Paglia at the Met

Always Ready With a Barb

By CAROL KINO

IT was a typical fall Friday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with visitors massing on the steps and milling awe-struck around the Great Hall. Among them was the cultural critic Camille Paglia, a pint-size martinet in a black military-style jacket who strode purposefully through the crowds with a scowl on her face and a reporter in tow.

“I don’t particularly think this is inspiring,” she said with withering scorn, as she entered the dimly lighted galleries of the Egyptian wing.

The impetus for her visit was the Oct. 16 publication of “Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars” (Pantheon), Ms. Paglia’s sixth book and her first to focus squarely on visual art. Asked to meet at the museum, she had responded with an enthusiastic e-mail, calling the choice “ideal” because “it made such a huge impression on me as a small child.” Now 65, she first visited in the early 1950s, on a trip from Endicott, N.Y., the upstate working-class enclave where she had been born and raised, and the foray had been so formative that “I’ll never forget it!!!,” she wrote.

But Ms. Paglia had arrived from Philadelphia, her home for the last 28 years, in a more dyspeptic frame of mind. As a child, she had perceived the Egyptian galleries to be deliciously “crowded, overwhelming,” she said, while darting between rooms filled with statues, mummy cases and amulets. But now they had somehow lost their drama, a problem she ascribed to “the blockbuster mentality” and curators’ “underestimating the appetite of the public for detail.”

After pausing briefly to admire a spotlighted statue of Hatshepsut, the 18th-dynasty female ruler of Egypt, she resumed complaining about the gallery, whose height she deemed too lofty for the work on display. “Talk about wasted space!” she said.

Ms. Paglia’s pugnacious, know-it-all attitude should come as no surprise. After all, she made her name in 1990 with “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,” a sweeping cultural history that challenged the political correctness of the era by suggesting, among other things, that men had produced the glories of Western civilization, spurred by a fear of female sexuality. Later that year she cemented her status as a provocateur with an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times that proclaimed Madonna “the future of feminism.” Since then Ms. Paglia’s public spats with other leading feminists and academics, from Susan Sontag to the Shakespearean scholar Marjorie Garber, have been renowned.

And now comes “Glittering Images,” less a polemic than an illustrated anthology that Ms. Paglia intends as “a very good handbook for young people who want to know about the history of the arts,” she said. (She has taught humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since 1984 — and taught this reporter in an English class at Bennington College some years earlier.) Besides, she writes in the introduction, faced with the “sea of images” that have come to define contemporary life, “the only road to freedom is self-education in art.”

The book skips lightly through 33 centuries with 29 brief — and readable — essays, each focusing on an individual artwork. Many of the selections are familiar, like Donatello’s Mary Magdalene, Jacques-Louis David’s “ Death of Marat” and Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” But Ms. Paglia’s choices grow more esoteric in the modern era, for which she includes a thumbnail biography of John Wesley Hardrick, a little-known African-American portraitist in Indianapolis during the Depression, and a paean to the filmmaker George Lucas, whose “Revenge of the Sith” (2005), the final movie of the Star Wars cycle, wins him praise as “the greatest artist of our time.”

Ms. Paglia chose Mr. Lucas, she said, because after failing to find a satisfactory visual artist of this era, she had decided that “I’m not going to put in my book some minor derivative thing just because it happens to be contemporary.” Yet despite her love of pop culture, she clearly feels a closer kinship to the art of the ancient world than to the art of today. In the museum that afternoon, for instance, she nixed the idea of visiting the Modern and contemporary-art galleries, saying they had played no meaningful role in her intellectual formation. Instead she decided to visit the new Greek and Roman galleries, whose airier, light-filled rooms considerably improved her mood.

There, Ms. Paglia reminisced about the days when the White sculpture court had been a restaurant and the hallways had been filled with 19th-century plaster casts. She pointed out a first-century B.C. bronze portrait bust of a general named Marcus Agrippa, saying his origins as a Roman were obvious because of his fleshy, domineering face.

In the Hellenistic Treasury galleries, she wondered whether the jewelry and objects in the vitrines could possibly be real. “Oh, my Lord, is this solid gold?” she exclaimed over a Greek arm band shaped like a snake, dated 300 to 250 B.C. “This is incredible, like a Hollywood musical.”

Later, over a beer in the Petrie Court cafe and wine bar, Ms. Paglia explained the origins of her book. In the early 1990s, searching for textbooks for a class called “Art and Style,” she decided that there hadn’t been a significant art historical survey since H. W. Janson’s 1962 “History of Art.” Fearing that “the fine arts are receding drastically and tragically in ways that people who live in cities with great museums don’t realize,” Ms. Paglia said, she decided to produce one herself.

While writing, she conceived of her readers as falling into two camps. The first includes students who are turned off by the postmodernist, post-structuralist view of art history that she believes they are being force-fed in school. The second, more surprisingly, is made up of “the home-schooling moms whose voices I hear on AM talk radio,” she said. Because many are churchgoing, she has emphasized “the spirituality of art and of the artistic mission” throughout, especially with abstractionists like Mondrian and Pollock.

Ms. Paglia is also gunning for parents in general — a view that may be influenced by the fact that she is raising a 9-year-old son, Lucien, with her former partner, Alison Maddex, a founder of the Museum of Sex in New York. “What I’m trying to inspire with my book is a return to the art history survey course,” she said, “and to say that this should be taught not only at the college level, but at the high school level. I’m trying to get into the primary schools, O.K.?”

For someone whose aim is to promote art history, Ms. Paglia is not shy about promoting her own, or dismissing her perceived competitors. Throughout our conversation she sounded off on post-colonial critics like Gayatri Spivak and Stanley Fish. Pointing to the acerbic writing of the Times columnist Maureen Dowd, she termed her “my progeny.” (When asked whether her students realize that she’d been a pioneer, however, Ms. Paglia responded, “Oh, no, they have no idea who I am!” without a hint of rancor.)

You also suspect that Ms. Paglia may be railing against art as it is taught in universities rather than as it exists in the real world. She remains infuriated that the art world defended the Brooklyn Museum’s 1999 “Sensation” show, which included a depiction of a Madonna figure that incorporated elephant dung, after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani denounced it. (Ms. Paglia deemed the piece, by the Nigerian-British artist Chris Ofili, a Turner Prize winner, to be “a very second-rate, third-rate, no, fourth-rate work.”) “That’s where the art world committed hara-kiri,” she said.

And when it was pointed out that enthusiastic crowds have since flocked to events like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Gates” in Central Park in 2005, or to Christian Marclay’s film “The Clock” at Lincoln Center last summer — and even to the Metropolitan that day — she waved it off. “New York has always been an art town,” she said.

As for her general attitude toward the Metropolitan itself, however, it had mellowed considerably by the time she’d finished her beer. “Wow, this is the way a museum should be, in my opinion,” she said, as we walked back through the Petrie Court, its French and Italian sculptures raked gloriously by the late afternoon light.

Then her voice turned wry. “But the Egyptian wing is underwhelming,” she said, only half-joking. “A revolution needs to be launched.”