With The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, University of Pennsylvania English professor Steiner weighed in on the NEA funding controversies and Rushdie fatwa, finding our age literal-minded about how artistic images function in society. Scandal
was named a New York Times
Best Book for 1996. In this follow-up, Steiner posits that, unlike in previous eras, female beauty is no longer "the central aim of art." Whizzing through literature, visual arts, architecture, etc., Steiner muses on this theme in eight sections with titles like "The Infamous Promiscuity of Things and of Women" and "The Bride of Frankenstein: At Home with the Outsider." (She skirts topics like film and dance since beautiful women are still at the center of things there.) One obvious problem with such an all-embracing study is any author's human limits of expertise, but Steiner's judgments throughout seem to have been made in haste and ignorance. She lumps together painters (Gustave Moreau, Alphonse Mucha, Pierre Bonnard, Norman Rockwell) and writers (Penelope Fitzgerald, Andrei Makine, Philip Roth ) who have little in common apart from having once been thought "too pretty" and now acceptable, or else those who are "pointing us back toward beauty." Steiner thinks art should create a "win-win situation," where through "communication" and "mutuality" one begins to understand the "value" of "feminine" "beauty," but her engagement with the juggernaut of these terms, and of gender and representation in general, can be murky and baffling. ("[A] true prostitute's effects are indifferent to class, like the diseases she spreads," Steiner writes, unreflectively.) For Steiner, the art of the 20th century, "an art of garbage, babble, obscenity," is emblematized by Mapplethorpe's "classicistic renderings of gay sadomasochism." In trying to deal with all the arts, Steiner is illuminating on none of them. (Aug. 16)
