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"The Rape of the Masters," by Roger Kimball.
Encounter Books, 2004, 186 pages.
Secondhand Gnostics by Andrew Ferguson
When is a lower-case e like a clitoris?
| | Andrew
Ferguson is managing editor of Liberty. |
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Unlike the Mad Hatter's "How is a raven like a writing desk?" chestnut, there
is actually an answer, though it is as silly and unsatisfying as later
generations' attempts at finishing off Lewis Carroll's riddle: when you're a
tenured professor and you can write anything you want without fear of your
colleagues mocking your blatant, fanciful misinterpretations. The
professor in question is David M. Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art
at Wake Forest University (which also continues to pay Maya Angelou six figures
to use her Hallmark cards as class texts). The sphinx's question above is
inspired by his bizarre analysis of "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" by
portraitist John Singer Sargent. Lubin's narrative can't even be called
tangential: he takes the name Boit; jumps to the French word boîte
(meaning box); lingers on the phallically plunging î and its "circumcision"
by the circumflex; detours into the differences between the straight, erect,
capitalist E and the curvy, clitoral, lower-class e; and winds up saying that
Boit is boîte minus E, which is of course Edward Darley Boit's penis.
Therefore the Boit daughters are trapped in the "box" of femininity by culturally
ascendant male-dominated capitalist society. |
| Kimball acts as a kind
of curator for an exhibit of stupidity. |
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Lubin cheerfully admits that not a single one of those thoughts ever passed
through Sargent's mind. But the professor excuses his attempts to shove them in
there by asserting that "somehow a psychic transfer or transmutation occurs
between the verbal part of the creative mind . . . and the visual part." At this
point, he should be treated like anyone else who talks about psychic transfers
and transmutations: mocked, pitied, and soon forgotten. Instead he's been
praised, envied, and widely read. He is not unique. In "The Rape of the
Masters," New Criterion editor Roger Kimball presents eight paintings, along with
an academic's ridiculous commentary on each. Others are equally as silly as
Lubin's: visions of a Madonna with Child seen in three bands of Rothko color, or
castration anxiety inserted into a Courbet hunting scene. But the silliness is a
bonus; what's important is how far removed the commentaries are from the works
they discuss: the paintings disappear from sight, and only academic digressions
are left. Staple our pages to the canvas, say the critics, because without our
words you'll never understand what's beneath. This is an old heresy,
perhaps the first: it answers to "gnosticism." Heresies have a way of coming back
around; where once gnosticism concerned itself with saying people needed special
secret knowledge to be saved, now it's saying people need special secret
knowledge to understand art in a culturally conscious way. Of course, to these
particular heretics, salvation and cultural consciousness are one and the
same. But all these billowy dons, these black-gowned conspiracy theorists,
receive their gnosticism secondhand: it's manufactured by Marx and processed
through Adorno or Foucault, before it gets squeezed out by David M. Lubin or any
of a thousand like him. That intellectual regression is symptomatic of the
gnostics: when Socrates says that knowledge leads one to a greater awareness of
how much more there is to know, they take it as an invitation. They fiddle around
with phallic punctuation, turn in the wordplay gyre, become ever more irrelevant
and extreme.
| Where one cannot
lecture, one can point a finger and laugh, and it is ridicule that Kimball
recommends. |
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What should be done about them? Not much, really. Many are already so loopy
that they're only taken seriously by other professors; refuting them
point-by-point would be as useless as trying to explain to a sociologist the
flaws in the labor theory of value. But where one cannot lecture, one can point a
finger and laugh, and it is ridicule that Kimball recommends. An old
prescription, but an effective one: examples can be found in just about any
literature that comments on the human condition (Ecclesiastes is a personal
favorite). Indeed, many writers dear to libertarians have specialized in
ridicule, from Voltaire to Mencken to O'Rourke. Kimball can't match those
luminaries; too often he makes direct appeals to the reader, like an amateur
thespian winking at pals in the crowd. The best sections of "The Rape of the
Masters" are those in which he acts as a kind of curator for an exhibit of
stupidity: choosing excerpts with care, and using his words as gallery lights, to
accentuate the phrases that best display the author's peculiar gifts. Curiously,
this approach is not too far off from Duchamp's signing a urinal and entering it
in an art competition, and the Dadaists earn a backhanded compliment in the
introduction: "[T]hough impish, they are at least direct." (p. 11) Kimball puts
the works of modern art critics on display, but only after he's drawn mustaches
on the publicity photos of each and every one. If the book were an actual
exhibit, it would barely fill a small room: "The Rape of the Masters" is too
short by half. While it's tough to fault Kimball for not subjecting himself to
more art-circle gnosticism, his publishers could spare a few blushes for charging
more than 15 cents for each page of large-print text. And if they wanted people
to read the book in public, they certainly could have designed the book so the
spine and dust jacket don't shout "RAPE MASTERS," as if the book were a tribute
to the disciples of de Sade. A more substantial problem is that Kimball
views art as subject to some sort of Gresham's Law of criticism. But even though
bad commentary has practically driven good out of the academy, Kimball's regular
employment indicates that some sort of counterweight exists: as art critic for
the Spectator of London and National Review, he reaches an audience many times
that of the average tenured radical. Deranged musings on clitoral vowels are like
hyperinflated deutschemarks: officially sanctioned but worthless, good only for
carting around by the wheelbarrow. Outside the academy, though, is a vibrant
black market, full of barter and intrigue; every day more people join it,
abandoning the gnostics to their vacant wit and straining barrows. Like any
hyperinflated system, there's no doubt that this one is headed for a crash; the
only question is if anyone will notice.
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