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Q: In the book you pose the question, where will our future artists come from? What’s the answer to that, do you think?

A: You have to start at the primary-school level. The major universities long ago abandoned the idea of great art in the canon. The canon has been associated with conservatives. But I believe in greatness in the arts. It’s very unfashionable to use the word "greatness." That’s what a critic should do, determine what is great and lasting and universal and can speak to the whole world. You may be very, very interested in certain things in the arts, but is this an essential work, a work that in the future could represent the age in some way? I think that the artists of today are trapped in this PR culture, where they feel they have to make a tremendous shock thing to get attention, and any publicity is better than none. I say that that is not responsibility to your talent. If you have a talent, you should withdraw from the chic scene, go someplace, and develop an artwork or a series of artworks and live with it.

I’m hoping I’m an example, because for five years, I stayed off the scene to do this book. I can get publicity if I snap my fingers, but I felt that this is an important topic, poetry and art in America, and it deserves total devotion. Over the last few years, [there were] all kinds of things on the Web, like "Paglia’s 15 minutes are over" and so on. I remember seeing one thing that said, "You mentioned Camille Paglia. Oh, isn’t she like five minutes ago?" That kind of snarky thing. This is the kind of pressure that young artists feel. I am lucky enough to have a number of books and have a job teaching at a college, so I could ignore this kind of pressure, but that is really ruthless. And what that does for the young artist is it undermines their confidence, the sense that you’ve gotta get out there, gotta get out there. If people really want to contribute to the history of criticism or the history of literature and art, they need to take time. I teach in Philadelphia, but I live in the suburbs. I go home. I look at the trees, I feed the birds. I get invitations all the time, to this event, that premiere, this and that. I never go. There’s a lot of people who love to make that circuit. But you begin to absorb this kind of brittle, artificial thing that all cities, all great metropolises, always generate, whether it was ancient Rome or Athens or Renaissance Florence or right down to modern New York. That social scene is particularly fatal to the aspiring artist now. It wasn’t this bad at all when I was in college. Even in grad school, I was going to Greenwich Village in the late ’60s, early ’70s, taking the train down from New Haven. You really had a sense of the arts and popular culture and hippie stores and silver-jewelry makers. You just had a sense of a kind of integration of popular culture and the fine arts. It was just a very exciting time. Now it’s awful. I go to New York, and I can hardly bear to go downtown anywhere. I just feel everybody is just looking at each other and checking each other out, and there’s a certain way you’ve got to look, you have a code that you’re wearing that tells what group you belong to, what are your beliefs. No art can come out of that context. You’ve got to give yourself emotionally to art, you’ve got to.

Q: What’s next for you?

A: I have my third essay collection under contract to Vintage, and it will cover the period from 1994 to now. And then I’m currently working on a project, and I don’t want to say too much about it, but it’s about the visual arts and Romanticism. I have a piece on plastic surgery coming out in the next Harper’s Bazaar, where I criticize American plastic surgeons for having no knowledge of art. I say that European and Brazilian plastic surgeons are basing their surgery on older women on paintings and things like that, but our American plastic surgeons are basing it on Barbie dolls. So women look awful, older women look awful. Whereas a Catherine Deneuve, in Europe, looks fabulous. She looks like a nice, sparkling version of her own age.

There’s no way to stop the plastic-surgery movement, I feel. I don’t think there’s any way to stop it, and I wouldn’t want to try to stop it, because even though I don’t want to do it — not unless things get really, really bad, not unless people stop, horrified, in the street — I still feel that if people want to reshape themselves, remodel themselves, it’s perfectly legitimate, making yourself a work of art, et cetera. But I am asking for a rethinking of the models that we’re using, because, like, Lana Turner, she looked so glamorous in her movies of the late ’50s and early ’60s. She looked so good. But she looked like a beautiful, sensual version of her own age. There was a kind of sexual maturity that she had. I think that American women who are depending on these really crass and illiterate surgeons are in a situation which is really bad. A 55-year-old woman should not look like a 25-year-old woman, or not try to, because there’s no way you’re going to win. A man is always going to want the 25-year-old woman. Instead, you have to add to your power as a woman. You have to show a knowledge of the world in your face, at the same time being glamorous. I want people to look at the history of Hollywood and realize how great the stars looked. The aging stars really handled it well. They weren’t made into nymphets or ingénues. That’s what we’re doing now, and it’s just horrifying. I’m a great soap-opera fan, and I’m very alarmed, like on All My Children, there are these really talented young women, and they’re really good actresses, these women can’t be older than their early 20s, mid 20s, and they are having surgery too early. I can see their faces start to get vapid. It’s a horrible pressure in the TV industry, and in the whole nation at large. It’s not plastic surgery per se; it’s how we are conceiving of the ideal type. The aging woman should have dignity. We’re in a very bad period right now.

Camille Paglia speaks at the Brattle Theatre, in Cambridge, on April 12 at 6 p.m. Free tickets are available at the Harvard Book Store. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com