So I saw camille paglia speak last week at AEI. She started out great - came out guns blazing on all things culture- and education-related. Here are some highlights:

Liberals are to blame for the paltry nature of arts education because they’ve turned everything into identity politics.
Conservatives are to blame for wanting to whitewash the canon of anything erotic, sexual, and pagan.
Deconstruction was never necessary in America because the fine arts never took root. Importing it from France was ridiculous.
Critics do not ‘create’ the canon, artists create the canon and critics detect it. Therefore, the feminist argument that dead white men created it is absurd. It’s terribly inconvenient for them that most of the best art ever created was done by white European men.
The avant garde has been irrevelant since the 1950s, so this constant quest for the avant garde artist and the continued proliferation of shock-value art pieces are totally outdated and are doing their part in undermining any vibrant art culture we may have.
Art history should be taught as early as possible to children.
The Passion of Christ put all the blood and guts back into Catholicism that has been toned down since the Reformation.
Education should be done chronologically rather than organized by all these silly themes that educators come up with all the time. it’s totally incoherent now.
Public K-12 education has been utterly de-politicized to avoid controversy and hurting anyone’s feelings and universities are hyper-politicized to distraction.

There’s so much more, but that gives you an idea. Good ol’ Camille, right? But then she takes an unexpected turn.

At the end of her main speech, she completely deteriorated to the point that i left rather than hear her blather on in answer to people’s questions. it was rather painful to hear such a brilliant woman - one of my idols no less - display such an unfortunate ignorance of markets and the net positives of technological innovations on creativity and accessibility.

for example, she complained of the loss of classical music stations in cities around the nation, recalling a story of sitting in her car as a college student, riveted to a classical work on the radio that she’d never heard before through the static of the reception. She bewailed that other people won’t get to experience that. she didn’t consider satellite or broadband radios that allow people to listen to classical music down to the minutest sub-category 24 hours a day and static-free.

she also said art has been replaced by design. it was a bit of a throwaway comment, but again, she’s seeing it as the new replacing the old rather than the new indicating an explosion of creativity in many places (she did talk about the cult of the modern in academia, which I think is compelling, but not related to technology and markets in the same way).

i personally think some of the best art being done today is in conde nast photography. magazines like Vogue–my favorite–are full of stunning images because of innovative colors, textures, and settings. The Annie Leibowitz storybooks in Vogue recently have been fascinating (although admittedly Annie’s in a catagory of her own). Marketers are often some of the best artists in America as well (not to mention the best sociologists). It’s sad that Camille is completely ignoring all these things.

what i noticed is that she seems to look only at the traditional institutions that she’s used to — higher education, the National Endowment of the Arts (of all things), public education, and galleries — and if those are failing, then the whole thing’s going to hell. the real story is that those things are in decline because the market is more dispersed and “art” is more accessible than any time in human history and that allows for more variation, innovation, and creativity. the centralization of those things is being defeated by the market.

she also said she has disavowed popular culture since right after the publication of Sexual Personae. an example of why was an inexplicable rant about movies - she said they’re all terrible now, that the acting is bad, everything is reliant on special effects, and strangely, a lot of the lighting is too dark (??). that is clearly ridiculous since movies can be so much more artful and exquisite with technology (Frida comes to mind, and What Dreams May Come, though I think I’m the only person on the planet that likes the latter) or can be simple and completely actor-dependent (I’ve heard great things about the Before Sunrise and After Sunset with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy for this reason).

The bottom line is that Camille may be a one hit wonder with Sexual Personae, and certainly that’s nothing to shake a stick at–it’s a remarkable achievement. But, as my companion observed afterwards, she seems to have declined into fogeyism.