The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art [Paperback]

Roger Kimball (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2005

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 witty and provocative 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 Jan van Eyck's masterful Arnolfini Portrait is about "middle-class deceptions ... and the treatment of women." Or that Mark Rothko's abstract White Band (Number 27) "parallels the pictorial structure of a pieta." 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, a noted art critic himself, shows how academic art history is increasingly held hostage to radical cultural politics--feminism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, the whole armory of academic antihumanism. To make his point, he describes how eight famous works of art (reprinted here as illustrations) have been made over to fit a radical ideological fantasy. Kimball 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 fuels much academic art history and leaks into the art world generally, affecting galleries, museums and catalogues. It also provides an engaging antidote to the tendentious, politically motivated assaults on our treasured sources of culture and civilization.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Roger Kimball's brilliant book sets out to repair the damage inflicted on art history...in short, a restoration project. -- Philippe de Montebello, Director, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Roger Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594031215
• ISBN-13: 978-1594031212
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #582,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

140 of 157 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scathing, Scary, But Hilarious, July 31, 2004

By 

L. Young "palmtree2000" (West Orange, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art (Hardcover)

This is a brilliant and scathing look at how our post-modernist art historians are engaged in the de-civilization of Western art. Kimball skewers the current trend of viewing all Western art (as well as Western literature) solely through the prism of sex, gender, and class. What results is a ludicrous but scary disfigurement of Western art.

Kimball takes seven well known paintings by seven different artists, and shows us the absurdity of those art elites in the academic world who are blinded by their politically correct madness. The chapter on John Singer Sargent's 1882 painting, "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" gave me belly laughs galore as leading Sargent expert Professor David M. Lubin of Wake University, subjects a painting of four upper crust little girls at the turn of the century into a critique of sexual oppression and perversion. Playing on the French version of Mr. Boit's name ( i.e. boite, meaning box) Professor Lubin contends 'the Female Child is enclosed within [an]ideological and biological box'. If this is not absurd enough, Kimball shows us how Lubin's reasoning in analyzing the painting in sexual/gender terms depends upon such things as the circumflexed 'i' in 'boite' (remember the Frenchified version of the girls' father's name) as a receptacle into which the 'i' phallus plunges. In addition the word 'boite' the good Professor tells us also means 'house of prostitution'. From this he concludes that the little girls represent the father's (remember Dad doesn't appear in Sargent's picture) harem.

One could laugh one's head off if it wasn't so frightening to consider this is what young people are subjected to in universities across America. 'Bravo' to Roger Kimball for showing us the 'Theater of the Absurd' that goes on behind those ivy covered walls. My daughter is an art major. I'll be sure to remember Mr. Kimball's book next time her university telephones asking for a charitable donation.

108 of 121 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Fine Art of Ridicule, August 27, 2004

By 

Gary H. Inbinder (Woodland Hills, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art (Hardcover)

Voltaire wrote, "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." No doubt, the Lord has already made the "tenured radicals" of postmodern academia ridiculous, but it takes a master of ridicule, like Voltaire or Roger Kimball, to make their ridiculousness evident to the rest of us. And this Kimball does with rare wit, humor, charm, and those great enemies of the ridiculous: reason, logic, and common sense. In this book Kimball takes several masterpieces by artists as diverse as Rothko and Rubens, and then cites the critiques of these works by highly respected authorities within the postmodern academy. We then see how these postmodern "experts" totally ignore the picture itself, the historical context, the intent of the artist, and anything related to common sense observation, while launching into theoretical nonsense that does nothing more than display their own "politically correct" ideologies, psychological preferences, prejudices, and solipsistic obsessions. Thus, we see that these academic "rapists" reveal much about themselves, but nothing about the artist, or the work of art itself, which is reduced to nothing more than a backdrop to better display the "art historian's" ego, and to score points with his or her like-minded academic peers.

This book is brilliant, captivating, and delightful to read, and includes a nice color plate of each masterpiece referenced. It is a page turner, with a laugh, or at least a wry smile of recognition, on each and every page. I highly recommend it.

62 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important and entertaining work, June 12, 2005

By 

smoothsoul (New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art (Hardcover)

My main reason for writing is to add my voice to the chorus of praise - and to challenge its politically correct critics. It worries me that readers might see the negative reviews and avoid this work. It's an important book, for good arts criticism is increasingly hard to find in universities, and here's why. Kimball does an excellent job of showing up what shoddy scholarship gets written in the academy nowadays. You can free associate with Lacan and Derrida - to paraphrase Camille Paglia - and get away with sheer nonsense. And as Paglia also said, they're destroying people's appreciation of beauty in the process.

It's really stunning that the writers Kimball picks on are taken seriously; but jargon and cant are the order of the day in the modern university. If you're obscure, you can get away with such nonsense. Well, not with clear and cutting thinkers like Kimball on the case. Kimball believes in art, beauty, and logical argument, and his work is searing and convincing. And as several others have pointed out, it's also incredibly funny. You have to read this book just to see what people are getting away with.