Pure elitist snobbery.
I am a self admitted non-artist. If I pick up a pencil and have a go at portraying some fruit so I can an idea across am I degrading serious artists?
Unfortunately the tools I have at my disposal for getting ideas across are few, and most of them involve language. If someone can't use the language at the level of someone who studies and perfects prose for a living are they to be derided?
She makes a point about Art needing to be moved back to the center of education. I suppose she feels this would solve the problem she has identified. I don't recall that Art has ever been at the center, and honestly don't think it needs to be there except for specialized education programs.
c,
Arguably, art WAS at the center of education. At that time though, formal education taken at a relative handful of institutions was unavailable to the unwashed multitudes.
In this day and age, it is damn near impossible to be rejected for an assoc or bacc program outside of the Ivy League, other successful privates, and a handful of elite publics.
As education has become more widely available to a wider population, so the study of art (using the term liberally) has declined. A huge majority of current students, if polled right now, would declare that getting a good job is the goal of college, not studying art for its own sake.
It's a good article. I don't think she quite understands Christianity, which she seems to think of as some grim puritanical force, overlooking the fact that much of the great art she praises came out of Christian societies or even directly related to the religion.
I think she's right about the academy with its "isms" (post-structuralism, for example) having destroyed poetry - that and drugs, which somehow made any raving into "poetry," no matter how unmelodic and self-referential. But one thing that kids love about rap, whether they know it or not, is that it has the basics of poetry: rhythm, a repeated rhyming pattern, and it's meant to be understood. Personally, I think poetry is an inborn linguistic need, and I think we'll see a resurgence of it, especially with folks like Camille Paglia willing to fight for it.