by Jon Lackman | 25 October 2007 | Teaching
In a recent issue (15:1) of Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Camille Paglia writes:
For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people’s faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s’ multicultural attraction to world religion, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts … To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory … Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school — which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude.
