Paglia on Art

I sometimes stir up trouble on the blog by wandering into the fringes of politics. I ended up by stating the policy of refraining from political commentary as such, but being pro-active when it comes to the necessity of defending art from politics. Mind you, I don't always adhere to my own policy! In the same vein, I have just been reading a long online interview at Quillette with Camille Paglia. She is, along with Canadian Jordan Peterson, perhaps the most interesting and certainly courageous academic in North America. I have been long acquainted with her, having read her Sexual Personae a couple of decades ago. Let's have some excerpts:

Claire Lehmann: You seem to be one of the only scholars of the humanities who are willing to challenge the post-structuralist status quo. Why have other humanities academics been so spineless in preserving the integrity of their fields?

Camille Paglia: The silence of the academic establishment about the corruption of Western universities by postmodernism and post-structuralism has been an absolute disgrace. First of all, the older generation of true scholars who still ruled the roost when I arrived at the Yale Graduate School in 1968 were not fighters, to begin with. American professors, unlike their British counterparts, had not been schooled in ferocious and satirical debate.

Post-structuralism, along with identity politics, made huge gains in the 1970s, as the old guard professors proved helpless against a rising tide of rapid add-on programs and departments like women’s studies and African-American studies. The tenured professoriate seemed not to realize that change of some kind was necessary, and thus they failed to provide an alternative vision of a remodeled university of the future. 

...the poisons of post-structuralism have now spread throughout academe and have done enormous damage to basic scholarly standards and disastrously undermined belief even in the possibility of knowledge. I suspect history will not be kind to the leading professors who appear to have put loyalty to friends and colleagues above defending scholarly values during a chaotic era of overt vandalism that has deprived several generations of students of a profound education in the humanities. The steady decline in humanities majors is an unmistakable signal that this once noble field has become a wasteland. 

My substitute for religion is art, which I have expanded to include all of popular culture. But when art is reduced to politics, as has been programmatically done in academe for 40 years, its spiritual dimension is gone. It is coarsely reductive to claim that value in the history of art is always determined by the power plays of a self-referential social elite. I take Marxist social analysis seriously: Arnold Hauser’s Marxist, multi-volume A Social History of Art (1951) was a major influence on me in graduate school. However, Hauser honored art and never condescended to it. A society that respects neither religion nor art cannot be called a civilization.

She also talks about the moral panic of #MeToo, so go read the whole interview.

Jordan Peterson has similar views of the decay of scholarship in the social sciences. I find this hard to reconcile with what I see in, for example, Canadian university music departments, at least the few that I have direct knowledge of. On my recent visit to Montreal I touched base with an old friend who is a musicology professor at McGill and though we did not go into details I had the strong impression that standards there remain as high as ever, if not higher. I wonder if the practicalities of musical performance are not a bulwark against post-modernist lunacy? At the end of the day, if the music department cannot put on fine performances, then it is not going to be perceived as being worth very much. Sure, McGill has a research department for the study of the neurophysiology of music, but while the findings don't seem to be earth-shaking, they are at least scientific. And when I attended the McGill Symphony concert, it was at least as good as in the past. I would love to do a tour of Canadian university campuses to get a sense of the health of music education at that level, but unfortunately, I don't really have the time and who would want to fund that? I can just see myself applying for a Canada Council grant and getting turned down because nearly everyone on the jury would stand to suffer from any criticism! In arts funding in Canada, one hand washes the other.

For an envoi I have turned up a fairly poor video (in terms of production values) of the University of Victoria Orchestra and Chorus performing a Mozart mass in a 2017 concert. The department was founded in 1967 and I attended as an undergraduate from 1971 to 1973 (and taught there in the 1980s). Blogger won't embed so just follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZmMq1xtzUU&index=1&list=PL4ucz2UWNKJk91tVxUt71qh1CCIfSktMS

A couple of comments. The School of Music is following exactly the same formula as they were when I was an undergraduate. There are a couple of large concerts each year. When I was there I sang in the Mozart Requiem and the Handel oratorio Judas Maccabaeus as well as a couple of Te Deums by Kodaly and Bruckner. It was a great experience, not least because it was my first encounter with a really knowledgeable and sophisticated musician, the conductor George Corwin. If I had to make a criticism it would be to note that there are two other elements that seem to have continued to today: there is an underlying smugness to the whole proceeding and this is likely because, when it comes to large productions of works for orchestra with vocal soloists and chorus, the School of Music has no nearby competition. A corollary to this is that they do not take any chances with repertoire but consistently stick to the most well-known and popular works. So, a great educational experience for the students and a special treat for the audience as this kind of production is very rare in the area. The university can afford to put on lavish productions like these because all the musicians and singers, being students, work for free!

So the bottom line is that a music department cannot afford to go full progressive, SJW, post-modern because that tends to destroy competence (which is no longer an objective value). You can't get rid of competence and still have a functional music department because the public face of the department depends on the concerts they present which all depend on a high level of technical and musical competence.