Provocations
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Though work offensive to organized religion constituted only a fraction of the projects annually supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, conservative demands for the total abolition of that agency escalated. The NEA’s administrators and peer-review panels were denounced for left-wing bias and anti-Americanism. As a career teacher at arts colleges, I was very concerned about the stereotyping of artists as parasitic nihilists that was beginning to take hold in the popular mind in America. While most people in the arts community viewed the Serrano and Mapplethorpe controversies as assaults on free speech, I saw them as primarily an argument about public funding. I feel that no genuinely avant-garde artist should be taking money from the government—a view also expressed at the time by the legendary Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (another Italian-American). Mapplethorpe, certainly, was no struggling artist—he was rich and famous by the time of his death. And I would question whether Mapplethorpe’s cool, elegant torture and mutilation scenarios were an ideal advertisement for gay male life.
After acrimonious congressional debate, the National Endowment for the Arts managed to survive, but it was now regulated by an obscenity clause; grants to individual artists also decreased. Though controversy has subsided, the NEA disturbingly remains at the top of every list of government agencies that many citizens across the nation want abolished. What I found agonizing about the Serrano-Mapplethorpe episodes was that they ruined any prospect for vastly increased federal support for the arts in this country and furthermore that they would inevitably undermine arts funding at the state and local levels, where budgets are limited. Dance companies are particularly vulnerable, because they require high-quality rehearsal space and depend on a sustained continuity of teacher and student.
Almost a decade passed in America without a major conflict between government and the arts. In 1999, however, the Brooklyn Museum of Art mounted an exhibit called “Sensation: Emerging British Artists from the Saatchi Collection.” When this show had appeared two years earlier at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, controversy had mainly focused on a large image of an infamous child murderess, which was vandalized with ink and eggs. The work that caused trouble in the U.S., however, was the British-Nigerian artist Chris Ofili’s mixed-media painting, The Holy Virgin Mary: it depicted a black-skinned Madonna with a protruding breast sculpted of lacquered elephant dung from the London zoo; two other lumps of dung supported the painting’s base. In England, no one objected to the Ofili work. But in New York City, with its huge constituency of ethnic Catholics, there was an immediate reaction, fomented by the New York–based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties, whose vocal president is William A. Donohue. Yet another Italian-American Catholic politician, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, expressed outrage—before the show had even opened. At a fiery press conference, Giuliani, who had not yet seen the Ofili painting, called it “sick” and “disgusting.” The mayor unilaterally impounded the Brooklyn Museum’s city funding and threatened to evict it from its century-old lease. This extreme political intrusion diverted the discussion from one of art to that of censorship.
While the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing the handling of the show by Arnold Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, most people in the arts community instantly rallied to the latter’s side. But unease remained, especially after Lehman openly lied to the press about the pivotal financial role played in the show by Charles Saatchi, a British advertising executive notorious for his speculation in the art market. A direct intervention was made at the Brooklyn Museum by a 72-year-old devout Catholic, who evaded security guards to squeeze washable white paint all over Ofili’s painting—an act that some viewed as racist but that oddly paralleled the whitewashing of Catholic images by early Protestant iconoclasts. The man, who told police he had attacked the painting because it was “blasphemous,” was charged with violating the city’s ordinance against graffiti.
When the controversy first erupted, I publicly questioned the double standard operative in the art world in regard to artists’ manipulation of religious iconography: desecration of Catholic symbols was tolerated in American museums in ways that would never be permitted if the themes were Jewish or Muslim. Second, I denounced the total failure of curatorial support of “Sensation” at the Brooklyn Museum, which simply passively mounted the London show. Much of the misunderstanding of the Ofili painting might have been avoided if the museum had framed it with historical context about, first, African Christian and particularly Ethiopian art; second, tribal African fertility cults; third, the Catholic doctrine of the Virgin Birth; and fourth, the long Southern European tradition of black Madonnas. Commentary by the tabloid press and furious conservatives who had never seen the painting referred to dung being “thrown” or “flung” at the Madonna, which was completely false. But with all candor, no defense of this painting could have totally exonerated it from scandal, since Ofili had provocatively pasted around Mary a cloud of small cutouts of female genitalia culled from pornography magazines. From a distance, they looked like butterflies or hovering angels, emissaries of nature rather than the Christian God. That there was indeed unprofessional indifference to curatorship in this case would be confirmed just last year [in 2006] when Arnold Lehman shockingly demoted his principal curators in a reorganization of the Brooklyn Museum that demonstrated the unscholarly diversion of the institution from public education toward commercial buzz.
