Critic as Censor: How the Humanities Sacrificed Art at the Altar of Theory

My beloved friend, mentor, and Columbia University Professor Howard Stein, was fond of saying, “The Enemy of the Arts is the Humanities.” That insight, and advice, has stuck with me over the past 35 years. Now, that phrase is not the glib provocation it may seem. It is a precise diagnosis of an institutional disease, a declaration of war against a century of academic drift that has created a schism between the act of creation and the act of analysis, and we’re here to discuss this with you today. The Arts, in their purest form, are the domain of creation itself, of non-verbal expression, of performance, and of the direct, visceral encounter with an aesthetic object.¹ They are a primary, generative impulse. The Humanities, by contrast, have become the domain of secondary analysis, of verbal codification, of research, and, most critically, of the theory of the arts.¹ The relationship is not symbiotic; it is parasitic. Over the past half‑century, many university humanities programs, eager to claim scientific gravitas yet wary of prescriptive taste, have privileged metacritical theory over direct aesthetic encounter, often at the expense of studio practice. They have replaced the artwork with the interpretation, the artist with the critic, and beauty with politics. The evidence for this enmity is overwhelming, found in the testimony of artists, the language of critics, and the desperation of shrinking university budgets.

The very structure of our academic and governmental institutions codifies this conflict, establishing a hierarchy that inevitably positions the humanities as the master of the arts. The National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, for instance, explicitly includes “the history, criticism and theory of the arts” within the definition of the humanities, while the arts are defined by the act of production.⁴ This creates a formal division of labor: one group makes, the other group explains. Within the university, where intellectual production is the coin of the realm, the act of explaining, analyzing, and theorizing is valorized as a higher-order activity. The humanist academic, therefore, is structurally positioned as the authority who decodes and bestows “meaning” upon the “raw material” produced by the artist. This institutional arrangement is not a collaboration between equals; it is a power dynamic that places the analyst above the creator, setting the stage for a conflict that is not accidental, but foundational.

The Artist’s Testimony: A Revolt Against Interpretation

The most potent evidence of this antagonism comes not from theorists, but from the creators themselves. For generations, artists have actively resisted, mocked, and condemned the academic-critical establishment that claims to be their greatest champion. This is not a theoretical squabble; it is a lived reality for creators who see their work distorted and violated. Georgia O’Keeffe waged a lifelong war against reductive interpretations. When male critics, and later feminist writers, insisted her magnified flower paintings were symbols of female genitalia, she was enraged.⁵ She vehemently denied these readings, insisting her focus was on the work’s formal qualities, its “form and color,” which she considered its “real thematic contents”.⁶ O’Keeffe, who disdained overtly political art, paraphrased as, “illustrative and lowbrow,” saw these interpretations as a crude imposition of a narrative that was alien to her artistic purpose.⁶ Her fury was directed at an interpretative machine that refused to see the painting for what it was, demanding instead that it conform to a pre-existing theory, whether psychoanalytic or political.

This same act of resistance is embodied in filmmaker David Lynch’s famous refusal to explain his work. Lynch maintains that words do “violence” to his films, which are meant to be apprehended through intuition, like music.⁸ He wants the audience to “fall in love with ideas” and have an experience in a “brand new world,” trusting that “the intuition saves us”.¹⁰ This stance is a complete repudiation of the entire project of academic film studies, which is predicated on verbal analysis, thematic decoding, and the search for fixed meaning. For Lynch, to explain the work is to kill it. The contempt is echoed throughout the arts. Vladimir Nabokov dismissed literary criticism as a useless exercise that reveals nothing but the critic’s own intellectual limitations, scorning the “communion of established views and academic traditions”.¹² J.D. Salinger’s famous reclusion was a physical retreat from a world of critics and interpreters he deemed “phony,” animated by a belief that an artist’s only concern is achieving “perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s”.¹⁴ Frank Zappa delivered one of the most blistering indictments, defining rock journalism as “people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read”.¹⁶ His core complaint was that critics, unqualified to discuss music, consistently bypassed the actual musical content of his work to focus on his persona and lyrics.¹⁸ This points to a fundamental incompetence at the heart of the critical enterprise. This conflict is not new; it is historical. The Impressionists, now safely canonized, were reviled by the critics of their day. They staged their own exhibition in 1874 specifically to break away from the academic restrictions of elitist society on art, which they saw as stifling and nepotistic.¹⁹ The critic Marc de Montifaud called Paul Cézanne a “madman, painting in a state of delirium tremens”.¹⁹ The very artists we now study as pillars of the canon were, in their time, insurgents fighting against the humanities establishment.

