Critic Camille Paglia is very angry, and in Glittering Images she doesn't hold back in explaining why. In this "age of vertigo," she believes, we have no focus; the steady contemplation of art would reteach us to see--if only Americans didn't have such "open animosity" toward the art world, because the schools have utterly failed to educate students about it. So she embarks on a 5,000-year survey of select works of art--some great, some minor, all with something profound to say to those who will stop and look with an open mind.
The artistic works explored in Paglia's pithy essays, from an "elegant apparition" of Queen Nefertari painted on an ancient Egyptian wall to George Lucas's Revenge of the Sith, will always inform and sometimes surprise. With full color plates reproducing each of the works under discussion, recognizable masterpieces like Titian's revealing Venus with a Mirror and Picasso's "overwhelming and intimidating" Les Demoiselles d'Avignon are juxtaposed with John Wesley Hardrick's portrait of dress designer Xenia Goodloe and Eleanor Antin's 100 Boots postcard series--and, as mentioned, the films of George Lucas, one of the "most powerful and tenacious minds in contemporary culture."
Paglia's scintillating prose, acute analysis and perceptive assessments of five millennia of art history make her tour a joy to take, to argue about and to learn from. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher