High Art & Kitsch

How many times do we catch ourselves appreciating a film, art work or literature that the so called ‘critics’ seem to trash calling it for the masses/mass culture or ‘kitsch’? Nobody appreciates being told they are wrong and being accused of bad taste definitely does not go down well with anyone. In such a situation, we either tend to get defensive, secretive or simply agree with the ‘Critics’.But if we were to think about it, these few words – taste, art, beauty, aesthetics – are highly responsible for forming the culture or maybe we could say ‘identity’ of a niche group of people in a society, the society itself or if this was - utopia then perhaps the whole world.

In his book Aesthetic Theory, German sociologist and philosopher Theodore W. Adorno says that freedom of modern art from restrictions such as cult and imperial functions is what has led to art's expanded critical capacity and increased formal autonomy and with this expanded autonomy, comes art's increased responsibility for societal commentary. Adorno was concerned not only with standard aesthetic preoccupations like the function of beauty and sublimity in art, but with the relations between art and society. However, he did not feel that overtly politicized content is art's greatest critical strength. Instead he championed a more abstracted type of “Truth-content”.

CULTURE INDUSTRY

The second notion Adorno talks about is the “Culture Industry”. In his essay (written along with Max Horkheimer) “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” Adorno says that the phenomenon of mass culture has a political implication, namely that all the many forms of popular culture are a single “culture industry” whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests.

“Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.” Theodore Adorno. The rationale of Adorno’s theory supported the liberation of the consumer from the tyranny of the producers by inducing the consumer to question beliefs and ideologies. He felt that in order to question the status quo, the consumer first needs to be free of its (Staus quo) mass produced cultural idioms. Given that these were his beliefs, he supported the erstwhile division of Western culture into highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow.

Highbrow is synonymous with intellectual, as an adjective, it also refers to the elite and generally carries a connotation of high culture. It is a concept that is usually applied to classical music tradition, literature - literary fiction, poetry and to films in the art-house tradition.A Lowbrow as described by the literary fiction writer Virgina Woolf is “a person devoted to a singular interest, someone “of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life”. According to her the avant-garde men and women who act according to their indelible commitment to beauty, value, art, form, and integrity are the highbrow. Woolf said, “We highbrows read what we like and do what we like and praise what we like”.  She felt that this characteristic was shared by the lowbrow as well, making them equally worthy of reverence, as they, too, were living for what they intrinsically know as valuable. The Middlebrow was considered by highbrow supporters in the ones “in-between” – the connation of which remains open – in between classes, ideologies, period in history or simply the once labeled so. The art critic Clement Greenburg, also a supporter of highbrow culture, wrote in his essay Avant Garde and Kitsch that “A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences. It becomes difficult to assume anything. All the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works.”Greenburg felt that any respite or sign of hope that the 19th century western culture had was in the form of the “avant –garde culture”. He notes avant-garde culture and art to be synonymous with highbrow culture and consequently, with high art. This brings us to the next question of “what is High Art?

HIGH ART

According to Clement Greenburg, High art was the art that was practiced by the avant-garde men and women of the society. He felt that the “true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to "experiment," but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence.” Greenburg championed "Art for art's sake" and "pure poetry". With this new motto the subject matter or content becomes “something to be avoided like a plague.”

According to Greenberg in its search of the absolute that the avant-garde had arrived at "abstract" or "non-objective" art. The avant-garde artist as per Greenburg tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid. “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.”He says that in turning his attention away from subject matter the artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft. Artists like Arshile Gorky, David Smith, Williem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were all, in Greenberg's view, creating art that was far superior to that being created in Europe.Citing artists like Picasso, Braque and Cézanne, Greenburg says that “they derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in.The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc.” He considered the best avant-garde artists are “artists' artists”. However, he also admits that this very aspect of the avant-garde has “estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets.”There was however, another element of the 19th century western bourgeoisie culture that he considered as a threat to the avant-garde – Kitsch.

KITSCH

Greenburg in the same essay mentions that “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.”Kitsch according to Greenburg is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy. Therefore, Kitsch was all that was popular, commercial art and literature with its chrome-types, magazine covers, illustrations, advertisements, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies etc. Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons, while making cheap produced objects that are unoriginal.  Excessive sentimentality is often associated with the term. Kitsch therefore relies on formulae that convert the higher emotions into an uncomplicated regurgitated

form. It presents to the consumer a cheaper version of the essence so that he may not be able to experience the end result without actually having to go through the uneasy process of feeling or thinking for himself.

Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas and 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.” Greenburg.According to Greenburg, “Kitsch” has certain preconditions without which it would not exist. One is the availability of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from the mature culture’s devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. In his essay Kitsch and the Modern Predicament, Roger Scruton, a conservative English philosopher and writer says that “Kitsch is pretense. But not all pretense is kitsch. Something else is needed to create the sense of intrusion—the unwanted hand on the knee. Kitsch is not just pretending; it is asking you to join in the game. In real kitsch, what is being faked cannot be faked. Hence the pretense must be mutual, complicitous, knowing. The opposite of kitsch is not sophistication but innocence. Kitsch art is pretending to express something, and you, in accepting it, are pretending to feel.”According to Scruton in any art, there comes a point where a style, a form, an idiom, or a vocabulary can no longer be used without producing cliché. Fear of this debasement led to the routinization of the avant-garde. “By posing as avant-garde, the artist gives an easily perceivable sign of his authenticity. But the result, I have suggested, is kitsch of another kind and a loss of genuine public interest.” According to this then however further we may go or wider we may search for a new idiom that too shall soon become kitsch…..so do we keep returning to kitsch? And is that where art is now?

MODERN PREDICAMENT – GOING BACK TO KITSCH?

According to Scruton, “Fear of kitsch was one of the motives behind modernism in the arts. Tonal music, figurative painting, rhyming and regular verse—all seemed, at the time of the modernist experiments, to have exhausted their capacity for sincere emotional expression. To use the traditional idioms was to betray the higher life—which is why Clement Greenberg told his readers that there was, between abstract art and kitsch, no third way.”

Scruton chooses to term "postmodernism" as "preemptive kitsch." He explains that having recognized that modernist severity is was longer acceptable, as modernism began to seem like the same old thing and so not modern at all, artists began not to shun kitsch but to embrace it. We can see this in the manner of Andy Warhol, Alan Jones, and Jeff Koons. These artists chose to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it would no longer kitsch at all but a sort of sophisticated satire or parody. The onset of Postmodernism in art greatly blurred the lines between high and popular art. The Contemporary art world is no different than the various periods art has seen previously. It has its mixed bag of Avant-gardes, realists, expressionists, cubists and a generous dose of Kitsch as well. Kitsch by many is called as the flotsam of the high art.I would rather call it a derivative of publicized and promoted art. Kitsch itself has become the leitmotif in the works of many mainstream artists. The American artist Jeff koons is celebrated as the king of Kitsch. His preoccupation with everyday banal objects such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces, multiplied in size has left critiques with divided opinions on him. In India Artists Thukral and Tagra unashamedly use ‘Kitschy appearing’ motifs and symbols in their works. The bright colour and bold motifs that are symbols of mass production are more of a critique than a desperate attempt to extract tears from the viewer. The works of Japanese artist Takeshi Murakami is yet again derivative of japans long standing cutler of 2 dimensional tonalities & anime culture. This has become Murakami’s chosen mode of expression but would that make it Kitsch?

Andreas Huyssen writes “in view of the fact than an aesthetic dimension shapes not just the high arts but also the products of consumer culture via design, advertising and the mobilization of affect and desire. It is simply retrograde to claim that any concern with aesthetic form is inherently elitist.”Patricia A. Johnston in her book Seeing High & Low states that “High and the low are relational not absolute…[…]…When a cultural form is labelled middlebrow of popular or low, it can simply be a strategy for elites to distinguish themselves from the middle class.”

They say the one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. So is it possible that one man’s kitsch could be another man’s art?

This would be true if we were to go with the subjectivist version of relativism, which interprets aesthetic judgment as expressions of personal preference then according but according to Tomas Kulka in his book Kitsch and art “the very

existence of the concept of kitsch argues against it. Kitsch is both a normative and classificatory concept, and as such presupposes a certain constancy of use. The fact that there is a need for this term speaks against such a subjective interpretation.”Kulka also states that “aestheticians have been traditionally more interested in questions such as “what is beauty?” Than in questions such as “what is ugliness?” Questions such as what makes a good work of art good? Have received all the attention of theoreticians, while questions such as “what make a bad work of art bad” or “what disqualifies a work from being regarded as a work of art?” have been neglected altogether.”

Maybe the answer to understanding kitsch lies in asking question not of beauty but of non-beauty, of good and bad art as oppose to high and low or kitsch.

Sources

BOOKS

1. Kitsch and art by Tomas Kulka2. Art Theory and Criticism by Sally Everett3. Seeing High & Low by Patricia A. Johnston

WEBSITE

1. www.jstor.org2. www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/default3. www.marxists.org4. www.city-journal.org5. online.wsj.com