The Rape of the Masters

Kimball, a noted art critic himself, shows how academic art history is increasingly held hostage to radical cultural politics -- feminism, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, the whole armoury of academic anti-humanism. To make his point, Kimball shows how eight famous works of art (reprinted here as illustrations) have been made over to fit a radical ideological fantasy. Kimball then performs a series of intellectual rescue operations, showing how these great works should be understood through a series of illuminating readings in which art, not politics, guides the discussion.

Roger Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion and an art critic for the Spectator of London and National Review.