In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.
Camille PagliaRead
Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the uncertain future of visual arts compared to thriving performance genres.
Camille Paglia expresses concern for the visual arts, noting a decline over the past four decades despite the success of performance genres like opera, theater, music, and dance. She observes that there has been a lack of significant artistic figures in painting and sculpture since the transformations in art movements during the 1970s, questioning the trajectory of visual art in the contemporary landscape.
Themes
ArtVisual ArtsPerformance GenresFuturePaglia
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the evolution of art, one could reference this quote to highlight the contrast between visual and performance arts.
More from Camille Paglia
All quotes →Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.
Camille PagliaRead
Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
Camille PagliaRead
The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.
Camille PagliaRead
We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
Camille PagliaRead
Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.
Camille PagliaRead
Similar quotes
Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.
Zora Neale HurstonRead
Some of the smallest things on a smaller film, to me, are greater achievements than on a big film when you have the resources and the time and everything else.
Roger DeakinsRead
I've seen my own blood and broken a few bones. I've been hit, which isn't an entirely bad thing, as at least you have a glimpse of the suffering endured by the people you are photographing. And in a sense, crumbling empires and war have been with me all my life.
Don MccullinRead
One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.
Stella AdlerRead
I think it's insulting to an audience to make them sit and watch a film and then give them a message in one sentence.
Asghar FarhadiRead
My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.
Kehinde WileyRead