- Clement Greenberg Avant Garde And Kitsch 1939 Pdf 2017
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Clement Greenberg
- Clement Greenberg Imagines the Kitsch Public - Download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read. Avant-Garde and Kitsch is the title of a 1939 essay by Clement Greenberg, first published in the Partisan Review, in which he claimed that avant-garde and modernist art was a means to resist the.
- AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH Clement Greenberg This is Greenberg's breakthrough essay from 1939, written for the Partisan Re-view when he was twenty-nine years of age and at the time more involved with literature than with painting. He came, later, to reject much of the essay -notably the definition of kitsch which he later believed to be ill.
- This is Greenberg's breakthrough essay from 1939, written for the Partisan Review when he was twenty-nine years of age and at the time more involved with literature than with painting. He came, later, to reject much of the essay - notably the definition of kitsch which he later believed to be ill thought out (as, indeed, it is.).
- “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1939 by Clement Greenberg By this point only the book and reference book operations still bore the original family name. The book is a continuation of Eco’s aesthetic work On Beauty: Ironically, art for art’s sake often led to a kind of academicism.
This is Greenberg's breakthrough essay from 1939, written for the Partisan Review when he was twenty-nine years of age and at the time more involved with literature than with painting. He came, later, to reject much of the essay -- notably the definition of kitsch which he later believed to be ill thought out (as, indeed, it is.) Later he came to identify the threat to high art as coming from middlebrow taste, which in any event aligns much more closely with the academic than kitsch ever did or could. The essay has an air and assurance of '30s Marxism, with peculiar assumptions such as that only under socialism could the taste of the masses be raised. But for all that, the essay stakes out new territory. Although the avant-garde was an accepted fact in the '30s. Greenberg was the first to define its social and historical context and cultural import. The essay also carried within it the seeds of his notion of modernism. Despite its faults and sometimes heady prose, it stands as one of the important theoretical documents of 20th century culture.
-- TF
ONEAND THE SAME civilization produces simultaneously two suchdifferent things s a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song,or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover.All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts ofthe same culture and products of the same society. Here, however,their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by EddieGuest -- what perspective of culture is large enough to enableus to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other?Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame ofa single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted-- does this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of thenatural order of things? Or is it something entirely new, andparticular to our age?
The answer involves more than an investigation in aesthetics.It appears to me that it is necessary to examine more closelyand with more originality than hitherto the relationship betweenaesthetic experience as met by the specific -- not the generalized-- individual, and the social and historical contexts in whichthat experience takes place. What is brought to light will answer,in addition to the question posed above, other and perhaps moreimportant questions.
A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the courseof its development, to justify the inevitability of its particularforms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writersmust depend in large part for communication with their audiences.It becomes difficult to assume anything. All the verities involvedby religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question,and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the responseof his audience to the symbols and references with which he works.In the past such a state of affairs has usually resolved itselfinto a motionless Alexandrianism, an academicism in which thereally important issues are left untouched because they involvecontroversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosityin the small details of form, all larger questions being decidedby the precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanicallyvaried in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced:Statius, mandarin verse, Roman sculpture, Beaux-Arts painting,neo-republican architecture.
Clement Greenberg Avant Garde And Kitsch 1939 Pdf 2017
It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the decay ofour present society that we -- some of us -- have been unwillingto accept this last phase for our own culture. In seeking to gobeyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society hasproduced something unheard of heretofore: -- avant-garde culture.A superior consciousness of history -- more precisely, the appearanceof a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism-- made this possible. This criticism has not confronted our presentsociety with timeless utopias, but has soberly examined in theterms of history and of cause and effect the antecedents, justificationsand functions of the forms that lie at the heart of every society.Thus our present bourgeois social order was shown to be, not aneternal, 'natural' condition of life, but simply thelatest term in a succession of social orders. New perspectivesof this kind, becoming a part of the advanced intellectual conscienceof the fifth and sixth decades of the nineteenth century, soonwere absorbed by artists and poets, even if unconsciously forthe most part. It was no accident, therefore, that the birth ofthe avant-garde coincided chronologically -- and geographically,too -- with the first bold development of scientific revolutionarythought in Europe.
CLEMENT GREENBERG AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH 1939 PDF - Avant-garde and kitsch are contrasting concepts of art. These two concepts prevailed in the art world during a trivial time in history for artist.
