|
|
AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH
|
|
|
|
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 may well be.) 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. |
|
|
|
ONE AND THE SAME civilization produces simultaneously two such
different 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 of the same culture and products
of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by
Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest -- what perspective of culture is large
enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each
other? Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a
single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted -- does
this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the natural order of
things? Or is it something entirely new, and particular to our age? The answer involves more than an
investigation in aesthetics. It appears to me that it is necessary to examine
more closely and with more originality than hitherto the relationship between
aesthetic experience as met by the specific -- not the generalized --
individual, and the social and historical contexts in which that experience
takes place. What is brought to light will answer, in addition to the
question posed above, other and perhaps more important questions. 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. In the past such a state of
affairs has usually resolved itself into a motionless Alexandrianism, an
academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because
they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to
virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided
by the precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically varied
in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced: Statius,
mandarin verse, Roman sculpture, Beaux-Arts painting, neo-republican
architecture. It is among the hopeful signs in the midst
of the decay of our present society that we -- some of us -- have been
unwilling to accept this last phase for our own culture. In seeking to go
beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced
something unheard of heretofore: -- avant-garde culture. A superior
consciousness of history -- more precisely, the appearance of a new kind of criticism
of society, an historical criticism -- made this possible. This criticism has
not confronted our present society with timeless utopias, but has soberly
examined in the terms of history and of cause and effect the antecedents,
justifications and functions of the forms that lie at the heart of every
society. Thus our present bourgeois social order was shown to be, not an
eternal, "natural" condition of life, but simply the latest term in
a succession of social orders. New perspectives of this kind, becoming a part
of the advanced intellectual conscience of the fifth and sixth decades of the
nineteenth century, soon were absorbed by artists and poets, even if
unconsciously for the most part. It was no accident, therefore, that the
birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically -- and geographically, too
-- with the first bold development of scientific revolutionary thought in
Europe. True, the first settlers of bohemia --
which was then identical with the avant-garde -- turned out soon to be
demonstratively uninterested in politics. Nevertheless, without the
circulation of revolutionary ideas in the air about them, they would never
have been able to isolate their concept of the "bourgeois" in order
to define what they were not. Nor, without the moral aid of revolutionary
political attitudes would they have had the courage to assert themselves as
aggressively as they did against the prevailing standards of society. Courage
indeed was needed for this, because the avant-garde's emigration from
bourgeois society to bohemia meant also an emigration from the markets of
capitalism, upon which artists and writers had been thrown by the falling
away of aristocratic patronage. (Ostensibly, at least, it meant this -- meant
starving in a garret -- although, as we will be shown later, the avant-garde
remained attached to bourgeois society 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 repudiate revolutionary as well as bourgeois politics. The
revolution was left inside society, a part of that welter of ideological
struggle which art and poetry find so unpropitious as soon as it begins to
involve those "precious" axiomatic beliefs upon which culture thus
far has had to rest. Hence it developed 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. Retiring from public altogether, the
avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by
both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all
relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point.
"Art for art's sake" and "pure poetry" appear, and
subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague. It has been in search of the absolute that
the avant-garde has arrived at "abstract" or "nonobjective"
art -- and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to
imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own 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. 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. But the absolute is absolute, and the poet
or artist, being what he is, cherishes certain relative values more than
others. The very values in the name of which he invokes the absolute are
relative values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be
imitating, not God -- and here I use "imitate" in its Aristotelian
sense -- but the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves.
