Soft Porn? The Washington Post Review

I put a link to Philip Kennicott's review essay under the "Reviews" heading to the right. Please take the time to read it carefully. In many respects, it's a very curious piece of writing. Calling EBJ's work "soft porn" is a lazy cheap shot. Kennicott seemingly can't make up his mind. He wants to hate it, but he can't quite. We'll discuss it in class.

One online commenter, Mandam, had a rather sharp response to his review:

Beauty once again takes a back seat to the politics of art. The fact that the Pre-Raphaelites looked to the past for inspiration is a crime for modernists with out the slightest acknowledgement that the 15th century artists looked back even further, to ancient Rome for their inspiration. Another modernist trope that shows up often in this criticism is that they didn't "confront the world directly". Apparently being seen as "avant-garde" is the main criterion for quality in the eyes of modernists who equate radical confrontation with progress.

"The Pre-Raphaelites are extremely problematic artists." Says who? When did striving for beauty become problematic? When did this need to "sort out the radical from the retrograde" become paramount? And why are those two the only valid positions one can take? In this purely intellectual exercise, beauty is a second class citizen, all the more ironic as he chastises Dickens for letting his "class prejudice" blind him to the beauty of a woman in a painting. It's Kennicott's modernist bias that blinds him once again to the main driver of most pre-modernist art, the pleasure of beauty.

As he attempts to psychoanalyze the motives of these "problematic" artists, he seems to recognize a "deep anxiety among the painters," allowing him to get closer, now that they may be more than mere decorators. "Were they in fact confronting the world directly, or through the artifice of mirrors and art?" In case anyone should be confused, all art is a form of artifice used to simultaneously escape from and peer closer than our earthly existence with pleasure, awe of both.

In the end, even Mr. Kennicott succumbs to the Pre-Raphealites' charms when he speaks of "our own guilty pleasures in looking at these works." Speak for yourself. Some of us have a less than problematic relationship with pleasure. It seems that even modern man is never too far from his puritanical past. Moving forward by looking backwards indeed.

How would you respond to "Mandam's" argument?