True, the first settlers of bohemia -- which was then identicalwith the avant-garde -- turned out soon to be demonstrativelyuninterested in politics. Nevertheless, without the circulationof revolutionary ideas in the air about them, they would neverhave been able to isolate their concept of the 'bourgeois'in order to define what they were not. Nor, without the moralaid of revolutionary political attitudes would they have had thecourage to assert themselves as aggressively as they did againstthe prevailing standards of society. Courage indeed was neededfor this, because the avant-garde's emigration from bourgeoissociety to bohemia meant also an emigration from the markets ofcapitalism, upon which artists and writers had been thrown bythe falling away of aristocratic patronage. (Ostensibly, at least,it meant this -- meant starving in a garret -- although, as wewill be shown later, the avant-garde remained attached to bourgeoissociety precisely because it needed its money.)
Yet it is true that once the avant-garde had succeeded in 'detaching'itself from society, it proceeded to turn around and repudiaterevolutionary as well as bourgeois politics. The revolution wasleft inside society, a part of that welter of ideological strugglewhich art and poetry find so unpropitious as soon as it beginsto involve those 'precious' axiomatic beliefs upon whichculture thus far has had to rest. Hence it developed that thetrue and most important function of the avant-garde was not to'experiment,' but to find a path along which it wouldbe possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideologicalconfusion and violence. Retiring from public altogether, the avant-gardepoet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art byboth narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolutein which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolvedor beside the point. 'Art for art's sake' and 'purepoetry' appear, and subject matter or content becomes somethingto be avoided like a plague.
It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-gardehas arrived at 'abstract' or 'nonobjective'art -- and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries ineffect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on itsown terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape-- not its picture -- is aesthetically valid; something given,increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Contentis to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of artor literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anythingnot itself.
But the absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, beingwhat he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others.The very values in the name of which he invokes the absolute arerelative values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns outto be imitating, not God -- and here I use 'imitate'in its Aristotelian sense -- but the disciplines and processesof art and literature themselves. This is the genesis of the 'abstract.'(1)In turninghis attention away from subject matter of common experience, thepoet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft. Thenonrepresentational or 'abstract,' if it is to haveaesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but muststem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original. Thisconstraint, once the world of common, extroverted experience hasbeen renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplinesby which art and literature have already imitated the former.These themselves become the subject matter of art and literature.If, to continue with Aristotle, all art and literature are imitation,then what we have here is the imitation of imitating. To quoteYeats:
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence.
Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, evenKlee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspirationfrom the medium they work in.(2)The excitement of their art seemsto lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the inventionand arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., tothe exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in thesefactors. The attention of poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé,Valéry, Éluard, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens, evenRilke and Yeats, appears to be centered on the effort to createpoetry and on the 'moments' themselves of poetic conversion,rather than on experience to be converted into poetry. Of course,this cannot exclude other preoccupations in their work, for poetrymust deal with words, and words must communicate. Certain poets,such as Mallarmé and Valéry (3)are more radical in this respect thanothers -- leaving aside those poets who have tried to composepoetry in pure sound alone. However, if it were easier to definepoetry, modern poetry would be much more 'pure' and'abstract.' As for the other fields of literature --the definition of avant-garde aesthetics advanced here is no Procrusteanbed. But aside from the fact that most of our best contemporarynovelists have gone to school with the avant-garde, it is significantthat Gide's most ambitious book is a novel about the writing ofa novel, and that Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wakeseem to be, above all, as one French critic says, the reductionof experience to expression for the sake of expression, the expressionmattering more than what is being expressed.
That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating -- thefact itself -- calls for neither approval nor disapproval. Itis true that this culture contains within itself some of the veryAlexandrianism it seeks to overcome. The lines quoted from Yeatsreferred to Byzantium, which is very close to Alexandria; andin a sense this imitation of imitating is a superior sort of Alexandrianism.But there is one most important difference: the avant-garde moves,while Alexandrianism stands still. And this, precisely, is whatjustifies the avant-garde's methods and makes them necessary.The necessity lies in the fact that by no other means is it possibletoday to create art and literature of a high order. To quarrelwith necessity by throwing about terms like 'formalism,'purism,' 'ivory tower' and so forth is eitherdull or dishonest. This is not to say, however, that it is tothe social advantage of the avant-garde that it is whatit is. Quite the opposite.
