate view of the destructiveness of the ideas that Kimball challenges, this book is a well-written expression of what we have long felt. Jeffrey Morseburg


Rating:
Summary: If you like Hilton Kramer, you'll love this book.
Review: Aestheticists unite. If you enjoy reading Hilton Kramer's art reviews in the New York Observer, you are likely to be quite happy with this book. The book is easy to read. Indeed, it's ideal for a flight overseas because it will fit right in your briefcase or purse (or both!) and won't take more than a few hours to finish. Kimball has clearly done a great deal of work to slim the analysis down to size. If you have been out of school for a decade or more, this short book will bring you quite up to speed in no time on what passes for art criticism. I'd have given it 5-stars if the book had not been dedicated to my Uncle Richard's college roommate. This really should have been dedicated to Sir John P-H, Panofsky or Vasari. Cheers!

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining but slightly irritating
Review: After reading a positive review of this book in the Wall Street Journal I went straight to Amazon and ordered it. Ultimately the book really is very entertaining (I especially liked what he did to Heidegger in chapter 7) and quite informative, but also a little cloying. For people who hate what art critisism has become (and I count myself among them) this book is their anthem but at a certain point I got tired of the smug self-satisfied tone of the author. Yes, I get it -- your clever. You have clever things to say. Goodie for you. But could we focus more on the issues and be a little less self-congradulatory in our one liners? In the end I recommend this book unreservedly for people who know about art and those who don't -- it's definitely worth reading, but maybe in the next book Kimball could take it down a notch.

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Summary: Straw-Man Arguments
Review: I just ran across this book today at the local bookstore and thought I'd take a look. The writer I might best compare Kimball to is P.J. O'Rourke who can certainly be very funny but his humor is ultimately derived by refusing to look at the larger picture. Kimball manages to find some of the least accessible texts in art criticism -- ones that do perhaps provide extreme readings of the given paintings, and then engages in homey-gee-golly 'sometimes a cigar is just a cigar' readings of the texts. What he doesn't provide is an alternative reading -- what does HE think the painting is about? But the big problem with his criticism is that he isolates one example of an extreme reading (by, say, Michael Fried) and convinces the reader that this one reading stands in a synecdochical relationship to the whole of the critic's work. It is from this position that Kimball launches his straw-man attack. The truth is that art really is a product, trace and sign of racial, classed and gendered power most of the time. I'm sure many people wish that art could just be "beautiful" and taken at face-value (and that evolution was not a fact!) but the world is just not that way. Art is complicated and we owe much to critics who, by reconstructing the historical contexts for making and looking, production and reception, etc. reveal things in pictures that might have been transparent even to the artist him- or herself. Especially telling is an epilogue wherein Kimball says that he could have done a similar reading of something like T.J. Clark's work. I would have enjoyed seeing that attempt given Clark's careful historical documentation --- The fact that Clark etc. are not included further proves the straw-man nature of Kimball's criticism.
I have no doubt that Kimball is an intelligent, educated critic in his own right which is why it is so disappointing to see him resort to this kind of writing.

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Summary: Do "New" Art Historians Want to Talk about Art?
Review: If you don't know what's currently happening in University art history departments, this book will give you a light-hearted yet healthy dose of "new" scholarship. On the other hand, if you've ever sat through a class in which "new" art history was taught, this book will make you laugh out loud.

Kimball presents seven art works (beautifully reproduced in color), and introduces each with a brief artist bio and description of the work. He then gives a reinterpretation of each painting by contemporary art historians (all well known and influential). What becomes evident is that today's new art historians have reduced art history to being the handmaiden of political interests and cultural studies. Granted, the more information we know and can connect with a painting, the deeper is our understanding -- but the bottom line is looking at the art; paying attention to what's THERE.

Kimball has fun presenting scholars who are more interested in looking for the "hidden" or who superimpose really ridiculous interpretations. The texts he quotes are real even though many are so far out and ludicrous that the reader can't believe they've earned respect in academia.

