Guilty as charged.(The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art)(Book Review)

The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, by Roger Kimball; Encounter Books, 2004, $46.95.

WITHIN LIVING MEMORY it was still widely believed that one of the objectives of education was the development of strong, independent and discerning minds which would equip their owners with an invaluable ability to sift the plausible from the implausible in argument and general life. Somewhere, somehow, to society's considerable shame and disadvantage, this admirable educational principle has become increasingly disregarded or forgotten. In its place we find the widespread fostering and promotion of fashionable but generally ephemeral orthodoxies. Today entry to our centres of higher learning often tacitly demands compliance with such orthodoxies in advance.

In his latest book, the American cultural commentator Roger Kimball describes how the once noble discipline of art history has fallen under the almost total domination of postmodernist fashions--in America at least. Sadly, the dissemination of fashionable, postmodernist orthodoxies had also largely supplanted the traditional teaching of aesthetic judgment even at London's world-famous Courtauld Institute when I applied to do some work there twenty-five years ago. I have some degree of evidence that the practices Kimball describes in American universities are widely replicated in Australia, Britain and other Western countries. Indeed, as a general rule, postmodernist doctrines have spread through Western universities like an unstoppable plague.

Happily for us, Roger Kimball has remained one of the more steadfast and consistent critics of this contagion, opposing it through a series of entertaining but fiercely-argued articles and books. If you have not yet read Kimball's Tenured Radicals, The Long March and Experiments against Reality, all published in the USA, make every effort to repair these omissions. Few other writers chronicle the culpable betrayal of our culture by leading Western academics so convincingly or in greater detail. If you yearn to see the vast cultural influence of such vaunted figures as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty challenged and dissected, Kimball's books can provide an overdue stimulus to your spirits.

The Rape of the Masters proceeds from a simple but instructive format. Kimball takes seven relatively well known works by artists from different cultures and centuries and contrasts a sober, descriptive analysis of these works--which, as an experienced art critic, he supplies himself--with the generally preposterous, overblown and historically nonsensical commentaries written recently by leading contemporary academics, all of whom seem under the thrall of postmodernlst fashion. I suspect most readers will find it hard to believe that the latter commentaries all proceed from holders of professorships at supposedly reputable universities--yet amazingly this is so.

Unless immediate family members are involved, most people have only the haziest notion about the teaching and attitudes in present-day university faculties. In general terms, what were formerly believed to be historically sound educational practices have been subverted and overthrown in the name of postmodernist obsessions--multiculturalism, feminism, gender issues, post-colonialism, structuralism, historical revisionism and the like. Whether these and other "isms" can be tied together legitimately under the umbrella heading of political correctness--as Kimball seems to have done with the present book--strikes me as doubtful, but then American usage may be different.

What Kimball really seems to be writing about is the way postmodernist doctrines have effectively sabotaged both art itself and the discipline of art history. One of these doctrinal articles of faith is that the whole notion of aesthetics is a kind of middle-class myth or conceit. Yet there seems no harm in acknowledging here that aesthetics has traditionally been a preserve of what might once have been described accurately as the "educated classes".