This is the genesis of the "abstract." (1) In turning his attention
away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it in
upon the medium of his own craft. The nonrepresentational or
"abstract," if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be
arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy
constraint or original. This constraint, once the world of common,
extroverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very
processes or disciplines by 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 quote Yeats: Nor
is there singing school but studying Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro,
Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief
inspiration from the medium they work in.(2) 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., to the exclusion of
whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors. The attention of
poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Éluard, Pound, Hart Crane, Stevens,
even Rilke and Yeats, appears to be centered on the effort to create poetry
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 poetry must deal with words, and
words must communicate. Certain poets, such as Mallarmé and Valéry (3) are
more radical in this respect than others -- leaving aside those poets who
have tried to compose poetry in pure sound alone. However, if it were easier
to define poetry, 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 Procrustean bed. But aside from
the fact that most of our best contemporary novelists have gone to school
with the avant-garde, it is significant that Gide's most ambitious book is a
novel about the writing of a novel, and that Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake seem to be, above all, 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. That avant-garde culture is the imitation
of imitating -- the fact itself -- calls for neither approval nor
disapproval. It is true that this culture contains within itself some of the
very Alexandrianism it seeks to overcome. The lines quoted from Yeats
referred to Byzantium, which is very close to Alexandria; and in 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 what justifies the avant-garde's methods and
makes them necessary. The necessity lies in the fact that by no other means
is it possible today to create art and literature of a high order. To quarrel
with necessity by throwing about terms like "formalism,"
"purism," "ivory tower" and so forth is either dull or
dishonest. This is not to say, however, that it is to the social
advantage of the avant-garde that it is what it is. Quite the opposite. The avant-garde's specialization of
itself, the fact that its best artists are artists' artists, its best poets,
poets' poets, 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. The
masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in the
process of development. But today such culture is being abandoned by those to
whom it actually belongs -- our ruling class. For it is to the latter that the
avant-garde belongs. No culture can develop without a social basis, without a
source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was
provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it
assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by
an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real. And now this elite is rapidly
shrinking. Since the avant-garde forms the only living culture we now have,
the survival in the near future of culture in general is thus threatened. We must not be deceived by superficial
phenomena and local successes. Picasso's shows still draw crowds, and T. S.
Eliot is taught in the universities; the dealers in modernist art are still
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. Academicism and commercialism are
appearing in the strangest places. This can mean only one thing: that the
avant-garde is becoming unsure of the audience it depends on -- the rich and
the cultivated. Is it the nature itself of avant-garde
culture that is alone responsible for the danger it finds itself in? Or is
that only a dangerous liability? Are there other, and perhaps more important,
factors involved? II 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 taken for granted. It is time we looked into its
whys and wherefores. Kitsch is a product of the industrial
revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and
established what is called universal literacy. Prior to this the only market for formal
culture, as distinguished from folk culture, had been among those who, in
addition to being able to read and write, could command the leisure and
comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some sort. This
until then had been inextricably associated with literacy. But with the
introduction of universal literacy, the ability to read and write became
almost a minor skill like driving a car, and it 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 petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of
efficiency, but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the
enjoyment 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, the new urban masses
set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for
their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity
was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, 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. Kitsch, using for raw material the debased
and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this
insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and
operates by 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 our times. Kitsch pretends to
demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time. The precondition for kitsch, a condition
without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand
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 it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes,
converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood,
so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience. This is what is
really meant when it is said that the popular art and literature of today
were once the daring, esoteric art and literature of yesterday. Of course, no
such thing is true. What is meant is that when enough time has elapsed the
new is looted for new "twists," which are then watered down and
served up as kitsch. Self-evidently, all kitsch is academic; and conversely,
all that's academic is kitsch. For what is called the academic as such no
longer has an 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 become an integral part of our productive system in a way in which
true culture could never be, except accidentally. It has been capitalized at
a tremendous investment which must show commensurate returns; it is compelled
to extend as well as to keep its markets. While it is essentially its own
salesman, a great sales apparatus has nevertheless been created for it, which
brings pressure to bear on every member of society. Traps are laid even in
those areas, so to speak, that are the preserves of genuine culture. It is not
enough today, in a country like ours, to have an inclination towards the
latter; one must have a true passion for it that will give him the power to
resist the faked article that surrounds and presses in on him from the moment
he is old enough to look at the funny papers. Kitsch is deceptive. It has
many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to
the naive 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 material for its own uses. Nor is every
single item of kitsch altogether worthless. Now and then it produces
something of merit, something that has an authentic folk flavor; and these
accidental and isolated instances have fooled people who should know better. Kitsch's enormous profits are a source of
temptation to the avant-garde itself, and its members have not always
resisted this temptation. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their
work under the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely. And
then those puzzling borderline cases appear, such as the popular novelist,
Simenon, in France, and Steinbeck in this country. The net result is always
to the detriment of true culture in any case. Kitsch has not been confined to the cities
in which it was born, but has flowed out over the countryside, wiping out
folk culture. Nor has it shown any regard for geographical and national
cultural boundaries. Another mass product of Western industrialism, it has
gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing native
cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is now by way of
becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld. Today
the native of China, no less than the South American Indian, the Hindu, no
less than the Polynesian, have come to prefer to the products of their native
art, magazine covers, rotogravure sections and calendar girls. How is this
virulence of kitsch, this irresistible attractiveness, to be explained?
