Dear Jonathan, 28 Jan 2011

With all due respect, I differ from your interpretation of the Kylie Minogue video. Even though I found your selection and analysis of the video to be intriguing and provocative, I think you’re off track in connecting it to the Castration of Ouranos. While the video clearly opens with the suggestive spilling of liquids — coffee, then milk — and then other white things — marshmallows, then a briefcase’s contents — I don’t see anything there to bring to mind the violence of Cronus’ first violent act. I think you’re giving the video’s creators too much credit for invoking this less obvious iconography into the video. I think the coffee/milk spillage seems more like fluids of opposite types spilling onto the ground and fertilizing it.

I may well be wrong. And you may well be right. But, I don’t see any violence in the opening moments.

What we do certainly agree on, though, is the association of this video with the iconography of the Birth of Aphrodite. Since the song is from the new album “Aphrodite”, there’s no great surprise that such imagery is used in the presentation for video of this one song. What is surprising to me is that the imagery of so sophisticated. I froze one moment from the video, just as the singer emerges as Aphrodite from the thronging masses of lovers. It is very much the birth of Aphrodite that’s depicted there: doves especially give it away.

In the criticism that raged in the late 19^th century over increasingly licentious depictions of Aphrodite at her birth, the critic Earl Shinn wrote (1877) that Alexandre Cabanel’s “The Birth of Venus” manifested anatomical impossibility: “The form of this personage suffers from bonelessness. [Venus has] delicate and seductive as well as a rather uncelestial beauty.” Another critic in our day has written “In presenting a supposedly classical theme –no less than the birth of a powerful goddess – in a decidedly contemporary fashion, Cabanel had broken new stylistic ground, as well as his model’s back.” (B.J. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (Oxford 1986) 101.

As Ms Minogue gets hoisted above the crowd by all those lovers, she strikes the nearly clothed pose of Cabanel’s Venus.

Addendum: I am sorry if it made you uncomfortable to talk about this in class today. I am especially sorry, upon reflection, that I kept the floor to myself and didn’t allow you to respond afterwards. Do you agree with my overall assessment? … What is my overall assessment, anyway? It boils down to this: If I were to have to assign where the video goes in the Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, I would taxonomize it as OGCMA0152NOTAphroditeBirth_Minogue, and you would probably put it there, also; but, your paper seems to emphasize the connection to the castration of Ouranos more than I believe we can give the author credit for.

Thanks for writing a thought-provoking paper!