Grieving

Dear Grieving,

You pose a suggestive connection between the New Age resurgence and those commemorative tokens at death sites. Perhaps the latter, sometimes kitschy trend is related to Christian religiosity about angels, who are enjoying a big comeback. And there is a recent craze for contacting the dear departed, which bestselling author James Van Praagh claims to do for the credulous even on the Larry King show. (Despite his wobbly accuracy, Van Praagh may be a genuine psychic who can read minds, but it's a cruel hoax to pretend that messages can be received from the beyond.)

Ritual roadside displays are vestigially pagan and propitiatory, marking the spot where a spirit lingers and may prey on the living. Untimely deaths were always thought to leave a wraithlike presence. Those bringing an offering to crash sites may be seeking some magical point of contact between time and eternity. It shows a thirst for transcendence in our banal, commercialized era.

The mammoth banks of flowers left at the gates of Kensington and Buckingham palaces after Diana died may have given this practice an international boost. Modern middle-class society is too detached from the physical facts of death. Traditional Italian culture, with its open coffins, corpse-kissing and cemetery visits, is far more realistic. Perhaps this revived (and rather Victorian) taste for memorializing death scenes will lead to the recognition that at death the individual is reabsorbed into nature and is not saved by any fairy tale of resurrection and the afterlife.

For all of recorded history, flowers have expressed the fragility and evanescence of youth and beauty, the mortality that is man's fate. When the tomb of King Tutankhamen was opened in 1922, the garland that had been placed around the pharaoh's neck by his wife still smelled fresh for a brief moment before the petals shriveled. Floral tributes are poetic and symbolic, a confession of human subordination to cosmic law.

Dear Camille,

Stefan Herpel
Ann Arbor, Mich.

Dear Mr. Herpel,

Thank you for your very impressive and challenging letter. It's a central thesis of my work that in the 20th century (which I call the Age of Hollywood) pagan popular culture overtook and vanquished the high arts. Thanks to advances in technology, pop became a universal language, as catholic in its reach as the medieval church. Once pop art embraced commercial iconography, the avant-garde was dead.

The high arts began their downward slide with the triumph after World War II of the chic nihilism of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," which set a style for dreary posturing that is still being aped in postmodernism. In its series "Millennium Reputations," London's Sunday Telegraph has been asking, "Which are the most overrated authors of the past 1,000 years?" My response, pillorying Beckett, appeared on Feb. 14. It's no coincidence that tunnel-vision, doom-and-gloom Michel Foucault had his early conversion experience when he saw "Waiting for Godot" in Paris.

No, I don't think teaching and scholarship, even in their decayed condition, have affected the actual practice of the high arts -- except in the area of draftsmanship, where conformist abstraction broke the continuity of naturalism and perspective that stretched back to the Renaissance. The great modernists like Picasso, Matisse and Mondrian were trained in the old manner, which gave force to their formal experiments. Even Jackson Pollock began as a figurative painter.

It's really art appreciation, rather than production, that has been harmed by the trendy pedants of academe. The humanities departments of the elite schools (from which very little important work has emerged in the last 20 years) are increasingly dead zones locked in by pretension and tenure. American universities have helped desensitize the audience to high art, leaving the major museums to pick up the slack with their monster traveling shows -- which have been wildly successful because of their delightfully outmoded premise of the artist-as-hero.

Some reawakening may be at hand: Aesthetics is coming to the fore again, a process in which I obviously played a pivotal role. When I mounted my challenge in my first book (whose methodology is Wildean aestheticism), the PC elite was routinely dismissing aesthetics as merely a branch of ideology, typified by the work of that maleducated designer Marxist, Terry Eagleton.

The academic feminists are now falling all over themselves claiming they were always proponents of beauty, but of course that's nonsense. They were completely silent for those long years when I was at open war on this issue -- as at the tumultuously hostile 1992 feminist conference at Princeton where, at the invitation of MTV producer Alisa Belletini, I accompanied Cindy Crawford and Allure's Linda Wells to defend the cause of fashion and beauty. A hilarious onstage photograph, reproduced in Ken Siman's 1995 book, "The Beauty Trip," shows me in apoplectic Amazonian overdrive with Belletini blanching by my side.

While painting has slowly lost its prominence as the prestige genre, I don't believe any "art establishment" can keep a talented, productive painter from eventually winning sponsorship by a gallery. Cronyism and favoritism do occur, but aspiring artists and writers must persist in their work and not be discouraged by rejections: The truly original is usually rebuffed but over time does make its way (sometimes, alas, posthumously).

In my call for an American Bernini, I was deliberately evoking not a painter but a sculptor and architect, a master of operatic Baroque theatricality. This coming artistic messiah may work in film or multimedia performance, a modern version of masque. I prophesy that the American Bernini will be a gay black male. He will have grown up with gospel music and will retain his Christian evangelical fervor even in his daringly pagan creations. He will have absorbed all the forms of world art and will reject the crabbed ironies of late modernism. His gift will be choreography, the universal body language of dance, which he will transform into brilliant visual images. Let our emperor's games begin!

Postscript: For the series on "Millennium Masterworks" appearing in London's Sunday Times, I contributed an article on Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" that appeared on Feb. 18. For the May/June issue of American Heritage, I contrasted Gloria Steinem and Faye Wattleton as, respectively, our most overrated and underrated feminists.

The April 19 issue of Publishers Weekly reports the May publication of "Women Together" (Running Press), which contains Mona Holmlund's detailed profiles and Cyndy Warwick's photos of lesbian couples, including Alison Maddex and me. The bronze moose we are dramatically pictured beneath belongs to a fountain at the foot of the grand front steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art -- the ones Sylvester Stallone dashed up at dawn in "Rocky."
salon.com | April 28, 1999

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