The avant-garde's specialization of itself, the fact that itsbest artists are artists' artists, its best poets, poets' poets,has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerlyof enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, butwho are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation intotheir craft secrets. The masses have always remained more or lessindifferent to culture in the process of development. But todaysuch culture is being abandoned by those to whom it actually belongs-- our ruling class. For it is to the latter that the avant-gardebelongs. No culture can develop without a social basis, withouta source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde,this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that societyfrom which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it hasalways remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradoxis real. And now this elite is rapidly shrinking. Since the avant-gardeforms the only living culture we now have, the survival in thenear future of culture in general is thus threatened.
We must not be deceived by superficial phenomena and localsuccesses. Picasso's shows still draw crowds, and T. S. Eliotis taught in the universities; the dealers in modernist art arestill in business, and the publishers still publish some 'difficult'poetry. But the avant-garde itself, already sensing the danger,is becoming more and more timid every day that passes. Academicismand commercialism are appearing in the strangest places. Thiscan mean only one thing: that the avant-garde is becoming unsureof the audience it depends on -- the rich and the cultivated.
Is it the nature itself of avant-garde culture that is aloneresponsible for the danger it finds itself in? Or is that onlya dangerous liability? Are there other, and perhaps more important,factors involved?
Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-guard.True enough -- simultaneously with the entrance of the avant-garde,a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West:that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful name of Kitsch:popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes,magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics,Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc.For some reason this gigantic apparition has always been takenfor granted. It is time we looked into its whys and wherefores.
Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanizedthe masses of Western Europe and America and established whatis called universal literacy.
Prior to this the only market for formal culture, as distinguishedfrom folk culture, had been among those who, in addition to beingable to read and write, could command the leisure and comfortthat always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some sort. Thisuntil then had been inextricably associated with literacy. Butwith the introduction of universal literacy, the ability to readand write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, andit no longer served to distinguish an individual's cultural inclinations,since it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes.
The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and pettybourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency,but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for theenjoyment of the city's traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless,their taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside,and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, thenew urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide themwith a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fillthe demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatzculture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the valuesof genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversionthat only culture of some sort can provide.
Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicizedsimulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility.It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operatesby formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations.Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same.Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of ourtimes. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers excepttheir money -- not even their time.
The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitschwould be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fullymatured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, andperfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of forits own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems,rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discardsthe rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoirof accumulated experience. This is what is really meant when itis said that the popular art and literature of today were oncethe daring, esoteric art and literature of yesterday. Of course,no such thing is true. What is meant is that when enough timehas elapsed the new is looted for new 'twists,' whichare then watered down and served up as kitsch. Self-evidently,all kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that's academic iskitsch. For what is called the academic as such no longer hasan independent existence, but has become the stuffed-shirt 'front'for kitsch. The methods of industrialism displace the handicrafts.
Because it can be turned out mechanically, kitsch has becomean integral part of our productive system in a way in which trueculture could never be, except accidentally. It has been capitalizedat a tremendous investment which must show commensurate returns;it is compelled to extend as well as to keep its markets. Whileit is essentially its own salesman, a great sales apparatus hasnevertheless been created for it, which brings pressure to bearon every member of society. Traps are laid even in those areas,so to speak, that are the preserves of genuine culture. It isnot enough today, in a country like ours, to have an inclinationtowards the latter; one must have a true passion for it that willgive him the power to resist the faked article that surroundsand presses in on him from the moment he is old enough to lookat the funny papers. Kitsch is deceptive. It has many differentlevels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to thenaive seeker of true light. A magazine like the New Yorker,which is fundamentally high-class kitsch for the luxury trade,converts and waters down a great deal of avant-garde materialfor its own uses. Nor is every single item of kitsch altogetherworthless. Now and then it produces something of merit, somethingthat has an authentic folk flavor; and these accidental and isolatedinstances have fooled people who should know better.
Kitsch's enormous profits are a source of temptation to theavant-garde itself, and its members have not always resisted thistemptation. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their workunder the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely.And then those puzzling borderline cases appear, such as the popularnovelist, Simenon, in France, and Steinbeck in this country. Thenet result is always to the detriment of true culture in any case.