The automatic defense of the Brooklyn Museum during the “Sensation” imbroglio sometimes betrayed a dismaying snobbery by liberal middle-class professionals who were openly disdainful of the religious values of the working class whom liberals always claim to protect. Supporters of the arts who gleefully cheer when a religious symbol is maltreated act as if that response authenticates their avant-garde credentials. But here’s the bad news: the avant-garde is dead. It was killed over forty years ago by Pop Art and by one of my heroes, Andy Warhol, a decadent Catholic. The era of vigorous oppositional art inaugurated 200 years ago by Romanticism is long gone. The controversies over Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Chris Ofili were just fading sparks of an old cause. It is presumptuous and even delusional to imagine that goading a squawk out of the Catholic League permits anyone to borrow the glory of the great avant-garde rebels of the past, whose transgressions were personally costly. It’s time to move on.
For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people’s faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s’ multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts. The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the “Force.” But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts.
To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.
Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom si
nce the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture.
* [The Cornerstone Arts Lecture, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, February 6, 2007. Broadcast by C-SPAN, American Perspectives series. Published in Arion, Spring-Summer 2007.]
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RESOLVED:
RELIGION BELONGS IN THE CURRICULUM*
Madame President, Madame Speaker, ladies and gentlemen:
Perhaps the most pressing issue is not whether religion belongs in the university curriculum but rather what religion is already being taught now to college students coast to coast in the U.S. And that religion, I submit, is a toxic brew of paternalistic neo-Victorian philanthropy and dogmatic political correctness—a sanctimonious creed promulgated and enforced with missionary zeal by a priestly caste of college administrators and faculty censors in unholy alliance with intrusive federal bureaucrats.
Although I am an atheist, I have argued for over twenty-five years that true multiculturalism would make scholarly study of comparative religion the core curriculum of university humanities programs everywhere. No society or civilization can be understood without reference to its religious roots. Every student should graduate with a basic familiarity with the history, sacred texts, codes, rituals, and shrines of the major world religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Islam. Indeed, what could be more urgent, in this time of terrorism, than to know exactly what the Quran says about jihad and how those verses have been interpreted in multiple ways in Muslim tradition?
Universities as we know them began as schools for clerics in the Middle Ages. The academic robes and regalia we don for commencement ceremonies still invoke that medieval religious past, when scholarship arose from devout study of scripture and the conservation and copying of manuscripts. At their founding, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were each affiliated with rivalrous branches of American Protestantism—Calvinist, Congregationalist, and Presbyterian respectively. Attendance at daily chapel was required for students in Yale College until 1926. Not until 2005 did Yale sever Battell Chapel from its historic link to the Congregational Church, now the United Church of Christ. But the grand cathedral of Sterling Memorial Library remains, a neo-Gothic temple of learning where a devout medieval scholar stands with quill and scroll in a stone niche between the main doors and where, above the ornate altar of the circulation desk, Alma Mater reigns with blue globe in hand like the Madonna. And we must ask: has the divestment by the elite schools of their religious associations in fact produced better educated or more sophisticated and creative graduates?
My profound respect for religion is partly based on my college experiences during the 1960s counterculture. Many members of my baby-boom generation turned away from the dictatorial organized religions of their childhood but actively sought spirituality in other directions. Among our role models were the Beat poets of the 1950s, who had been heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism. The poet Gary Snyder sporadically studied for years in a monastery in Japan. Allen Ginsberg, who went to India with Snyder, incorporated Hindu chanting with political protest at innumerable demonstrations and festivals during the 1960s. The sitar master Ravi Shankar performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in California in 1967, an event also notable for the explosive national debut of Janis Joplin. The Beatles made a famous, abortive pilgrimage to India, but George Harrison remained a lifelong disciple of the Hare Krishna movement. Psychedelics like peyote, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and LSD were widely used (although never by me) to duplicate the vision quests of Native American shamans in the deserts of the Southwest and Mexico. Spiritual aspiration, with a goal of cosmic consciousness, was a high ideal among that decade’s hippies, who rejected the materialism and status-mongering of the Western career system. The idealistic comprehensiveness of the 1960s world-view has been completely forgotten: passionate commitment to protest and social reform was wedded to spirituality, outside the hierarchical framework of traditional faiths.
