Camille Paglia: prediction

Transcript context

…Get a job. Have a job. Again, that’s the real job. Every time you have frustrations with the real job, you say, “This is good.” This is good, because this is reality. This is reality as everybody lives it. This thing of withdrawing from the world to be a writer, I think, is a terrible mistake. Number one thing is constantly observing. My whole life, I’m constantly jotting things down. Constantly. Just jot, jot, jot, jot. I’ll have an idea. I’m cooking, and I have an idea, “Whoa, whoa.” I have a lot of pieces of paper with tomato sauce on them or whatever. I transfer these to cards or I transfer them to notes. I’m just constantly open. Everything’s on all the time. I never say, “This is important. This is not important.” That’s why I got into popular culture at a time when popular culture was — . In fact, there’s absolutely no doubt that at Yale Graduate School, I lost huge credibility with the professors because of my endorsement of not only film but Hollywood. When Hollywood was considered crass entertainment and so on. Now, the media studies came in very strongly after that, although highly theoretical. Not the way I teach media studies. I also believe in following your own instincts and intuition, like there’s something meaningful here. You don’t know what it is, but you just keep it on the back burner. That’s basically how I work is this, the constant observation. Also, I try to tell my students, they never get the message really, but what I try to say to them is nothing is boring. Nothing is boring. If you’re bored, you’re boring. [laughter] stant observation. Also, I try to tell my students, they never get the message really, but what I try to say to them is nothing is boring. Nothing is boring. If you’re bored, you’re boring. [laughter] Wherever you are, it’s exhausting. It’s frustrating. I don’t know what. The plane has been canceled and whatever. After you get over your fury, you realize what opportunity is there here to absorb something more from this experience, from observing other people or whatever it is. I think there’s really no experience that you can have that there’s not something in there that eventually you can’t use as a part of your developing system. Another thing I have to say, anyone interested in ideas, do not read any of the current books like Pierre Bourdieu and all that stuff. Oh my God, it’s so incomplete. It’s really boring. I believe in the library. The library is my shrine. It was my shrine when I was researching Amelia Earhart. When I got to Yale, Sterling Library was my shrine. I ransacked that building, oh my God. That’s the thing, is that I’ve learned more from the old commentators. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, which was considered completely gone but had a huge impact on “The Waste Land” and other works of modernism. I’ve learned a great deal from the commentators of the past, the historians of the past. Now, when I did Glittering Images, the actual nullity of current scholarship became very exposed to me. Of course, I already knew about it, but I really got objective proof of it. There’s 29 chapters in it. Each artwork that I chose, I did a full research of what had been said about that particular artwork, so I began chronologically. I would work, if it was an older work from the late 19th century, moving through the decades to the present. There, oh my God, could you see it, could you see the fall in the quality of scholarship in our time from the 1980s on. I would move from these incredibly erudite and wonderful sentences, beautiful stylus about art, late 19th century moving into the 20th century. Still solid into about the ’60s. And then the ’70s is kind of holding there. All of a sudden comes the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s. All these people are pygmies. Pygmies, the people at the elite schools. Let me say, the big art survey courses are being dismantled. Hello? It used to be you had a two-semester course. It would begin with cave art and move, in two semesters, down to modernism. Magnificent structure, now abandoned wholesale except when students have protested, like at Smith. My sister is a graduate of Smith, and was part of the protest that got the survey restored. Graduate students in art history and art historians no longer have the ability to teach the big picture, because all narratives are regarded as fictional now, imperialistic fictions. The entire story of art is not possible, and therefore, people know nothing. [laughter] I need to give them the chance to ask you questions, but thank you for a fascinating discussion. [applause]…

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