Writing - student papers
| 1989. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Fifty Years Later: a conversation with Clement Greenberg." Saul Ostrow. Arts Magazine, v.64 (December): 56-57 1939. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Clement Greenberg. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White. 1958: 98-107 I am choosing to write about this interview with Clement Greenberg because I recently read his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." First of all, I will describe the essay then I will discuss the interview which took place fifty years after Greenberg wrote the essay. Greenberg begins his essay by comparing T.S. Eliot’s poems to that of Eddie Guest and also notes that the same culture that produces a painting by Braque also produces Saturday Evening Post covers. He asks how this is possible. He begins to attempt to answer this question. First of all, he talks about the state of our culture resembling what he calls Alexandrianism. That is, everything becomes academic and status quo. He then talks about the appearance on the scene of a group of artists and writers who rebel against this Alexandrianism–the Avant-Garde. The avant-garde arose in the mid-nineteenth century and at the same time sought to separate themselves from the bourgeois but remain tied to it by "a golden umbilical cord" because they need its money to survive. He goes on to say that the goal of the avant-garde artist and poet is the abstract. That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating. Next, he talks about the appearance alongside of the avant-garde of a rear guard, which is called kitsch. Kitsch includes popular, commercial art and literature, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music whatever that is, dancing, Hollywood movies etc., etc. Kitsch appeared at the beginning of the industrial Revolution to provide a culture for the proletariat moving into urban areas from the countryside. These masses that were not able to appreciate the culture urban life had to offer chose instead the culture of kitsch. He goes on to say a lot about kitsch but overall he says that kitsch takes its life’s blood from high culture, waters it down and regurgitates it at the lowest common denominator. Greenberg sites a quote about soviet culture, which implies that the soviet government is responsible for the appeal of kitsch in that country. But Greenberg disagrees. He feels that "conditioning" does not explain the potency of kitsch. In an example, Greenberg supposes that a Russian peasant stands before a Picasso and a Repin and that he would prefer Repin. Not because he is "conditioned" to soviet realism, but because he can relate to the picture. "It tells a story." He goes on to say that kitsch is so easily accessible that it provides an instant gratification with far greater immediacy than high art or serious fiction can hope to do. Lastly, he talks of kitsch as being all effect. With avant-garde culture on the one hand and kitsch on the other, we live in a cultural dichotomy. Greenberg fears that the avant-garde could disappear from lack of an audience. He talks of reactionary dissatisfaction, which in 1939 expressed itself most strongly as fascism. Now we travel time 50 years to 1989. Saul Ostrow is interviewing Greenberg about the essay. The first thing that Greenberg says about the essay is " When I read it now there are things about it that churn my stomach. Its Marxism was too simplistic and maybe too Bolshevistic." He calls the piece badly written and sophomoric. He goes on to say that he and his friends disdained Stalinism. " The notion of a proletarian culture had been discredited for years and the essay was written in that climate not in answer to it." Greenberg is surprised his essay is still regarded as relevant today. Ostrow points out that the essay began to draw lines of demarcation, define categories, separate mass art from folk art, avant-garde from high culture. Greenberg says that that is a misunderstanding. The struggle he was actually talking about was between the avant-garde and the middlebrow. Greenberg ends the interview by saying that effect is the content of kitsch and that he still believes in the terms of an avant-garde. This essay informed me a lot. I am sad somehow that Greenberg no longer agrees with the piece. In my term paper I hope to use essays like this. Questions it raises for me are: Why does the avant-garde and Marxist theory seem to go hand in hand? If the avant-garde ceased to exist, where would kitsch derive its inspiration? Are the tastes that motivate people towards kitsch incapable of appreciating high culture? Is kitsch a drug? Are people controlled by kitsch? |