Books, Arts & Manners: Hot for Teacher

Sex, Art, and American Culture, by Camille Paglia (Vintage, 337 pp., $13)

IT IS POSSIBLE that some of the people who, two years ago, read Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, an eccentric seven-hundred-page survey of Western art from the Stone Age to the Yellow Decade, were so taken with its discussions of Goethe’s ‘Venetian Epigrams” and the paintings of Sir Edward Burne-Jones that they are now thinking of buying Sex, Art, and American Culture hoping for more of the same. More likely, Miss Paglia’s first readers want Madonna, pornography, date rape, and roller-derby bouts with feminists and deconstructionist literary theorists.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Sex, Art, and American Culture, by Camille Paglia (Vintage, 337 pp., $13)

IT IS POSSIBLE that some of the people who, two years ago, read Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, an eccentric seven-hundred-page survey of Western art from the Stone Age to the Yellow Decade, were so taken with its discussions of Goethe’s ‘Venetian Epigrams” and the paintings of Sir Edward Burne-Jones that they are now thinking of buying Sex, Art, and American Culture hoping for more of the same. More likely, Miss Paglia’s first readers want Madonna, pornography, date rape, and roller-derby bouts with feminists and deconstructionist literary theorists.