The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art (Paperback)

by Roger Kimball (Author) "HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?..." (more)
Key Phrases: art history today, noa noa, study art history, Professor Lubin, Professor Fried, Professor Moxey (more...)

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.

Product Description
Exposes the charlatanry that fuels much academic art history today and leaks into the art world generally.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 186 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (November 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594031215
• ISBN-13: 978-1594031212
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #274,905 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

117 of 131 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 (REAL NAME)

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.

92 of 103 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 (REAL NAME)

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.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential for critics of a PC crazed academic world, September 7, 2006

By	Robert Torchia - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

During my years in art history graduate school (Columbia and Penn) I was constantly baffled by theory crazed professors and peers who were wildly enthusiastic about what I regarded as inpenetrable, ill-written, politically charged interpretations of art history. As an Americanist I was forced to read Lubin and Fried and could make no sense of their often bizarre pronouncements. I seriously began to wonder if I was simply not intellectually equipped to pursue the subject because these authors were lionized by everyone yet they were utterly incomprehensible to me.

Roger Kimball takes these authors (one can hardly call them scholars) to task by citing some of their oddest statements about well known painters and their masterpieces. All of this is prefaced by his own sane, common sense historical approach to these same works of art. So I love the book, but not without certain reservations.

The book (dare I say "text") is more appropriate for the average educated person than the professional art historian. Kimball relies heavily on satire and ridicule because, as he states openly in his introduction, the ideas he criticizes are so outlandish that they ought not be honored with a serious, point by point refutation. This approach at times becomes empty and heavyhanded, and one gets the impression that the author is merely showing us how clever he is with words, which he very certainly is.

Kimball, weened on Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer style formalism (both critics that he quotes approvingly), tends to look at complex paintings with a "what you see is what you get" stance. I am all for formalism, but it is impossible [for me] to look at Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream and rule out the possibility that the artist is making a social commentary on the status and possible symbolic fate of the freed Negro in the late or post-Reconstruction era. Just because Homer was a strange, reclusive personality who did not like to explain his pictures does not mean that we should overlook the strong undercurrents of violence that run through his work and try to learn about him through his pictures. (I just argued with my artist wife about the violence in such a seemingly innocent picture such as Snap the Whip.)

Kimball is avowedly against politicizing works of art, yet much art is intensely political. Moreover, his own book is political in that it is a passionately articulated conservative response to the liberal mania for political correctness.

Ultimately I think that Kimball very deliberately picked his most vulnerable enemies, tore them to shreds, and wrote a conservative crowd pleaser that never really addressed the questions and limitations of interpretetation. He even took a minor shot at Panofsky. Those who espouse the purely formalist and "common sense" approach to art history are not getting the whole picture and deprive themselves of some of the qualities that make images such wonderful, mysterious, and thought provoking things. Kimball dismantled the academic Tower of Babel with all due sarcasm, but became so caught up in destruction that he didn't follow through with any truly profound and memorable conclusions.

That all said, Kimball has challenged some very prominent art historians on their own ground, and I am unaware that any of them have dared to venture forth from their ivory towers and offer a reasoned response. You will note that the negative reviewers above did nothing but spurt venom; could it be that Kimball caught them with their proverbial pants down and there is no defence for such subjective flights of fancy?