[T]he absurdities of Benton were so absurd, and I myself was so
thoroughly used to them, that they had come to seem to me,
almost, the ordinary absurdities of existence. Like Gertrude, I
cherished my grievances against God, but to some of them I had
become very accustomed…

—Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

As far as I know, the great novel of graduate-student
life has yet to be written. As for the life of the graduate student of art history,
a subgenre of subgenres, one finds virgin literary
terrain.
Kingsley Amis gave us Dixon and Welch, and you could do worse for
a model than that. Lucky Jim’s archetype of hapless lecturer and
dense don may find a good home just about anywhere you are
thirty, you are in your fourth year of researching the role of
dwarfs in seventeenth-century Spanish portraiture (with a nod
towards Veronese), you have spent a fruitless year dilating on Oriental motifs in Regency caricature, and
your funding is up for annual review. Evelyn Waugh’s poor Paul
Pennyfeather from Decline and Fall, sent down for indecent
behavior (“I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir.
That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down
for indecent behavior”), might
serve as fair warning for what
happens when things turn south, and why a graduate
student
should
avoid attention. David
Lodge’s campus trilogy with Philip Swallow and
Morris Zapp—Changing Places,
Small
World, and Nice Work—can also do a good turn to any young adjunct professor
contending with his generation’s Stanley Fish.

But as a guide to studying the likes of art history years on
end
(which can
include a visiting lectureship here or there), Randall Jarrell’s
Pictures from an Institution is the closest one comes to
Baedeker’s. Jarrell’s erudite putdown of Benton, based on the
poet’s experience teaching at the progressive Sarah Lawrence
College for Women in the late 1940s, should be awarded each year
as the booby-prize to the most ill-treated graduate student in
the realm—a consolation that life at school has always been
strange, and that progress can sometimes mean a stampede over your
mangled corpse. The life of the mind may be all that and a bag of
chips, but it’s nothing up against the life of the stomach.
The motivating
factors of grad-life can be as base as they come.

At the opposite extreme to grad-life is
the
undergraduate. At the Benton where I studied art history
as a graduate student, and which I had an occasion to revisit, the dew that collects
on these princes and princesses is the ichor of Greek mythology.
Here a
fountain replenishes itself every year with
fresh faces. A Rhine flows with red-cheeked Kewpies. Fashionable
gamines smell of Kiehl’s.
Blond tresses sprout
Mikimoto.
These undergraduates have been imbued with an
admiration for their elders and a sinfully sophisticated libido.
They are the reason Benton exists—forget Spanish portraiture and
Regency caricature. They need teaching
assistants, and whether you know it or not, for them you are to
assist. “At Benton they wanted you really to believe everything
that they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was.”

The daily psychodrama mostly unfolds in the afternoons,
during office hours in the Brutalist
building you called home. The slender legs and arms of
future film-makers, auction-house workers, and
assistants on the Council on Foreign Relations litter the
corridors like limbs from sacrifice. Across from your temporary
office, a professor in Chinese art slams her door
pointedly at your arrival. You press into your fourth
decade of life, but you have yet to be accorded the respect that
comes from
adulthood.
The fact that you are the most educated,
privileged person who is not a felon or insane to live this
far below the poverty line is not lost on you. You take a
pauper’s pride in penury, as though asceticism has
focused you on your studies and weakened you from deviation. The
queerness of the situation can be downright pleasurable.

[W]hen I dream I’m back at Benton it’s as if I were in a hothouse
or a—or with the Lotus-Eaters. I can feel Benton all over me
like a warm bath, and I try to move my arms and legs, and I can’t
and I say to myself, “you’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got
to get out of here!” and then I wake up.

“To get out of here,” you endure
strange circumstances. Without teaching assistantships, study
carrels, and library privileges, you and your fellow
Nibelungs would be out of Nibelheim. Tenured faculty would be
forced to grade papers. Alberich would be less than
pleased. You can also forget researching Spanish dwarfs
for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes friends ask what it was like to study at Benton,
expecting stories of radicalism and ramparts. But of course
progressivism on the inside can seem downright
conservative. “If Benton had had an administration building with
pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the
truth, and the truth shall make you feel guilty.” And as
Gertrude notes: “Americans are so
conformist that even their dissident groups exhibit the most
abject conformity.”

