Reading: Clement Greenberg's Avant-Garde and Kitsch

• "in the past... really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy"

Avant-garde culture: 
-"appearance of a new kind of criticism of society, a historical criticism"
-coincided with the "development of scientific revolutionary thought of Europe"
-"emigration from bourgeois society to bohemia meant also an emigration from the markets of capitalism"
-function 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"
-"arrived at 'abstract' or 'nonobjective' art" bc of search of the absolute
-"imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms"

• "'art for art's sake' and 'pure poetry' appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague"
• turning "attention away from subject matter of common experience...turns it in upon the medium of his own craft"
• "cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original"
• "excitement of [Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, etc.] art seem to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc."
• "expression mattering more than what is being expressed"
• "no culture can develop without a... stable source of income... provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off"
• "academicism and commercialism are appearing" --> avant-garde: "unsure of the audience it depends on" (rich & cultivated)

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.

-"a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy"

-"destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide"

-"vicarious experience and faked sensations"

-can be "turned out mechanically"

-"flowed out over the countryside, wiping out folk culture"

-"self-evident" & obvious meanings

-"culture of the masses"

• "proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency"
• "a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption."
• "artists will modify their work under the pressure of kitsch"
• "attitude of the masses both to the old and new art styles probably remains essentially dependent on the nature of the education afforded them by their respective states"

Repin (Kitsch) VS. Picasso

-peasant "suddenly discovers values in Repin's picture that seem far superior to the values he has been accustomed to find in icon art; and the unfamiliar"

-the "recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic... are not immediately or externally present in Picasso's painting... projected into it by the spectator"

-Repin: "'reflected' effect has already been included in the picture... predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort"

-"Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art"

-"superior culture is one of the most artificial of all human creations, and the peasant finds no 'natural' urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties"

• "minority of the powerful- and therefore cultivated" VS. "exploited and poor- and therefore ignorant. formal culture has always belonged to the first...the last have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture" (kitsch)
• subject matter "prescribed by those who commissioned works of art" --> "content was determined in advance... artist was free to concentrate on his medium" & "relieved of the necessity to be original and inventive... devote all his energy to formal problems"

Regarding Socialism/Facism

-totalitarians will "flatter the masses by bringing all culture down to their level"

-"from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists...[avant-garde] is too difficult to inject effective propaganda into"

-"more useful to...please the cultural tastes of the...masses"
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Class discussion:

• first generation/point able to look backward & understand their place
• people/artists who recognize place in history & creating something that forces consideration & a different sort of viewing/literacy
• avant-garde coming from the rich, from the industrial, increase in education
• avant-garde: room for interpretation
• kitsch: trite reproduction, uncomplicated & unchallenging
• written in 1930s: he was jewish & it was the time around holocaust
• Greenburg saying that kitsch could be used to manipulate the masses; power in the imagery
• folk art (local traditions) drowned out by kitsch (global economy) --> everything the same