These artists are not merely complaining about “bad reviews.” Their objections constitute a philosophical rejection of the humanities’ core premise: that a work of art is an inert object to be vivisected and translated into verbal, analytical discourse. Lynch’s “violence,” O’Keeffe’s “form and color,” and Zappa’s “musical content” all point to the same truth: the artist operates in a paradigm of aesthetic presentation, while the humanities academic operates in a paradigm of discursive representation. The enmity is born in this translational violence, where the academic, to justify his own existence, must reduce the rich, ambiguous, and non-verbal experience of art to fit the narrow, logical terms of his own discipline. The artist experiences this reduction not as illumination, but as a violation of the work’s essential nature.

The Rise of the Priestly Caste: Jargon, Theory, and the Death of the Object

In the 20th century, the academic humanities, in a bid for institutional power and intellectual prestige, constructed an elaborate, in situ apparatus of theory and jargon that elevates the critic above the artist and alienates the public. The university absorbed what was once the public practice of criticism, an act of aesthetic judgment, and professionalized it into an academic discipline focused on interpretation and scholarship.²⁰ As the scholar John Guillory has detailed, this created a new class of “professing critics” whose primary audience was no longer the public, but other academics, and whose goal was no longer elucidation, but professional advancement.²⁰ The dominant ideology of this new priestly caste became postmodernism and post-structuralism, a school of thought born of skepticism that rejects universal truths, objective reality, and grand narratives like Progress or the Enlightenment.²² Its core tenets argue that meaning is never fixed but is instead a shifting product of language, context, and power structures.²⁵ In this world, all phenomena, including art, are merely a “text” to be deconstructed.²⁴

This new theoretical framework required a new, impenetrable language. Words like “pastiche,” “bricolage,” “simulacra,” “rhizomatic,” “intertextuality,” and verbs like “deconstructs,” “problematizes,” and “interrogates” became the markers of supposed intellectual sophistication.²⁷ This jargon serves a dual purpose: it creates an illusion of scientific rigor while simultaneously excluding the uninitiated, thereby solidifying the critic’s status as a high priest interpreting sacred texts for a lay audience that can no longer trust its own eyes. The goal is no longer to help the public appreciate art, but to demonstrate the critic’s mastery of theory. The art object itself becomes a mere pretext for a theoretical performance. In this paradigm, the artwork is stripped of its aesthetic power and treated as a symptom of a societal illness. A post-structuralist analysis of a Francis Bacon painting is not about the visceral horror of the image, but about “the human body in an unending encounter with outside vectors of force”.³¹ A critical-theory reading of Shakespeare’s

The Tempest reduces the play to a simple tract about the “power dynamics of colonialism”.³² In every case, the work of art vanishes, replaced by the critic’s ideological template.

This turn toward impenetrable theory was not an innocent intellectual fashion; it was a survival mechanism. As the humanities lost their traditional cultural authority, which was based on a shared understanding of aesthetic judgment and a classical canon, they faced immense institutional pressure from the better-funded and more “useful” sciences.³³ Unable to justify their existence on the old terms of taste-making, they invented a new form of authority based on specialized, quasi-scientific knowledge that only credentialed experts could possess. The jargon, the dismissed theories, the focus on “research;” these were the weapons developed in a turf war for institutional survival. This new model made their work seem rigorous and difficult, mimicking the sciences, and created a professional barrier to entry. The enemy, therefore, armed itself not out of a love for art, but out of a need for self-preservation.

