Camille Paglia's Sex, Art, and American Culture

Abstract

Camille Paglia's writing is often numbingly boring. The problem with reviewing her is that selective quotes make her appear snappy in a fashionably politically incorrect way. Then Camille the public performer and Camille the writer of books get all mixed up. Which is not to say reading Sex, Art and American Culture is only boring; it is also infuriating. I kept looking ahead to see how much more, oh lord, how much more to go before I was through? Then there were the moments of disgust and anger. And why didn't anyone warn me in one of the numerous hyped-up articles I read about naughty Camille that her writing is repetitious and tediously predictable? I'm bewildered that Paglia has apparently captivated so many with so little, including a swag of gay men and lesbians. In a recent issue of the Australian gay magazine Outrage, Peter Blazey practically elevated our Camille to saviour status (Blazey, 1993). It just goes to show, yet again, that being queer is no indicator of political acumen. At least her first book; Sexual Personae Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, no matter how nauseously undergraduate it tended to be, did focus on famous cultural artifacts and personalities. In it she tells us she is practically single-handedly rescuing us from the aridity of modernism and restoring the unity and continuity of Western culture in an approach which combines the disciplines of literature, art history, psychology and religion. Gee whiz. Her 'method is a form of sensationalism: I try to flesh out intellect with emotion and to induce a wide range of emotion from the reader' (1992: xiii). The aim is continued in this collection of essays, mostly written between 1990 and 1992 after the first book's publication. In it she expounds ad infinitum on her main themes, including the news that rape is one of life's little miseries, that paganism and astrology are deep and meaningful, that American academia sucks, French intellectuals suck, feminism sucks, lesbianism sucks, Madonna is fabulous and so is PAGLIA. But the focus