Naturally, machine-made kitsch can undersell the native handmade article, and
the prestige of the West also helps; but why is kitsch a so much more
profitable export article than Rembrandt? One, after all, can be reproduced
as cheaply as the other. In his last article on the Soviet cinema
in the Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald points out that kitsch has in
the last ten years become the dominant culture in Soviet Russia. For this he
blames the political regime -- not only for the fact that kitsch is the
official culture, but also that it is actually the dominant, most popular
culture, and he quotes the following from Kurt London's The Seven Soviet
Arts: ". . . the 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." Macdonald goes on to say:
"Why after all should ignorant peasants prefer Repin (a leading exponent
of Russian academic kitsch in painting) to Picasso, whose abstract technique
is at least as relevant to their own primitive folk art as is the former's
realistic style? No, if the masses crowd into the Tretyakov (Moscow's museum
of contemporary Russian art: kitsch), it is largely because they have been
conditioned to shun 'formalism' and to admire 'socialist realism.'" In the first place it is not a question of
a choice between merely the old and merely the new, as London seems to think
-- but of a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new. The
alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch. In the second place,
neither in backward Russia nor in the advanced West do the masses prefer
kitsch simply because their governments condition them toward it. Where state
educational systems take the trouble to mention art, we are told to respect
the old masters, not kitsch; and yet we go and hang Maxfield Parrish or his
equivalent on our walls, instead of Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Moreover, as
Macdonald himself points out, around 1925 when the Soviet regime was
encouraging avant-garde cinema, the Russian masses continued to prefer
Hollywood movies. No, "conditioning" does not explain the potency
of kitsch. All values are human values, relative
values, in art as well as elsewhere. Yet there does seem to have been more or
less of a general agreement among the cultivated of mankind over the ages as
to what is good art and what bad. Taste has varied, but not beyond certain
limits; contemporary connoisseurs agree with the eighteenth-century Japanese
that Hokusai was one of the greatest artists of his time; we even agree with
the ancient Egyptians that Third and Fourth Dynasty art was the most worthy
of being selected as their paragon by those who came after. We may have come
to prefer Giotto to Raphael, but we still do not deny that Raphael was one of
the best painters of his time. There has been an agreement then, and this
agreement rests, I believe, on a fairly constant distinction made between
those values only to be found in art and the values which can be found
elsewhere. Kitsch, by virtue of a rationalized technique that draws on
science and industry, has erased this distinction in practice.
Let us see, for example, what happens when
an ignorant Russian peasant such as Macdonald mentions stands with
hypothetical freedom of choice before two paintings, one by Picasso, the
other by Repin. In the first he sees, let us say, a play of lines, colors and
spaces that represent a woman. The abstract technique -- to accept
Macdonald's supposition, which I am inclined to doubt -- reminds him somewhat
of the icons he has left behind him in the village, and he feels the
attraction of the familiar. We will even suppose that he faintly surmises
some of the great art values the cultivated find in Picasso. He turns next to
Repin's picture and sees a battle scene. The technique is not so familiar --
as technique. But that weighs very little with the peasant, for he 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 itself is one of
the sources of those values: the values of the vividly recognizable, the
miraculous and the sympathetic. In Repin's picture the peasant recognizes and
sees things in the way in which he recognizes and sees things outside of
pictures -- there is no discontinuity between art and life, no need to accept
a convention and say to oneself, that icon represents Jesus because it
intends to represent Jesus, even if it does not remind me very much of a man.
That Repin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident
immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator -- that is
miraculous. The peasant is also pleased by the wealth of self-evident
meanings which he finds in the picture: "it tells a story. "
Picasso and the icons are so austere and barren in comparison. What is more,
Repin heightens reality and makes it dramatic: sunset, exploding shells,
running and falling men. There is no longer any question of Picasso or icons.
