I hadn’t wanted to get into an art-historical tussle with someone who may not be reading your blog in any case and can’t defend their choices — so I didn’t comment before on the “Grand Narrative” m-curve with its strange peaks for Nefertiti and the Mona Lisa, its disdain for icons and Romanticism, and so forth – but really…

I don’t think it serves our purpose — the “map” simply doesn’t correspond well with the territory.

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From my point of view it’s so obviously designed around a set of personal preferences and prejudices as to be a serious distraction from the points you’re making about narrative and its social importance.

Consider: how would one arrange the “grand narrative” to include the composers – say, Palestrina 1526 – 1594, Monteverdi 1567 – 1643, Vivaldi 1678 – 1741, Bach 1685 – 1750, Handel 1685 – 1759, Mozart 1756 – 1791, Beethoven 1770 – 1827, Wagner 1813 – 1883, Verdi 1813 – 1901, Brahms 1833 – 1897, Tchaikovsky 1840 – 1893, and Mahler 1860 – 1911?

Or the painters for that matter, including say Giotto 1266 – 1337, Rublyev 1370 -1430 — who makes an absolute mockery of the diagram’s flatline for “religious icons” single-handed — Leonardo 1452 – 1519, Michelangelo 1475 – 1564, El Greco 1541 – 1614, Bosch ca 1450 – 1516, Rembrandt 1606 – 1669… and on up to Warhol — does he belong?

Could we include non-westerners in what must by now be looking more like a Himalayas than a Bactrian camel? I mean, what about Hokusai 1760 – 1849?

And turning to the poets, with a similar global scope… After Homer, Sophocles and so forth among the Greeks and Vergil, Catullus and others among the Romans, there’s Kalidasa ca 500, Li Po 701-762, Rumi 1207 – 1273, Dante 1265-1321, Shakespeare 1564 – 1623, Milton 1608 – 1674, Basho 1644-1694, Goethe 1749 -1832, Blake 1757 – 1827, Yeats 1865 -1939, Rilke 1875 – 1926…

I don’t mean to disparage Paglia, who turns an interesting mind onto a variety of topics and comes up with conclusions and suggestions that provoke thought, even if one’s thought differs from hers, nor indeed Venkat, whose book I am eager to read following Zenpundit’s and Scott Shipman’s applause — just to say that an evaluation such as Paglia’s will seem as wrong to some people as it seems right to others.

Jeff Conklin has a brilliant diagram in which he shows the “Pattern of cognitive activity of one designer – the “jagged” line” — it’s figure 2 in his “wicked problems” .pdf:

http://cognexus.org/wpf/wickedproblems.pdf

I suspect a “fair” telling of the art narrative would be closer to a “jagged Freytag” — but where its broader trends would go down and up would be very much a matter of taste.

Bach’s Matthew Passion, probably first performed in 1727, was almost entirely unknown outside Leipzig, and bach himself largely forgotten, until Mendelssohn revived it — and Bach’s reputation — in 1829.

If there are large trends within the jagged ranges of the arts — and I expect there are — then one of the problems of mapping them will be that what one counts as a valley and what as a peak will depend on where one is on the slopes — because the emergence of one new peak often causes the subsidence of another.

It’s a highly volcanic part of the world…