Kitsch has not been confined to the cities in which it wasborn, but has flowed out over the countryside, wiping out folkculture. Nor has it shown any regard for geographical and nationalcultural boundaries. Another mass product of Western industrialism,it has gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out anddefacing native cultures in one colonial country after another,so that it is now by way of becoming a universal culture, thefirst universal culture ever beheld. Today the native of China,no less than the South American Indian, the Hindu, no less thanthe Polynesian, have come to prefer to the products of their nativeart, magazine covers, rotogravure sections and calendar girls.How is this virulence of kitsch, this irresistible attractiveness,to be explained? Naturally, machine-made kitsch can undersellthe native handmade article, and the prestige of the West alsohelps; but why is kitsch a so much more profitable export articlethan Rembrandt? One, after all, can be reproduced as cheaply asthe other.
In his last article on the Soviet cinema in the PartisanReview, Dwight Macdonald points out that kitsch has in thelast ten years become the dominant culture in Soviet Russia. Forthis he blames the political regime -- not only for the fact thatkitsch is the official culture, but also that it is actually thedominant, most popular culture, and he quotes the following fromKurt London's The Seven Soviet Arts: '. . . the attitudeof the masses both to the old and new art styles probably remainsessentially dependent on the nature of the education affordedthem by their respective states.' Macdonald goes on to say:'Why after all should ignorant peasants prefer Repin (a leadingexponent of Russian academic kitsch in painting) to Picasso, whoseabstract technique is at least as relevant to their own primitivefolk art as is the former's realistic style? No, if the massescrowd into the Tretyakov (Moscow's museum of contemporary Russianart: kitsch), it is largely because they have been conditionedto shun 'formalism' and to admire 'socialist realism.'
In the first place it is not a question of a choice betweenmerely the old and merely the new, as London seems to think --but of a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinelynew. The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch.In the second place, neither in backward Russia nor in the advancedWest do the masses prefer kitsch simply because their governmentscondition them toward it. Where state educational systems takethe trouble to mention art, we are told to respect the old masters,not kitsch; and yet we go and hang Maxfield Parrish or his equivalenton our walls, instead of Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Moreover,as Macdonald himself points out, around 1925 when the Soviet regimewas encouraging avant-garde cinema, the Russian masses continuedto prefer Hollywood movies. No, 'conditioning' doesnot explain the potency of kitsch.
All values are human values, relative values, in art as wellas elsewhere. Yet there does seem to have been more or less ofa general agreement among the cultivated of mankind over the agesas to what is good art and what bad. Taste has varied, but notbeyond certain limits; contemporary connoisseurs agree with theeighteenth-century Japanese that Hokusai was one of the greatestartists of his time; we even agree with the ancient Egyptiansthat Third and Fourth Dynasty art was the most worthy of beingselected as their paragon by those who came after. We may havecome to prefer Giotto to Raphael, but we still do not deny thatRaphael was one of the best painters of his time. There has beenan agreement then, and this agreement rests, I believe, on a fairlyconstant distinction made between those values only to be foundin art and the values which can be found elsewhere. Kitsch, byvirtue of a rationalized technique that draws on science and industry,has erased this distinction in practice.
Left: Repin, Cossacks;Right: Piacsso,Woman with a Fan
Let us see, for example, what happens when an ignorant Russianpeasant such as Macdonald mentions stands with hypothetical freedomof choice before two paintings, one by Picasso, the other by Repin.In the first he sees, let us say, a play of lines, colors andspaces that represent a woman. The abstract technique -- to acceptMacdonald's supposition, which I am inclined to doubt -- remindshim somewhat of the icons he has left behind him in the village,and he feels the attraction of the familiar. We will even supposethat he faintly surmises some of the great art values the cultivatedfind in Picasso. He turns next to Repin's picture and sees a battlescene. The technique is not so familiar -- as technique. But thatweighs very little with the peasant, for he suddenly discoversvalues in Repin's picture that seem far superior to the valueshe has been accustomed to find in icon art; and the unfamiliaritself is one of the sources of those values: the values of thevividly recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic. In Repin'spicture the peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in whichhe recognizes and sees things outside of pictures -- there isno discontinuity between art and life, no need to accept a conventionand say to oneself, that icon represents Jesus because it intendsto represent Jesus, even if it does not remind me very much ofa man. That Repin can paint so realistically that identificationsare self-evident immediately and without any effort on the partof the spectator -- that is miraculous. The peasant is also pleasedby the wealth of self-evident meanings which he finds in the picture:'it tells a story. ' Picasso and the icons are so austereand barren in comparison. What is more, Repin heightens realityand makes it dramatic: sunset, exploding shells, running and fallingmen. There is no longer any question of Picasso or icons. Repinis what the peasant wants, and nothing else but Repin. It is lucky,however, for Repin that the peasant is protected from the productsof American capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next toa Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell.
