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The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism. Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.

Camille Paglia

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Camille Paglia
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: April 2
Art Historian
Essayist
Film Critic
Journalist
Literary Critic
Professor
Teacher
Writer
Endicott
New York
Camille Anna Paglia
Art
Drunk
Sophistication
Electrifying
Self
Sign
Attained
Overestimated
Love
Western
Scholarship
Sorely
Criticism
Visuals
Undervalued
Modern
Visual
Hugely
Language
Literary
Conceptual
History
Failed
Fraction
Culture
Images
Fractions
Centrality

More quotes by Camille Paglia

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You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.
Camille Paglia
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Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.
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In sex, man is driven into the very abyss which he flees. He makes a voyage to non-being and back.
Camille Paglia
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What is pretty in nature is confined to the thin skin of the globe upon which we huddle. Scratch that skin, and nature's daemonic ugliness will erupt.
Camille Paglia
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All men even, I have written, Jesus Christ began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes.
Camille Paglia
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Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?
Camille Paglia
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Heterosexual love,. is in sync with cosmic forces. Not everyone has the stomach for daily war with nature.
Camille Paglia
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Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.
Camille Paglia
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We should teach general ethics to both men and women, but sexual relationships themselves must not be policed. Sex, like the city streets, would be risk-free only in totalitarian regimes.
Camille Paglia
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Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.
Camille Paglia
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The capitalist distribution network, a complex chain of factory, transport, warehouse and retail outlet, is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture.
Camille Paglia
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Art is something out of the ordinary commenting on the ordinary.
Camille Paglia
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Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.
Camille Paglia
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The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.
Camille Paglia
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Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.
Camille Paglia
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We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.
Camille Paglia
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Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.
Camille Paglia
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Considering the popularity of soaps with the African-American audience, it's grotesque that the entertainment industry, for all its vaunted liberalism, is lagging so far behind social changes in the United States. And why has there never been an all-black daytime network soap? It would probably blow the white soaps off the map.
Camille Paglia
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Your life is a Fellini film, lacking only Anita Ekberg with a cat on her head.
Camille Paglia
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Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.
Camille Paglia