Overall the book is a delightful read (only 165 pgs.)peppered with the author's caustic and often funny remarks. Occassionally however, Kimball's smug one-liners reminded me of Rush Limbaugh's I'm-so-smart-and-clever rhetoric. (Maybe it's the conservative bias they share....) Despite that, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in art history. You don't have to agree with absolutely everything the author puts forth to appreciate his aim. (I disagree with his interpretation of Rothko's work yet I agree with his concern about current scholarhsip destroying our pleasure in great works of art.) The study of a more traditional art history has almost disappeared from campuses and this book sheds plenty of light on how far current scholars have drifted.

Read it...Share it...and have fun discussing it.

Rating:
Summary: Blasting the Bozoisie
Review: In his Fifth Labor Hercules cleaned the Augean Stables of a vast accumulation of digestive by-products. At first glance it might seem that Roger Kimball has committed himself to cleaning theAcademic Stables in similar fashion. But Hercules had the easier task. Kimball must deal with great gusts of bovine flatulence---much harder to cleanse than that material which bears the same initials as Banana Syrup.

His method bears a slight resemblance to Virgil conducting Dante through seven circles of hell, except he conducts the reader through a seven-ring circus consisting entirely of clowns. He
introduces us to exemplary members of what may be described as the Bozoisie capering about seven select masterpieces of painting. The painting in question is displayed, the artist's qualities
briefly explained, the picture's features lucidly illuminated, and each individual bozo's ponderous and preposterous "theorizings" are placed before the reader. Seven servings of drivel could be
tiresome, but the author's discerning eye has culled out seven quite distinctive styles of high-falutin' driveling, while his wittily acerbic commentary further relieves what would otherwise be a wearisome investigation.

I suppose it is impossible to determine with certainty whether the primary motivation of these academic bozos is political zeal or sheer trendiness. We would have a clearer take on this
question if the author told us whether his specimens display tatoos, magenta hair, bill-to-back baseball caps, and body-piercings. His failure to do so is the only criticism I have to make of this splendid book.

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Summary: The Defender of Our Faith.
Review: In the area of Chicago in which I live there are at least ten art galleries within a square mile of my home, and the other day I had the unexpected opportunity to actually enter one of them. What brought several of us to the open house was not a desire to examine art, imbibe free wine or socialize with the trendy poseurs by the door. It was for the most Philistine of reasons; we were attracted to its name. It was called the Verbeek, which also happens to be the last name of a former Detroit Red Wing whom a couple of us were particularly fond. We walked inside and discovered numerous pieces of metallic sculpture in every corner. One of them was particularly humorous as it was entitled, "the gender gap." It consisted of a steel rectangle and a steel triangle that were linked by a chain. My friend asked, "What the hell could that mean?" I answered, "Nothing good for our types I'm sure."

My friend's sentiment is exactly what many outsiders experience when encountering today's art. Yet, such responses would be even more common if the average person were exposed to the opinions and theorizing that is inherent to art criticism. Endless politicizing appears to be as essential to the field as free passes to a museum. The proper exposure of this Bedlam is one of the main goals of Roger Kimball's The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art. A few pages in, the reader discovers that, for many pseudo-scholars, art is merely an innocuous container into which their political machinations can be poured. Their criticism is merely an "index prohibitrum of political correctness."

Theory alone is transcendent. The trendinista "write to traduce, not satirize. More precisely, they poach upon the authority of art in order to pursue an entirely non-artistic agenda. Their interest in art is ulterior, not aesthetic." A oily film of degradation has been applied to the characters and talent of men like Courbet, Rubens, Sargent, van Gogh, Gauguin, and whoever else with canvasses that clash with twenty-first century, anti-humanist thought. Their criticism includes all the usual mumbo-jumbo that students are oppressed by in universities across the country. Ubiquitous is the constantly looping, hyper-verbal mélange of anti-intellectualism which takes the form of radical feminism, anti-capitalism, and anti-western positions. In this contrived arena, a person in not simply fair of skin but instead "the privileged male of the white race." In this respect, the above mentioned hockey player's nickname, "The Little Ball of Hate", is quite appropriate for the subject matter after all.