Ultimately, it can be said that the cultivated spectator derivesthe same values from Picasso that the peasant gets from Repin,since what the latter enjoys in Repin is somehow art too, on howeverlow a scale, and he is sent to look at pictures by the same instinctsthat send the cultivated spectator. But the ultimate values whichthe cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at asecond remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediateimpression left by the plastic values. It is only then that therecognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter. They arenot immediately or externally present in Picasso's painting, butmust be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough toreact sufficiently to plastic qualities. They belong to the 'reflected'effect. In Repin, on the other hand, the 'reflected'effect has already been included in the picture, ready for thespectator's unreflective enjoyment.(4)Where Picasso paints cause, Repinpaints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and spareshim effort, provides him with a shore cut to the pleasure of artthat detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin,or kitsch, is synthetic art.
The same point can be made with respect to kitsch literature:it provides vicarious experience for the insensitive with fargreater immediacy than serious fiction can hope to do. And EddieGuest and the Indian Love Lyrics are more poetic than T. S. Eliotand Shakespeare.
If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch, wenow see, imitates its effects. The neatness of this antithesisis more than contrived; it corresponds to and defines the tremendousinterval that separates from each other two such simultaneouscultural phenomena as the avant-garde and kitsch. This interval,too great to be closed by all the infinite gradations of popularized'modernism' and 'modernistic' kitsch, correspondsin turn to a social interval, a social interval that has alwaysexisted in formal culture, as elsewhere in civilized society,and whose two termini converge and diverge in fixed relation tothe increasing or decreasing stability of the given society. Therehas always been on one side the minority of the powerful -- andtherefore the cultivated -- and on the other the great mass ofthe exploited and poor -- and therefore the ignorant. Formal culturehas always belonged to the first, while the last have had to contentthemselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch.
In a stable society that functions well enough to hold in solutionthe contradictions between its classes, the cultural dichotomybecomes somewhat blurred. The axioms of the few are shared bythe many; the latter believe superstitiously what the former believesoberly. And at such moments in history the masses are able tofeel wonder and admiration for the culture, on no matter how higha plane, of its masters. This applies at least to plastic culture,which is accessible to all.
In the Middle Ages the plastic artist paid lip service at leastto the lowest common denominators of experience. This even remainedtrue to some extent until the seventeenth century. There was availablefor imitation a universally valid conceptual reality, whose orderthe artist could not tamper with. The subject matter of art wasprescribed by those who commissioned works of art, which werenot created, as in bourgeois society, on speculation. Preciselybecause his content was determined in advance, the artist wasfree to concentrate on his medium. He needed not to be philosopher,or visionary, but simply artificer. As long as there was generalagreement as to what were the worthiest subjects for art, theartist was relieved of the necessity to be original and inventivein his 'matter' and could devote all his energy to formalproblems. For him the medium became, privately, professionally,the content of his art, even as his medium is today the publiccontent of the abstract painter's art -- with that difference,however, that the medieval artist had to suppress his professionalpreoccupation in public -- had always to suppress and subordinatethe personal and professional in the finished, official work ofart. If, as an ordinary member of the Christian community, hefelt some personal emotion about his subject matter, this onlycontributed to the enrichment of the work's public meaning. Onlywith the Renaissance do the inflections of the personal becomelegitimate, still to be kept, however, within the limits of thesimply and universally recognizable. And only with Rembrandt do'lonely' artists begin to appear, lonely in their art.
But even during the Renaissance, and as long as Western artwas endeavoring to perfect its technique, victories in this realmcould only be signalized by success in realistic imitation, sincethere was no other objective criterion at hand. Thus the massescould still find in the art of their masters objects of admirationand wonder. Even the bird that pecked at the fruit in Zeuxis'picture could applaud.
