Venus in Exile

Publishers Weekly

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 artof 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) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Steiner (humanities, Univ. of Pennsylvania) examined the role of beauty in art in The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism. Here she shows how traditional forms of beauty disappeared from art in the 20th century, when artists rejected this ideal as placing undue importance on ornament while often objectifying the female body. She shows how representations of beauty disappeared from art, citing examples from literature, popular culture, visual arts, and even pornography in this heavily illustrated book. These artists, she argues, provided considerable food for thought but left a hunger for the pleasure of visual beauty. In the early days of the 21st century, Steiner sees a resurgence of female beauty in art but with the continuing struggle to see women as fully human. By examining what happened to art and popular culture when beauty became suspect, Steiner hopes to lead us to a better understanding of beauty as a kind of communication in human culture. Steiner is both a respected scholar and a talented and accessible writer, and her book is strongly recommended for all academic art and feminist studies collections. Drew Harrington, Pacific Univ., Forest Grove, OR Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

This latest installment of Steiner's (The Scandal of Pleasure, 1995) distinguished work in aesthetics considers 20th-century art in light of its peculiar hostility to beauty. "Beauty," for our purposes, refers to that intersection of pleasure, empathy, and revelation that Western art since the Renaissance has embodied in the female nude. Steiner argues that the formalist aesthetics of modernism and the anti-aesthetic politics of modern feminism have both been intensely hostile to this principle, and that both reactions were fueled by the avant-garde's contempt for bourgeois domesticity. Beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Steiner examines key works of art and literature to discern the outlines of the modernist tradition-in which femininity, ornament, passivity, intimacy, and communication are suppressed in favor of misogyny, formal purity, exploitation, impersonality, and obscurity. In the modernist imagination, beauty-as-woman must be sacrificed (rather than celebrated) in the name of a formal purity that insulates both art and artist from their audience. Feminism has demanded the same sacrifice, in the name of ideological purity. Later movements that attempt to retrieve lost notions of ornament and community (such as postmodernism) have fallen prey to the what the author calls the "cycle of the avant-garde," whereby an audience eventually expects and even demands art that is hostile, alien, and unsympathetic. Now, however, with the dawn of a new century, beauty's restoration is at last under way. In the final chapters, Steiner considers some recent works (many but not all by women) in which aesthetic delight is a source of community and nourishment, instead of transcendentisolation. Abstract expressionism, with Pollock as its poster-child, is indisputably the apotheosis of the modernist anti-beauty; at the opposite pole, she places Mark Morris, whose humane and humorous revision of classical ballet she finds the sturdiest vessel of Venus's return. Like most cultural critics, Steiner writes more persuasively and authoritatively about texts than about images, but the sensibility of her study is rich enough to move beyond literary concerns, its prose at once lucid and provocative, sophisticated and sincere. Striking, fresh, and convincing: Anyone who thinks hard about art and gender should read this.