The Economics of Enmity: A War for Scraps

The antagonism of the humanities toward the arts is fueled by economic desperation. Starved of resources in a university system dominated by the utilitarian logic of STEM, the humanities are forced to justify their existence by betraying the very nature of art, turning it from an object of contemplation into a tool for social engineering. The financial data tells a story of near-total institutional abandonment. At the federal level, the humanities receive a shockingly minuscule 0.13% of research funding in higher education. Of the $54 billion the U.S. government directs to university research, a mere $69 million goes to the humanities.³³ That amounts to a paltry $1.30 for every $1,000 spent.

This chasm is mirrored on university campuses, where arts and humanities programs are routinely axed to balance budgets.³⁵ At the University of North Carolina, the chemistry department spent $42.5 million in fiscal year 2022-23, while the dramatic art department spent just over $3 million. The top five STEM departments combined outspent the English, drama, and music departments by a colossal margin.³⁶ At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, science and engineering programs received nearly $500 million from the National Science Foundation in one period, while all non-science programs received just $26 million.³⁴ The institutional investment per student reveals an even starker picture of these priorities.

Department (UNC, FY 2022-23)	Undergraduate Majors	Total Expenditures	Expenditure per Major
Chemistry	323	$42,500,000	$131,579
Biology	1,528	$27,000,000	$17,670
English & Comp. Lit.	358	< $13,000,000	< $36,313
Dramatic Art	53	> $3,000,000	> $56,604
Source: Data compiled from University of North Carolina financial data 36

Faced with this economic reality and plummeting enrollment, the humanities have abandoned arguments for intrinsic value and resorted to a defensive pitch based on utility.³⁷ They claim a humanities education provides marketable “critical thinking skills,” makes one a better citizen, or fosters “empathy”.³⁹ Progressives go further, explicitly instrumentalizing the humanities as a “laboratory for social change” or a “training camp for activists”.⁴³ Such utilitarian rhetoric inadvertently concedes that aesthetic contemplation lacks autonomous worth. Art, as thinkers from Oscar Wilde to Emina Melonic have argued, is powerful precisely because it is “useless” in the instrumental sense.⁴⁴ Its purpose is not to serve a political agenda or provide moral instruction, but simply to be. By twisting a painting into a tool for critiquing capitalism or a novel into a lesson on social justice, the humanities strip the work of its aesthetic power and subordinate it to an external goal. This is the central act of enmity, born from a fight for budgetary scraps. The entire economic structure of the modern university, modeled on scientific R&D, compels the humanities to behave like a science, to adopt jargon, to frame inquiry as “research,” and to justify its existence with measurable “outcomes.” This institutional pressure is what forged the enemy.

The Counter-Reformation: In Defense of the Sensuous and the Sacred

The antidote to the sterile, politicized analysis of the modern humanities is a return to the direct, powerful, and unmediated encounter with the art object. This counter-reformation is championed by dissident critics like Camille Paglia, who has waged a decades-long war against academic trends that view art in a “reductively ironic or overly politicized way”.⁴⁵ Paglia attacks the “wizened, crabbed way of approaching art” that dominates secular academia, arguing for a return to beauty as a “primary principle of life”.⁴⁵ Her own approach is rooted in the “lavish and theatrical,” informed by an Italian immigrant culture where art was an integral part of daily existence, not an object for remote analysis.⁴⁵

Crucially, Paglia argues for restoring a sense of the sacred to our understanding of art. Though an atheist, she contends that a “religious perspective shapes my view of art,” which she sees as a “spiritual journey”.⁴⁵ She connects artistic creation to the primal, pagan, and often violent forces of nature and sex that the “rote secularism of the Western professional class” has sought to repress.⁴⁵ For Paglia, Picasso’s epochal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is not a formalist exercise in Cubism but a “pagan epiphany of ferocious sex goddesses”.⁴⁵ This perspective stands in direct opposition to the sanitized, intellectualized readings of the academy. It demands a “high-energy confrontation” with the work, not the self-pitying, therapeutic lens that has become fashionable in university departments.⁴⁷ This approach connects directly to the idea, expressed by artists from O’Keeffe to Wilde, that art is ultimately “useless”.⁶ Its value is intrinsic, not instrumental. The proper way to engage with it is with “patience and discipline,” allowing the work to speak for itself rather than imposing an external agenda upon it.⁴⁴