It is a platitude that art becomes caviar to the general whenthe reality it imitates no longer corresponds even roughly tothe reality recognized by the general. Even then, however, theresentment the common man may feel is silenced by the awe in whichhe stands of the patrons of this art. Only when he becomes dissatisfiedwith the social order they administer does he begin to criticizetheir culture. Then the plebian finds courage for the first timeto voice his opinions openly. Every man, from the Tammany aldermanto the Austrian house-painter, finds that he is entitled to hisopinion. Most often this resentment toward culture is to be foundwhere the dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary dissatisfactionwhich expresses itself in revivalism and puritanism, and latestof all, in fascism. Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentionedin the same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or theblood's health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues,the statue-smashing commences.
Returning to our Russian peasant for the moment, let us supposethat after he has chosen Repin in preference to Picasso, the state'seducational apparatus comes along and tells him that he is wrong,that he should have chosen Picasso -- and shows him why. It isquite possible for the Soviet state to do this. But things beingas they are in Russia -- and everywhere else -- the peasant soonfinds the necessity of working hard all day for his living andthe rude, uncomfortable circumstances in which he lives do notallow him enough leisure, energy and comfort to train for theenjoyment of Picasso. This needs, after all, a considerable amountof 'conditioning.' Superior culture is one of the mostartificial of all human creations, and the peasant finds no 'natural'urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spiteof all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitschwhen he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitschwithout effort. The state is helpless in this matter and remainsso as long as the problems of production have not been solvedin a socialist sense. The same holds true, of course, for capitalistcountries and makes all talk of art for the masses there nothingbut demagogy.(5)
Where today a political regime establishes an official culturalpolicy, it is for the sake of demagogy. If kitsch is the officialtendency of culture in Germany, Italy and Russia, it is not becausetheir respective governments are controlled by philistines, butbecause kitsch is the culture of the masses in these countries,as it is everywhere else. The encouragement of kitsch is merelyanother of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimesseek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects. Since theseregimes cannot raise the cultural level of the masses -- evenif they wanted to -- by anything short of a surrender to internationalsocialism, they will flatter the masses by bringing all culturedown to their level. It is for this reason that the avant-gardeis outlawed, and not so much because a superior culture is inherentlya more critical culture. (Whether or not the avant-garde couldpossibly flourish under a totalitarian regime is not pertinentto the question at this point.) As a matter of fact, the maintrouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point ofview of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical,but that they are too 'innocent,' that it is too difficultto inject effective propaganda into them, that kitsch is morepliable to this end. Kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contactwith the 'soul' of the people. Should the official culturebe one superior to the general mass-level, there would be a dangerof isolation.
Nevertheless, if the masses were conceivably to ask for avant-gardeart and literature, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin would not hesitatelong in attempting to satisfy such a demand. Hitler is a bitterenemy of the avant-garde, both on doctrinal and personal grounds,yet this did not prevent Goebbels in 1932-1933 from strenuouslycourting avant-garde artists and writers. When Gottfried Benn,an Expressionist poet, came over to the Nazis he was welcomedwith a great fanfare, although at that very moment Hitler wasdenouncing Expressionism as Kulturbolschewismus. This wasat a time when the Nazis felt that the prestige which the avant-gardeenjoyed among the cultivated German public could be of advantageto them, and practical considerations of this nature, the Nazisbeing skillful politicians, have always taken precedence overHitler's personal inclinations. Later the Nazis realized thatit was more practical to accede to the wishes of the masses inmatters of culture than to those of their paymasters; the latter,when it came to a question of preserving power, were as willingto sacrifice their culture as they were their moral principles;while the former, precisely because power was being withheld fromthem, had to be cozened in every other way possible. It was necessaryto promote on a much more grandiose style than in the democraciesthe illusion that the masses actually rule. The literature andart they enjoy and understand were to be proclaimed the only trueart and literature and any other kind was to be suppressed. Underthese circumstances people like Gottfried Benn, no matter howardently they support Hitler, become a liability; and we hearno more of them in Nazi Germany.