Repin is what the peasant wants, and nothing else but Repin. It is lucky,
however, for Repin that the peasant is protected from the products of
American capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to a Saturday
Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell. Ultimately, it can be said that the
cultivated spectator derives the same values from Picasso that the peasant
gets from Repin, since what the latter enjoys in Repin is somehow art too, on
however low a scale, and he is sent to look at pictures by the same instincts
that send the cultivated spectator. But the ultimate values which the
cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at a second remove, as
the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic
values. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous and the
sympathetic enter. They are not immediately or externally present in
Picasso's painting, but must be projected into it by the spectator sensitive
enough to react 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 the spectator's unreflective enjoyment.(4) Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect.
Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him
with a shore cut to the pleasure of art that 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
far greater immediacy than serious fiction can hope to do. And Eddie Guest
and the Indian Love Lyrics are more poetic than T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare. III If the avant-garde imitates the processes of
art, kitsch, we now see, imitates its effects. The neatness of this
antithesis is more than contrived; it corresponds to and defines the
tremendous interval that separates from each other two such simultaneous
cultural 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, corresponds in turn to a social interval,
a social interval that has always existed in formal culture, as elsewhere in
civilized society, and whose two termini converge and diverge in fixed
relation to the increasing or decreasing stability of the given society.
There has always been on one side the minority of the powerful -- and
therefore the cultivated -- and on the other the great mass of the exploited
and poor -- and therefore the ignorant. Formal culture has always belonged to
the first, while the last have had to content themselves with folk or
rudimentary culture, or kitsch. In a stable society that functions well
enough to hold in solution the contradictions between its classes, the
cultural dichotomy becomes somewhat blurred. The axioms of the few are shared
by the many; the latter believe superstitiously what the former believe
soberly. And at such moments in history the masses are able to feel wonder
and admiration for the culture, on no matter how high a 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 least to the lowest common denominators of experience. This
even remained true to some extent until the seventeenth century. There was
available for imitation a universally valid conceptual reality, whose order
the artist could not tamper with. The subject matter of art was prescribed by
those who commissioned works of art, which were not created, as in bourgeois
society, on speculation. Precisely because his content was determined in
advance, the artist was free to concentrate on his medium. He needed not to
be philosopher, or visionary, but simply artificer. As long as there was
general agreement as to what were the worthiest subjects for art, the artist
was relieved of the necessity to be original and inventive in his
"matter" and could devote all his energy to formal problems. For
him the medium became, privately, professionally, the content of his art,
even as his medium is today the public content of the abstract painter's art
-- with that difference, however, that the medieval artist had to suppress
his professional preoccupation in public -- had always to suppress and
subordinate the personal and professional in the finished, official work of
art. If, as an ordinary member of the Christian community, he felt some
personal emotion about his subject matter, this only contributed to the
enrichment of the work's public meaning. Only with the Renaissance do the
inflections of the personal become legitimate, still to be kept, however,
within the limits of the simply 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 art was endeavoring to perfect its technique, victories in
this realm could only be signalized by success in realistic imitation, since
there was no other objective criterion at hand. Thus the masses could still
find in the art of their masters objects of admiration and 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 when the reality it imitates no longer corresponds even
roughly to the reality recognized by the general. Even then, however, the
resentment the common man may feel is silenced by the awe in which he stands
of the patrons of this art. Only when he becomes dissatisfied with the social
order they administer does he begin to criticize their culture. Then the
plebian finds courage for the first time to voice his opinions openly. Every
man, from the Tammany alderman to the Austrian house-painter, finds that he
is entitled to his opinion. Most often this resentment toward culture is to
be found where the dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary
dissatisfaction which expresses itself in revivalism and puritanism, and
latest of all, in fascism. Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned
in the same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or the blood's
health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statue-smashing
commences. IV Returning to our Russian peasant for the
moment, let us suppose that after he has chosen Repin in preference to
Picasso, the state's educational apparatus comes along and tells him that he
is wrong, that he should have chosen Picasso -- and shows him why. It is
quite possible for the Soviet state to do this. But things being as they are
in Russia -- and everywhere else -- the peasant soon finds the necessity of
working hard all day for his living and the rude, uncomfortable circumstances
in which he lives do not allow him enough leisure, energy and comfort to train
for the enjoyment of Picasso. This needs, after all, a considerable amount of
"conditioning." 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. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels
like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort. The state
is helpless in this matter and remains so as long as the problems of
production have not been solved in a socialist sense. The same holds true, of
course, for capitalist countries and makes all talk of art for the masses
there nothing but demagogy.(5) Where today a political regime establishes
an official cultural policy, it is for the sake of demagogy. If kitsch is the
official tendency of culture in Germany, Italy and Russia, it is not because
their respective governments are controlled by philistines, but because
kitsch is the culture of the masses in these countries, as it is everywhere else.