This clash is more than a disagreement over interpretive strategy; it is a war between two irreconcilable conceptions of what it means to be human. The post-structuralist theories that dominate the humanities are rooted in social constructionism, the belief that human identity and experience are products of language and societal power structures.²² Paglia’s philosophy is a direct assault on this premise. She argues for a biological realism, asserting that humanity is driven by primal, hormonal forces of aggression and eroticism that predate society.⁴⁷ Her analysis of art is consistently rooted in these pagan and biological realities.⁴⁵ Therefore, when a humanities scholar analyzes a painting through the lens of “power dynamics,” they apply a social-constructionist anthropology. When Paglia analyzes it, she applies a biological one. The enmity between the humanities and the arts is a proxy war between these two worldviews. The academic approach is hostile to art because its sanitized, disembodied view of humanity is hostile to the deep, pre-social, and often savage forces from which great art springs.

Addressing the Apologists: Why the Defenses of the Humanities Fail

The standard defenses for the current state of the humanities are hollow, self-serving, and crumble under the slightest scrutiny. Apologists claim the humanities provide “essential context” needed to understand art, pointing to works like Picasso’s Guernica and its connection to the Spanish Civil War.⁴² No one denies that context can be illuminating. The charge, however, is that the “context” provided by the modern humanities is not neutral information but a restrictive ideological framework that smothers the work. It is a form of academic “canonization” that tames radical art, locking it into a “neutralised state” where its disruptive power is contained.⁵¹ The context becomes an excuse to impose a political reading, turning the art into a mere illustration of a social theory.³² A direct, powerful aesthetic appreciation is entirely possible, and often preferable, without this academic baggage.⁵²

Another canard is that the humanities teach “critical thinking skills”.³⁹ The reality inside many departments is the opposite: the enforcement of a “monolithic political orthodoxy” and ideological litmus tests that actively stifle genuine thought.⁴³ The goal is not to think freely, but to apply the correct theory, Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, to the text at hand. The weaponized jargon is itself a form of anti-thought, designed to obscure rather than clarify.²⁷ Finally, there is the sentimental delusion that studying art fosters “empathy”.⁴² This is an unprovable and naive assertion. As the critic Justin Stover bluntly observes, a humanities education can just as easily make a person “selfish, confused, totally biased, and even miserable”.⁴¹ There is no evidence that art historians are more empathetic than plumbers. This defense mistakes intellectual analysis for moral development and reduces art to a form of therapy, a purpose it was never meant to serve.⁴⁴

The very nature of these defenses exposes the core of the problem. They are all extrinsic justifications, arguing for the humanities based on what they do for society or the individual, improving skills, fostering empathy, providing political critique. This is a tacit admission that the academic humanities have lost faith in the intrinsic value of the objects they study. They no longer believe that a great painting or poem is worth contemplating for its own sake. Their reliance on these utilitarian claims reveals a deep-seated institutional insecurity and a catastrophic loss of purpose. They are defending the “case” for the humanities, not the humanities themselves.⁴¹ This is the ultimate proof of their enmity: they no longer believe in the art they are supposed to serve.

Conclusion: Liberating Art from the Academy

Howard Stein’s statement was not a provocation. It was a literal truth that diagnoses the institutional reality of our time. The modern academic humanities, through a toxic combination of intellectual fashion, professional self-interest, and economic desperation, have become the primary antagonist to the creation and appreciation of genuine art. They have entombed art in a mausoleum of theory, wrapped it in the burial shrouds of jargon, and performed a political autopsy on its corpse, searching for evidence of ideological sin. They have taught generations of students to distrust their own senses, to look at a painting and see not color and form, but a “problematic” text. The future of the arts depends on their liberation from this suffocating embrace. The path forward lies not in more analysis, more critique, or more theory, but in a renewed, courageous, and unmediated encounter with the power of the art object itself. It requires that we once again learn to see, to hear, and to feel, rather than merely to interpret. The true enemy of the Arts is not ignorance or indifference, but the vast, credentialed, and well-meaning intellectual apparatus that claims to be its greatest friend.

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