Secondhand Gnostics

A review by Andrew Ferguson in Liberty

In The Rape of the Masters, New Criterion editor Roger Kimball presents eight paintings, along with an academic's ridiculous commentary on each. Others are equally as silly as Lubin's: visions of a Madonna with Child seen in three bands of Rothko color, or castration anxiety inserted into a Courbet hunting scene. But the silliness is a bonus; what's important is how far removed the commentaries are from the works they discuss: the paintings disappear from sight, and only academic digressions are left. Staple our pages to the canvas, say the critics, because without our words you'll never understand what's beneath.

This is an old heresy, perhaps the first: it answers to "gnosticism." Heresies have a way of coming back around; where once gnosticism concerned itself with saying people needed special secret knowledge to be saved, now it's saying people need special secret knowledge to understand art in a culturally conscious way. Of course, to these particular heretics, salvation and cultural consciousness are one and the same.