The Rape of the Masters
Subtitle: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: September 25, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 186
ISBN-13: 9781893554863
Subjects: Theory of art; Criticism; Art & Art Instruction; Art; Art & Politics; Art / General; Political correctness; Politics in art
First sentence: YOU CAN PROBABLY recall several paintings by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), the French artist who emerged as the leader of the Realist school of painting in the 1850s.
Description: "Colleges and universities used to teach art history to encourage connoisseurship and acquaint students with the riches of our artistic heritage. But now, as Roger Kimball reveals in this book, the student is less likely to learn about the aesthetics of masterworks than to be told, for instance, that Peter Paul Rubens' great painting Drunken Silenus is an allegory about anal rape. Or that Courbet's famous hunting pictures are psychodramas about "castration anxiety." Or that Gauguin's Manao tupapau is an example of the way repression is "written on the bodies of women." Or that Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream is "a visual encoding of racism."" "In The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, Kimball, an art critic and essayist, shows how academic art history is increasingly held hostage to radical cultural politics - feminism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies and other weapons in the armory of academic anti-humanism. To make his point, Kimball describes the way seven famous works of art - all beautifully reproduced in this volume - have been reinterpreted by contemporary art historians to fit a radical ideological fantasy. He then performs a series of intellectual rescue operations, explaining how these great works should be understood through a series of illuminating readings in which art, not politics, guides the discussion." "The Rape of the Masters exposes the charlatanry that stands behind much academic art history and oozes into the art world generally. It also provides an antidote to the tendentious, politically motivated assaults on our treasured sources of culture and civilization that are occurring not only in our universities but in our museums and art galleries as well."--BOOK JACKET.