Camille Paglia: evaluation

Transcript context

…Take your last book, Glittering Images, and your other work, which emphasized the role of the iconic in Western and Eastern culture, the role of the spectacular. Vivid visual life-giving spectacular events. Now here we have people, they look, they listen on very small smartphones. Is this culture dead? But if the culture was so splendid, why did people give it up so quickly? The reason I wrote Glittering Images is because I felt that there’s an avalanche of fragmented visual impressions — disconnected, glaring, tacky, badly designed — that young people are growing up in. I think it really is true that children’s brains are being reshaped. The standard forms for logic and for sequential information and for reasoning, everything’s kind of disappearing. I tried to write a book where people would just stare at an image for a certain length of time. I think it’s getting worse and worse. Web design, which my school, University of the Arts, teaches — I think web design is in the pits. I thought web design was moving into becoming a major genre of the arts. I think we’re in a kind of swirling vortex — and yes, what you mentioned about the miniaturization of image is terrible. I was raised in a time, 1950s, when Hollywood was competing with television by doing something which television couldn’t do, with those gigantic screens. Like in The Ten Commandments, there’s a giant thing of Pharaoh, a giant sculpture. It starts at one end of the screen and you watch it go to the other end of the screen. Phenomenal. Lawrence of Arabia, oh my God, the dunes of Lawrence of Arabia with that music. There’s no sense of the large. Young people have no sense whatever of the expansive, of the big gesture. But do we maybe overrate the large? If the large gave through so quickly, so readily, to what you’re describing as this kind of mediocrity, what was wrong with that culture of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s to begin with?…

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