During graduate school at Yale (from 1968 to 1972), I did exhaustive research in the book tower of Sterling Library in ancient and modern religion as well as cultural anthropology, as it had developed along with the consolidation of archaeology as a scholarly discipline in the late nineteenth century. My work has always been aligned with the New Age movement of the 1970s, when now-neglected Jungian myth-criticism (originally inspired by Sir James George Frazer’s synoptic The Golden Bough) spread beyond academe into increasingly commercialized lifestyle applications like yoga classes, aromatherapy, and acupuncture treatments. The major theme of my first book, Sexual Personae, which was an expansion of my Yale doctoral dissertation, is explicitly religious: I argue that Judeo-Christianity never did defeat paganism, which went underground during the Middle Ages and erupted at three key moments: the Renaissance, Romanticism, and modern popular culture, as signaled by the pantheon of charismatic stars invented by studio-era Hollywood and classic rock music. My commitment to religious inquiry continues today: my ongoing research project of the past nine years has been the nature religion of Native American peoples of the Northeastern United States after the withdrawal of the continental glacier over 10,000 years ago.
The New Age movement, with its spiritual goals, globalist scope, and interdisciplinary flexibility, failed to transform academe as it should have, because the most radical and free-thinking students of my era did not go on to graduate school, which remained stultifyingly conservative in most of the elite schools, with their genteel Old WASP style—that is, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. When revolution arrived in American universities of the 1970s, it came in the form of bureaucratic fiat, as administrators primarily concerned with public relations imposed identity politics virtually overnight in the form of far too rapidly constructed new departments, such as women’s studies and African-American studies, which in my view was not a progressive but a reactionary development that perpetuated the fragmented, insular structure of the pre-1960s university and that simultaneously flash-froze and institutionalized a single, then-current brand of political ideology. I was calling, in contrast, for an end to the entire artificial, balkanized departmental structure of the modern university in favor of restoration of large, general topics of concentration, such as history, literature, and art, which would permit free movement into any new area of urgent interest.
This new, overt politicization of academe in the 1970s was accompanied in humanities departments by the arrival of continental theory—deconstruction and post-structuralism, which first flowered in the U.S. at Yale, brought here from Johns Hopkins University by J. Hillis Miller while I was still a graduate student. These needlessly abstruse and elitist methodologies were predicated on old-school European Marxism, with its atheistic premises. The American literary critics who were such quick converts to deconstruction and post-structuralism had virtually never done the kind of wide reading in history, economics, and political science that one should expect from proponents of Marxism. Literary theory became a new secular religion, where reverent murmuring of the names Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault instantly conferred saintly prestige. Those theorists who prostrated themselves before false European gods have much to answer for: they drastically weakened, undermined, and marginalized the humanities in the U.S. As they now steadily move on into affluent retirement, they have left the profession in ruins.
As I wrote in a long exposé of post-structuralism over a quarter century ago, “Better Jehovah than Foucault.” Let me repeat that: “Better Jehovah than Foucault.” Veneration of Jehovah brings vast historical sweep and a great literary work—the Bible—with it. Veneration of Foucault (who never admitted how much he had borrowed from others—from Emile Durkheim to Erving Goffman) traps the mind in simplistic, cynical formulas about social reality, applicable only to the past two and a half centuries of the post-Enlightenment. The high level of intell
ect, conceptual analysis, and rigorous argumentation in the collected body of ancient Talmudic disputation and medieval Christian theology far exceeds anything in the slick, game-playing Foucault. Go to YouTube, and listen to the heart-rending beauty of public recitation of the Quran sung by gifted imams to hundreds of thousands of weeping worshippers at Mecca—and then you will recognize the grotesque smallness of today’s smug and glib post-structuralists.
Religion cannot be reduced to cheap stereotypes, as is too often done these days by my fellow liberal Democrats, who equate believers with the glum morality police or dismiss them as a naïve, unwashed hoi polloi in fly-over country. All art began as religion, an enterprise born in fear to map and propitiate the mysterious powers of the universe. Religions are complex symbol-systems that use ancient techniques of the oral tradition, such as paradox and metaphor, to convey basic truths about human existence. Today’s shallow literary theorists, mired in their own subjectivity, deny there are any universals, but all human beings must confront eternal forces of time, fate, and mortality, which have always been the preoccupation of great art. The sayings of Buddha and the parables of Jesus have universal resonance and should be regarded as foundational to world literature.
Religion is a higher poetry, requiring a leap of faith that exposes the limitations of language far more effectively than deconstruction has ever done. Second, religion is a metaphysics, which is completely lacking from the Marxist system, which sees nothing but society. I respect Marxist analysis: the great Marxist scholar Arnold Hauser’s magnificent magnum opus, The Social History of Art, was one of my central influences in graduate school. But applied Marxism is blind to nature and incapable of understanding grand emotions like awe and wonder or electrifying peak experiences of the sublime or numinous.