ART

The greatest burden that the reader of [Camille Paglia’s] Glittering Images must carry is knowing from the start that the history of Western art will reach its apparent apogee with Star Wars, about which Paglia writes, “Nothing I saw in the visual arts of the past 30 years was as daring, beautiful and emotionally compelling as the spectacular volcano-planet climax of Lucas’s ‘Revenge of the Sith.’ ” Lucas’s importance lies in his ability to turn “dazzling new technology into an expressive personal genre.”

There is something deeply depressing about having to argue over the cultural dominance of an immensely successful and beloved filmmaker like George Lucas in the context of art history…. What speaks to us in a work of art and makes it resistant to the passage of time is the depth of the humanity it expresses. There is entertainment, and then there is something infinitely richer: what we call “the sublime,” the true rec­ord of our spiritual condition that we get from serious and complex artworks. The films of William Kentridge, the serene Land Art of Andy Goldsworthy, the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, Einstein on the Beach — all these are sublime. Star Wars is not.

Earlier in her book Paglia states that art “expresses our soul.” If her claim for Lucas’s importance is valid, we might well ask what kind of soul we Americans now have that is expressed not by Oedipus, or by Krishna , Lear, Faust, Tristan or Leopold Bloom, but rather by Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Have we reached a point in time where the very best we have to offer is Star Wars, a creation that, for all the enjoyment it may have afforded us in our youth, has all the soul and emotional resonance of a video game and ponders the mystery of our existence at the level of a toddler?

The achievement of Lucas, like that of Disney, is indisputably a defining element of American culture. But no amount of apotheosis and breathless encomium will elevate it to be other than exactly what it is — entertainment. To see George Lucas as the “greatest living artist” is to repeat an error especially common among Americans, which is to measure an artwork’s importance by its reach rather than its depth. Paglia, who knows her Emily Dickinson and her Kafka (both artists with zero “fan base” in their lifetimes), has journeyed to the wrong continent, and what she has found glittering there is fool’s gold.

-- John Adams , New York Times Book Review



Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Arthur Bispo do Rosário spent more than a half century locked inside a psychiatric hospital. Moving back and forth between reality and delirium, art and divine mission, Bispo do Rosário claimed to have been chosen by the Almighty to carry out the task of mapping the world and giving it back to God in a reconstructed form…Unraveling uniforms and sheets to obtain the materials for his embroideries, purchasing or exchanging objects and making use of leftovers of materials discarded at the hospital, his pieces bring to life a new language, one capable of bringing together meanings, dreams and signs. Fragmenting communication into his own codes, Arthur Bispo do Rosário created a ludic universe of embroidery, assemblages, mantles, banners and other objects that would later be hailed as works of reference for contemporary art.