We can see then that although from one point of view the personalphilistinism of Hitler and Stalin is not accidental to the rolesthey play, from another point of view it is only an incidentallycontributory factor in determining the cultural policies of theirrespective regimes. Their personal philistinism simply adds brutalityand double-darkness to policies they would be forced to supportanyhow by the pressure of all their other policies -- even werethey, personally, devotees of avant-garde culture. What the acceptanceof the isolation of the Russian Revolution forces Stalin to do,Hitler is compelled to do by his acceptance of the contradictionsof capitalism and his efforts to freeze them. As for Mussolini-- his case is a perfect example of the disponsibilitéof a realist in these matters. For years he bent a benevolenteye on the Futurists and built modernistic railroad stations andgovernment-owned apartment houses. One can still see in the suburbsof Rome more modernistic apartments than almost anywhere elsein the world. Perhaps Fascism wanted to show its up-to-dateness,to conceal the fact that it was a retrogression; perhaps it wantedto conform to the tastes of the wealthy elite it served. At anyrate Mussolini seems to have realized lately that it would bemore useful to him to please the cultural tastes of the Italianmasses than those of their masters. The masses must be providedwith objects of admiration and wonder; the latter can dispensewith them. And so we find Mussolini announcing a 'new Imperialstyle.' Marinetti, Chirico, et al., are sent intothe outer darkness, and the new railroad station in Rome willnot be modernistic. That Mussolini was late in coming to thisonly illustrates again the relative hesitance with which ItalianFascism has drawn the necessary implications of its role.
Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it isstill capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threatto its own existence. Advances in culture, no less than advancesin science and industry, corrode the very society under whoseaegis they are made possible. Here, as in every other questiontoday, it becomes necessary to quote Marx word for word. Todaywe no longer look toward socialism for a new culture -- as inevitablyas one will appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look tosocialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culturewe have right now.
1. The exampleof music, which has long been an abstract art, and which avant-gardepoetry has tried so much to emulate, is interesting. Music, Aristotlesaid curiously enough, is the most imitative and vivid of allarts because it imitates its original -- the state of the soul-- with the greatest immediacy. Today this strikes us as the exactopposite of the truth, because no art seems to us to have lessreference to something outside itself than music. However, asidefrom the fact that in a sense Aristotle may still be right, itmust be explained that ancient Greek music was closely associatedwith poetry, and depended upon its character as an accessory toverse to make its imitative meaning clear. Plato, speaking ofmusic, says: 'For when there are no words, it is very difficulto recognize the meaning of the harmony and rhythm, or to see thatany worthy object is imitated by them.' As far as we know,all music originally served such an accessory function. Once,however, it was abandoned, music was forced to withdraw into itselfto find a constraint or original. This is found in the variousmeans of its own composition and performance. <Returnto text>
Avant-garde And Kitsch Pdf
2. I owe this formulationto a remark made by Hans Hofmann, the art teacher, in one of hislectures. From the point of view of this formulation, Surrealismin plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is attempting torestore 'outside' subject matter. The chief concernof a painter like Dali is to represent the processes and conceptsof his consciousness, not the processes of his medium. <Returnto text>
3. See Valéry'sremarks about his own poetry. <Returnto text>
4. T. S. Eliotsaid something to the same effect in accounting for the shortcomingsof English Romantic poetry. Indeed the Romantics can be consideredthe original sinners whose guilt kitsch inherited. They showedkitsch how. What does Keats write about mainly, if not the effectof poetry upon himself? <Return totext>
Clement Greenberg Avant Garde And Kitsch Summary
5. It will be objectedthat such art for the masses as folk art was developed under rudimentaryconditions of production -- and that a good deal of folk art ison a high level. Yes it is -- but folk art is not Athene, andit's Athene whom we want: formal culture with its infinity ofaspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension. Besides, weare now told that most of what we consider good in folk cultureis the static survival of dead formal, aristocratic, cultures.Our old English ballads, for instance, were not created by the'folk,' but by the post-feudal squirearchy of the Englishcountryside, to survive in the mouths of the folk long after thosefor whom the ballads were composed had gone on to other formsof literature. Unfortunately, until the machine age, culture wasthe exclusive prerogative of a society that lived by the laborof serfs or slaves. They were the real symbols of culture. Forone man to spend time and energy creating or listening to poetrymeant that another man had to produce enough to keep himself aliveand the former in comfort. In Africa today we find that the cultureof slave-owning tribes is generally much superior to that of thetribes that possess no slaves. <Returnto text>