‘The Rape of the Masters’: A Vicious Takedown of Bad Art Criticism
A review of ‘The Rape of the Masters’, by Roger Kimball; Encounter Books, 2005.
I have a hunch that future generations will laugh at much of what we now call ‘art’. That is not to say that there is no good or even great art about; but only that, since Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal and exhibited it as art, there has been a thriving cottage industry of provocateurs and sceptics devoted to dismissing beauty as quaint and reducing art to mere preference. A linguistic sleight of hand has been at work here, for art is not a natural thing, like one of my cats or a tube of MAC lipstick. It is a functional thing, like a chair, which can be good or bad, better or worse, and whose value is determined by engaging sincerely with it. A chair that is uncomfortable and unstable is not a very good chair. And so it is with art, which can be full of aesthetic interest, or kitsch, or empty.
Roger Kimball, editor-in-chief and publisher of The New Criterion, would seem to share this view. But he looks at things from the other direction. Rather than sighing and rubbing his temples at the way we habitually interpret our way into thinking that, say, Tracey Emin’s bed is aesthetically interesting, he considers what happens when we — or at least, some of us — interpret genuinely good art—when we refract it through a lens of what he terms political correctness. For we can not just take mediocrity and make it good, but take good, and make it mediocre.
He considers what happens when we — or at least, some of us — interpret the genuinely good art—when we refract it through a lens of what he terms political correctness.
Kimball takes aim at seven examples of modern criticism whose authors are, in his view, more interested in forcing a particular work to fit a particular theory than actually looking at the thing and describing honestly the thoughts and feelings that arise. So we find, for example, one Professor Fried waxing psychological on Courbet’s 1856 painting The Quarry:
another of Courbet’s characteristically displaced and metaphorical representations of the activity, the mental and physical effort, of painting. Thus the young man’s strange, half-seated pose (with nothing beneath him but his folded jacket!) may be taken as evoking the actual posture of the painter-beholder seated before the canvas. The hunting horn, held in his left hand, combines aspects of a paintbrush (I’m thinking of the horn’s narrow, tubular neck) and a palette (its rounded shape . . .) while strictly resembling neither, and of course a horn being blown is also a traditional image of the fame Courbet forever aspired to win by his art.
The Quarry, by the way, is a hunting scene featuring a dead roe deer strung up by its hind-legs, two excitable dogs, a bearded man in a hat leaning against a tree. and a young piqueur (a master of hounds) sitting on a tree-stump and blowing his horn.
Kimball takes aim at examples of modern criticism whose authors are, in his view, more interested in forcing a particular work to fit a particular theory than looking at the thing.
Then there is a feminist take on Gaugin’s Manao tupapau, in which a woman (Gaugin’s first mistress, Teha’amana) lies on her front on a bed with her face turned towards the viewer. In the upper-left corner is the tupapau, the black-cowled ‘spirit of the dead’ for which the painting is named. Here is Griselda Pollock’s take:
Teha’amana’s presence is erased as this painted brown body becomes a sign not of a particular Oceanic woman, but of European man, a sign of art, itself a fetishistic structure which defends us against the complexities of what Marx called real relations. Behind the label “Olympia,” by the imposition of that conversation between two avant-garde moments, Gauguin achieved his own precarious inscription into the avant-garde’s narrative and canon. All these compound the excision from history of Teha’amana and whatever she might signify. What remains is the avant-garde fetishization of its own processes and procedures; not a sign of cultural specificity but merely the mark of difference from “the privileged male of the white race,” to use Gayatri Spivak’s comprehensive term.
Then there is a feminist take on Gaugin’s Manao tupapau, in which a woman (Gaugin’s first mistress, Teha’amana) lies on her front on a bed.
Kimball is amusing as, with equal parts humour and exasperation, he tears apart such analyses. He urges those of us who like art to return to a more honest and direct way of seeing it. Art, he says, ought to be seen through the eyes, not the intellect, and certainly not the intellect of the idealogue. The contemporary art historian has turned art appreciation into a kind of scavenger hunt for hidden symbols and subtexts that affirms his own interests or ideals. This kind of interpretation, for Kimball, amounts to a sort of theft, stripping work of its beauty and its creator of her craftsmanship, and, moreover, intimidating or irritating or even putting off the ordinary person, who sees art more honestly (and, suggests Kimball, more truly).
The clotted prose of the academics Kimball takes on in The Rape of the Masters ought to be proof enough that they are trying to conceal something. If something can be explained, it can be explained simply, or at least with simple terms. That said, I am not a mind-reader, and it would be graceless for me to suggest, as Kimball more or less openly does, that these academics are mere charlatans. His tone is sarcastic and mocking and therefore fun — though it does all feel a bit one-sided. But then Kimball is not known for compromising and is uninterested in seeking one art. His purpose is to show up the quackery and pretentiousness of academia, and his weapon of choice is ceaseless ridicule.
His tone is sarcastic and mocking and therefore fun — though it does all feel a bit one-sided.
He writes well. His prose is tight, lively. I appreciate how often I make this point, but we have the sense of being spoken to directly, which is an essential skill in a good polemicist. It helps enormously that Kimball knows his stuff and can communicate it in precisely the opposite of the style he attacks. But he feels no need to show off this knowledge; it is merely a point of reference, if you like, for nothing clarifies quite like contrast.
Clearly Kimball is enjoying himself and quite happy to be seen as a superior kind of critic to those he lampoons. But his effort is highly democratic. It is a call to arms against allowing members of the academy to strip the great works of art of the joy and meaning they elicit for the rest of us. We should greet art in a spirit of humility, look at it directly, consider it honestly, not impose the contents of our brains on it, which, he suggests, betrays egocentricity. Whether or not you agree with this view, reader, you may enjoy this really quite vicious takedown of a world where art is not seen, but broken down intellectually until, as it were, the pieces of what was once a beautiful thing are strewn across the floor.