As in any institution with a healthy
department of semiotics and a school of “modern culture
and media,” by the nature of subject matter alone a department
of art history can seem old-fashioned, no matter how
radical the instruction. Compared to the larger field of art
history,
Benton’s department might even be tame. The
assumption of progressiveness often
leads to a complacency in appropriating the latest in what’s new.
Radicalism ten years out of date can be as
decorous as tea and biscuits. Likewise, the same graduate
students who might lament the radicalization of art history
still bemoan Benton’s retardation in radical teaching. To take
an unintended lesson from Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals,
if tenure will result from radicalism, then radical they must
become. Accommodation is the surest path out of Benton and perhaps
the only way to get a job. The border between idealism and a life
out of poverty is one that graduate students eagerly line up to
cross.

In fact, at Benton, the biggest faux pas is not rooted in bad politics
but in bad manners. “Almost all the people there were agreed about
everything, and glad to be agreed, and right to be agreed.”
No one likes to have bulls run in the china shop.
From the most senior tenured faculty member down to the most meager first-year
grad student, relationships are built on codependence—and often
mistrust. The faculty might yank your funding at any moment. You
might try to unionize your fellow grad-students or make a
general stink. Meanwhile, everyone badmouths each other in a
cosmic circle of
who-slept-with-whom-a-decade-ago gossip. It
would make a spinster blush. And so
it goes.

But somewhere along the line something gives, and most often
it is the art that gives.

If you had given a Benton student a pencil and a piece of paper,
and asked her to draw something, she would have looked at you in
helpless astonishment: it would have been plain to her that you
knew nothing about art.

To put it another way, as Waugh writes in Brideshead
Revisited:

“‘Charles,’ said Cordelia, ‘Modern Art is all bosh,
isn’t it?’”

“‘Great bosh.’”

Art needs defending from a great deal of bosh—not necessarily
the bosh of Modern Art, which I rather
enjoy—but from the many accepted practices of what one might
call anti-art. Every day, the next generation of art
historians are rendered incapable of doing a thing about it.

Anti-art was part of my reason for visiting old Benton.
I had been invited to give a talk—not by Benton, but by the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute—on why I had left the school’s art history program without
taking a degree.[1]

It was something of a sore
subject for everyone involved (in particular, my mother).
Brideshead, of all books, provided a
point of departure for my thinking. A subtext on art underlies
this novel, especially if you consider Charles’s early comparison between
Collins, “the embryo don,” and Sebastian.

Without venturing into the superlatives
of “Against
Interpretation,” Susan Sontag’s essay “against the revenge
of the intellect,” I came to wonder if good art history could
depend on whether a practice revives art or fossilizes
art—between what one might call the Flyte and Collins
approaches. I also
wondered whether one could see a correlation
between the regenerative properties of scholarship and the
generosity (or lack thereof) of the professoriate—both words coming out of the
same root for “birth.” This is a touchy subject. But when you
believe that the achievement of art adds up to more than the sum
of the social and material circumstances of its creation, as do
I,
you have to think that your sense of economy is
different from that of a parsimonious don whose approach is
to divide up the spoils of production and take most
of it for keeps.

The temperament of a critic is, alas, the opposite of today’s art historian, and
art history could use more critics. I had forgotten how
enfeebling the “open” atmosphere of
the university had become until I returned to Benton. As an art critic for
this magazine, I rarely encounter a hostile gallery or
museum. Except for the boorish Whitney, almost everyone welcomes
the attention of a review, however critical. But at a progressive
school like Benton, where all the important truths of life have
been agreed upon beforehand and heaven is fast on its way to earth, no one
wants to hear a peep. Upon the announcement of my talk,
rumor has it, the
faculty at Benton confabulated, and somewhere along the line
it was understood that one professor from the department would attend. Two
professors would have confessed genuine interest; zero
professors, a sign of intimidation. But one was just enough to
keep an eye on things, enforce the silent treatment, and radiate
bad vibes.

And so it went off as it did. The talk was
loaded with praise for Benton (Benton had accepted me, funded me,
and imparted the lesson that academia wasn’t for
everyone). But minds had been made up. When I approached the lone
professor afterwards and offered what we in the real world might
call good manners (an extended hand, a “thanks for coming”), the
professor responded “it’s your trip,” turned, and spontaneously
combusted. The grad students meanwhile slunk down the side
aisles. Although a number of them had sent words of encouragement
before my talk, few asked questions after it. All of
them—friends and colleagues, I had supposed—declined an
invitation to dinner, usually by means of the old mafia trick of
speaking with hand cupped over mouth. Whispering,
cigarette-smoking shadows, the embryo dons slipped into the
night, surely never to make eye contact with me again.
They have their priorities at Benton, and criticism isn’t one of them.
Doubtless they wondered where I went wrong.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. 
   “Why I left Brown,” a talk by James Panero, was delivered
   on November 9th in 102 Wilson Hall, Brown Unversity,
   Providence, Rhode Island.
   Go back to the text.