Much of the gibberish these chapters outline will surprise even the most experienced detractors of political correctness. Our professors' explanations are more disturbing than illuminating. We find that Rubens, in his portrait Drunken Silenus, was not actually depicting a ribald scene from Greek mythology, but actually showcasing one of the world's first artistic representations of homosexual, interracial, anal rape [I'm not making it up]. We are also treated to malignant fantasy concerning a work like John Singer Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. What looks to our naked eye a scene of familial contentment is really subtle documentation of women's low status within Victorian society. These well-adjusted children are not well-adjusted at all; they are, instead, sexually charged symbols. Kimball mocks both argument and language by pointing out: "Clearly, Professor Lubin is not the sort of chap you want to leave alone with an underaged circumflex."

Courbet's The Quarry is not what it seems either. A dead deer hung up like a trophy amid a hunter and hounds might cause one to conclude that this painting concerns a hunting expedition. but that would be an incorrect interpretation. You see, the roe deer's genitals, which are not depicted, are the real story and this indicates, to critics like Michael Fried, that the main purpose of the work is to elucidate Freud's theory of castration. Along the lines of Dr. Freud, we must now ask, when can a pair of shoes simply be pair of shoes? Ah, never, if you're Jacques Derrida. He would rather endlessly play with Van Gogh's A Pair of Shoes for 130 pages in his The Truth in Painting than be so gauche as to admit that the subject in the work is obvious to everyone.

If you find what is mentioned about to be absolute madness then you'll be very glad that Roger Kimball took the time to write this book. The Rape of the Masters is something that will be appreciated by many a reader, and it's convenient plates of paintings in the center allow those who have never seen the works to follow along as Kimball attempts to welcome logic back into the pretentious confines of art criticism. This work will appeal to anyone who witnessed the cultural revolution while frantically searching for a multi-generational "off" button.

As an author, Kimball has always used common sense when wading through the obscurantist terrains of contemporary academia. That's the best weapon to use when one is confronted with requests to adhere to multiculturalism, deconstructionism, post-modernism, and, perhaps most frightening of all, senseless careerism. Kimball has the education and wit to stand up to these million-dollar-word terrorists by telling them that their positions are "unbridled intellectual masturbation."

This reviewer will now refrain from offering any trite puns based on the word "picture," but, in many a university today, the discipline of art criticism seems to be every bit as contaminated by politics as the rest of the liberal arts departments. With politics reigning supreme, one has to wonder what the good of obtaining a degree is when it amounts to little more than a skilled parroting of politically correct ideology. It is hoped that, through books like this one, the general public fully realizes that sometimes a pose is only a pose.




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Summary: Loved it! Very funny and on the mark.
Review: Roger Kimball's wonderfully readable book skillfully and wittily exposes the patently ludicrous interpretations of prominent postmodernist art history academics. He makes it clear that these academics are concerned less with understanding and appreciating art than with propagating their own silly obsessions with the politics of sex, race and class. I was left wondering how the `scholars' that Kimball highlights are able to stay employed much less rise to prominence in their field.

Kimball's book should be required reading for all university students, but especially art history students. It would be an effective inoculation against the politically motivated mumbo-jumbo that passes for scholarship in most arts faculties these days.


Rating:
Summary: Epistemological regression
Review: This book poses as common sense, clarity, the voice of reason, etc.: -- a reason to be skeptical of it immediately. Its arguments and premises -- going back to "the work itself" to find the work's "original meaning" and that old nonsense -- are naive and facile. In other words, looking at art this way is easy and narrow-minded. The author does no justice to the nuances and profund intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic challenges that good postructralist or "postmodern" criticism -- exemplified by Foucault, Derrida, and the other true philosophers of our time -- poses to us. There's a reason this kind of criticism is rarely found in universities, beyond the obvious and much-lamented "liberal bias" of higher education: any less-than-adequate high-school teacher can give you this kind of understanding of art.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: This is a must read for anyone interested in the way contemporary art historians misrepresent art. He does NOT write about little-known scholars. Kimball tackles some of today's most influential art historians. Sensitive readers will understand that he does address the "big picture," which is this: visual art is meant to be seen.