Camille Paglia, the cultural critic
and intellectual gadfly, wrote an article last week in the Wall
Street Journal diagnosing the cause of the sad state of the arts in
twenty-first century America. She sees the
death of the avant-garde, and of the visual arts in general, as the result of the
sequestering of artists into an upper middle-class cultural enclave separated
from the lives of the general public.
While she identifies herself as a “libertarian Democrat,” Paglia is critical
of the doctrinaire liberalism that dominates these artistic circles, which has
resulted in a world of left wing artists creating work for one another rather
than for the wider population. The main
part of her critique hypothesizes that the decline of an industrial base in the
U.S. means that most college students have had no experience working with their
hands. She argues that the traditional
trades like carpentry and medal work share skills in common with what is needed
to be a sculptor or painter, but alas few young artists today have these
skills. They make work which is
primarily ideological that is often, and not coincidentally, anti-capitalist,
lacking in craft and beauty; two elements that help make art timeless. Paglia’s observation, that artists have become a separate class creating sterile and disposable work, is not a new one. John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation that publishes Poetry Magazine, wrote a piece in 2006 arguing that his particular art form is ripe for a revolution, but that it will only happen if writers get out of academia, where most of them reside, and out into the world. While Barr is not critical of the craft and quality of contemporary poetry as Paglia is of the visual arts, he does see their scope as being limited by the relatively uniform experiences of many current writers. Today’s poets, who have been through writing seminars and master’s programs, know the forms very well, and are often able to shift between them with ease as they need to. The problem is that the content of their work is stale. For the most part they come from very similar backgrounds and higher education is how they make their livings. Not a bad thing, according to Barr, but the poet’s gift of analyzing life and reality through a particular lens has become narrowly focused onto one area that most people outside the academy cannot identify with. Again, contemporary writers work in an echo chamber (Paglia’s words), pleasing themselves and their alleluia chorus, but never challenging others or allowing themselves to be challenged by those who disagree.
This perceived cultural segregation
has been on my mind a lot lately, especially since I’ve been reading Charles
Murray’s newest book Coming Apart. In it the controversial political scientist
argues that the entire social structure is stratifying along class lines in a
way unprecedented in American history. Murray
argues that a well-educated social elite is living in a cultural bubble leaving
them out of touch with the lives of average Americans. He writes that class has
always existed in the United States, but that today the differences are not
simply a matter of the rich having more than the rest of us; there is a
qualitative difference in how the upper crust lives. From diet to leisure time activities the
upper 1% shares little if anything in common with the “lower” 99%. He adds that while there have always been
rich and poor neighborhoods, the social elites are now living in isolated
“super-zips,” geographically cut off from those of lower socioeconomic
backgrounds, again in a way unique to the American experience up to now,
further adding to the cultural disconnect.
(The most controversial part of
Murray’s analysis is that the upper classes by and large still follow the four
civic virtues that made America great and unique while the lower and working
classes have let them slip away. He
identifies them as marriage, industriousness, religiosity, and honesty. I’ll
have more on that in a later article).
Both Paglia and Murray point out
that the elite class is overwhelmingly liberal (Murray also identifies himself
as a libertarian, though of the conservative Republican variety). If recent elections and polls are to be
trusted, the nation as a whole is center-right, and has been for some
time. So what we have, if these authors
are accurate in their assessments, is a situation where a few people at the top
are making decisions for the rest of the country based on values and attitudes alien
to the broader culture. Laws and
regulations are thus being enacted without taking into proper account the will
of the governed. Culturally speaking
music, the visual arts, literature and other art forms that traditionally
served as glue for society, giving all the classes a common point of reference
is reduced to a worshiping of the latest trends at one end of the spectrum with
the other end considering it irrelevant.
What we are then left with two
Americas, but unlike John Edwards, Murray sees the cause of the division to be a
divergence of values as opposed to being those of economic or racial disparity. More on this in the next installment.
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