October 5, 2012 How Capitalism Can Save Art Camille Paglia on why a new generation has chosen iPhones

and other glittering g adgets as its canvas By CAMILLE PAGLIA 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 f or nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in paintin g or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the ea rly 1970s. Warhol grew up in industrial Pittsburgh. Today's college-bound rarely have direc t contact with the manual trades. Yet work of bold originality and stunning beauty continues to be done in archite cture, a frankly commercial field. Outstanding examples are Frank Gehry's Guggen heim Museum Bilbao in Spain, Rem Koolhaas's CCTV headquarters in Beijing and Zah a Hadid's London Aquatic Center for the 2012 Summer Olympics. What has sapped artistic creativity and innovation in the arts? Two major causes can be identified, one relating to an expansion of form and the other to a cont raction of ideology. Painting was the prestige genre in the fine arts from the Renaissance on. But pa inting was dethroned by the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and '70s. P ermanence faded as a goal of art-making. More from Review The Saturday Essay: Prescription for Addiction Bernanke on Baseball: A Beacon for D.C. .But there is a larger question: What do contemporary artists have to say, and t o whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art worl d, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy an upp er-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1 960s. (I am speaking as a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 200 8.) Today's blas liberal secularism also departs from the respectful exploration of w orld religions that characterized the 1960s. Artists can now win attention by im itating once-risky shock gestures of sexual exhibitionism or sacrilege. This tre nd began over two decades ago with Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine, and was typified more rece ntly by Cosimo Cavallaro's "My Sweet Lord," a life-size nude statue of the cruci fied Christ sculpted from chocolate, intended for a street-level gallery window in Manhattan during Holy Week. However, museums and galleries would never tolera te equally satirical treatment of Judaism or Islam. It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was k illed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy comme rcial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had st ubbornly scorned. The vulnerability of students and faculty alike to factitious theory about the a rts is in large part due to the bourgeois drift of the last half century. Our wo efully shrunken industrial base means that today's college-bound young people ra

rely have direct contact any longer with the manual trades, which share skills, methods and materials with artistic workmanship. Warhol, for example, grew up in industrial Pittsburgh and borrowed the commercia l process of silk-screening for his art-making at the Factory, as he called his New York studio. With the shift of manufacturing overseas, an overwhelming numbe r of America's old factory cities and towns have lost businesses and population and are struggling to stave off disrepair. That is certainly true of my birthpla ce, the once-bustling upstate town of Endicott, N.Y., to which my family immigra ted to work in the now-vanished shoe factories. Manual labor was both a norm and an ideal in that era, when tools, machinery and industrial supplies dominated d aily life. For the arts to revive in the U.S., young artists must be rescued from their san itized middle-class backgrounds. We need a revalorization of the trades that wou ld allow students to enter those fields without social prejudice (which often em anates from parents eager for the false cachet of an Ivy League sticker on the c ar). Among my students at art schools, for example, have been virtuoso woodworke rs who were already earning income as craft furniture-makers. Artists should lea rn to see themselves as entrepreneurs. Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all ind ustrial design. Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, d ynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial des igner is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world which, like i t or not, is modern reality. Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the w orld and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time. Over the past century, industrial design has steadily gained on the fine arts an d has now surpassed them in cultural impact. In the age of travel and speed that began just before World War I, machines became smaller and sleeker. Streamlinin g, developed for race cars, trains, airplanes and ocean liners, was extended in the 1920s to appliances like vacuum cleaners and washing machines. The smooth wh ite towers of electric refrigerators (replacing clunky iceboxes) embodied the el egant new minimalism. "Form ever follows function," said Louis Sullivan, the visionary Chicago archite ct who was a forefather of the Bauhaus. That maxim was a rubric for the boom in stylish interior dcor, office machines and electronics following World War II: Ol ivetti typewriters, hi-fi amplifiers, portable transistor radios, space-age TVs, baby-blue Princess telephones. With the digital revolution came miniaturization . The Apple desktop computer bore no resemblance to the gigantic mainframes that once took up whole rooms. Hand-held cellphones became pocket-size. Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineere d industrial design. Personalized hand-held devices are their letters, diaries, telephones and newspapers, as well as their round-the-clock conduits for music, videos and movies. But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art. Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented col lege students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic sys tem that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of a

rts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual l anguage even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and M ark Rothko is ignored or suppressed. Thus young artists have been betrayed and stunted by their elders before their c areers have even begun. Is it any wonder that our fine arts have become a wastel and? Ms. Paglia is University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the Univers ity of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her sixth book, "Glittering Images: A Journey T hrough Art From Egypt to Star Wars," will be published Oct. 16 by Pantheon. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444223104578034480670026450.html#p rintMode