Avant-garde and Kitsch
What does Greenberg mean when he defines the avant-garde as “an imitation of imitating?”
For the first time in decades, the idea of what acceptable art was would be questioned by Avant-garde.
According to Greenberg, one of the most important functions of the Avant-garde lay in finding a path following which it would be possible to keep the culture moving in contrast to Alexandrianism. He highlights, that the search for the absolute, to which avant-gardists sought to raise the level of their art, led avant-garde to the ‘abstract’ and ‘non-objective’ art.
Due to Greenberg Avant-garde is the practice of imitating the imitation; imitating the process of art by which techniques are formed rather than the technique itself. It is an attempt to illustrate the unconscious. ‘As one French critic says, the reduction of experience to expression for the sake of expression, the expression mattering more than what is being expressed.’[C.Greenberg, 1939]
What is meant by “kitsch?”
Kitsch is a cultural phenomenon that emerged at the same time as the avant-garde as a result of the industrial revolution, which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established universal literacy.
Kitsch is aimed at the mass commercial art and literature. Kitsch always occurs where the demand for the product is formed with pretensions to luxury. Namely, this kind of product has a great demand in today's consumer society. The products of kitsch are an accessible way to demonstrate the status of the individual not through unique things, but only through the sign of wealth and luxury.
Greenberg wrote: ‘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 our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time.’
What values does Greenberg ascribe to avant-garde?
In Greenberg’s opinion, the Avant-garde imitates the process of art. Subject-matter or content becomes something to be avoided. The avant-garde poet or artist tries to create something valid solely on its own terms; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything, not itself. Avant-garde is an as for artists.
What values does Greenberg ascribe to kitsch?
According to Greenberg Kitsch imitates the effects of art. This cultural phenomenon is mechanical and operates by formulas; its target audience is the general mass, as it was founded to fit the mass culture tastes; the subject of matter is understandable and could be digest without any effort, which makes it incredibly convenient tool to control the masses.
Kitsch is a profitable consumer art for masses which is described by Clement Greenberg as popular commercial art, ‘destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some can provide.’[C.Greenberg]
Select specific artworks in which you can identify and explain the use of or reference to kitsch.
‘Self-evidently, all kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that’s academic is kitsch.’[C.Greenberg]
This citation caught my eye due to the relevancy to my past, as I had been studying in academical art college in Ukraine for two years and I left because I couldn’t understand why do I need to copy reality better than the camera does.
That’s why I chose a typical academic painting by Ilya Repin ‘Ukrainian peasant house’.
There is no philosophy behind, as for that time, it was enough to be a good artificer. The landscape looks extremely realistic: typical Ukrainian village, a house, which everyone would recognize; sunny weather and a rooster in the left part of the painting — there is nothing to analyze or to think about. Everything is beautiful, straight and clear for understanding.