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September 13, 2010 at 2:47 pm (Uncategorized)

Camile Pagilia rants:

Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…

… Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…

At the risk of answering a rhetorical question, no. There never will be an exhausted end of the sexual revolution, since the sexual revolution is itself an expression of our own exhaustion. Paglia’s own argument belies her claim, since if the sexual revolution were vibrant and ennobling- the sort of thing that could be exhausted- then the one who captured its death in art would make some truly wonderful art. The death of the noble makes high art: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ionesco, Beckett, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Sartre, James Joyce, Picasso, and any number of other artists in the first six or seven decades of the twentieth century got to depict the meteoric death and collapse of a culture, and their art is wonderful. The sexual revolution was after all this, when things had already burnt out and gone black. Eliot had fragments he could shore against his ruin – these were the last intelligible fragments of a dying culture that fractured and blazed before it finally burnt out.