Camille Paglia on Star Wars

Film  Camille Paglia's audio commentary for Basic Instinct is a classic of the form, if the form is free form feminist academia.  Over a decade later, here she is again, this time pronouncing George Lucas "the greatest artist of our time" which is a poke in the eye for Antony Gormley.  Here she is enjoying a tremble in the Dorling Kindersleys:
"The precise draftsmanship, mastery of perspective, and glorification of engineering in these superbly produced books have not been seen since modernist abstraction swept away the great tradition of architectural drawings of the neoclassic Beaux Arts school. In genre, the Cross-Sections books are anatomies, analogous to Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, with their medical dissections, botanical studies, and military designs for artillery, catapults, tanks, and then-impossible submarines and flying machines."
Bizarrely, when she spends a few paragraphs venerating the Mustafar duel from Revenge of the Sith, she fails to notice or at least mention that it's a different artist, Spielberg, who created the original animatic the sequence was filmed from.  She does call it "a collaborative triumph of modern installation art", which rather puts Lucas in the category as Warhol [via].

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