The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in
which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.
Since these regimes cannot raise the cultural level of the masses -- even if
they wanted to -- by anything short of a surrender to international
socialism, they will flatter the masses by bringing all culture down to their
level. It is for this reason that the avant-garde is outlawed, and not so
much because a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture.
(Whether or not the avant-garde could possibly flourish under a totalitarian
regime is not pertinent to the question at this point.) As a matter of fact,
the main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view
of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they
are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective
propaganda into them, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. Kitsch keeps a
dictator in closer contact with the "soul" of the people. Should
the official culture be one superior to the general mass-level, there would
be a danger of isolation. Nevertheless, if the masses were
conceivably to ask for avant-garde art and literature, Hitler, Mussolini and
Stalin would not hesitate long in attempting to satisfy such a demand. Hitler
is a bitter enemy of the avant-garde, both on doctrinal and personal grounds,
yet this did not prevent Goebbels in 1932-1933 from strenuously courting
avant-garde artists and writers. When Gottfried Benn, an Expressionist poet,
came over to the Nazis he was welcomed with a great fanfare, although at that
very moment Hitler was denouncing Expressionism as Kulturbolschewismus.
This was at a time when the Nazis felt that the prestige which the
avant-garde enjoyed among the cultivated German public could be of advantage
to them, and practical considerations of this nature, the Nazis being
skillful politicians, have always taken precedence over Hitler's personal
inclinations. Later the Nazis realized that it was more practical to accede
to the wishes of the masses in matters of culture than to those of their
paymasters; the latter, when it came to a question of preserving power, were
as willing to sacrifice their culture as they were their moral principles;
while the former, precisely because power was being withheld from them, had
to be cozened in every other way possible. It was necessary to promote on a
much more grandiose style than in the democracies the illusion that the
masses actually rule. The literature and art they enjoy and understand were
to be proclaimed the only true art and literature and any other kind was to
be suppressed. Under these circumstances people like Gottfried Benn, no
matter how ardently they support Hitler, become a liability; and we hear no
more of them in Nazi Germany. We can see then that although from one
point of view the personal philistinism of Hitler and Stalin is not
accidental to the roles they play, from another point of view it is only an
incidentally contributory factor in determining the cultural policies of
their respective regimes. Their personal philistinism simply adds brutality
and double-darkness to policies they would be forced to support anyhow by the
pressure of all their other policies -- even were they, personally, devotees
of avant-garde culture. What the acceptance of the isolation of the Russian
Revolution forces Stalin to do, Hitler is compelled to do by his acceptance
of the contradictions of capitalism and his efforts to freeze them. As for
Mussolini -- his case is a perfect example of the disponsibilité of a
realist in these matters. For years he bent a benevolent eye on the Futurists
and built modernistic railroad stations and government-owned apartment
houses. One can still see in the suburbs of Rome more modernistic apartments
than almost anywhere else in the world. Perhaps Fascism wanted to show its
up-to-dateness, to conceal the fact that it was a retrogression; perhaps it
wanted to conform to the tastes of the wealthy elite it served. At any rate
Mussolini seems to have realized lately that it would be more useful to him
to please the cultural tastes of the Italian masses than those of their
masters. The masses must be provided with objects of admiration and wonder;
the latter can dispense with them. And so we find Mussolini announcing a
"new Imperial style." Marinetti, Chirico, et al., are sent
into the outer darkness, and the new railroad station in Rome will not be
modernistic. That Mussolini was late in coming to this only illustrates again
the relative hesitance with which Italian Fascism has drawn the necessary
implications of its role. Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence. Advances in culture, no less than advances in science and industry, corrode the very society under whose aegis they are made possible. Here, as in every other question today, it becomes necessary to quote Marx word for word. Today we no longer look toward socialism for a new culture -- as inevitably as one will appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now. 1. The example of
music, which has long been an abstract art, and which avant-garde poetry has
tried so much to emulate, is interesting. Music, Aristotle said curiously
enough, is the most imitative and vivid of all arts because it imitates its
original -- the state of the soul -- with the greatest immediacy. Today this
strikes us as the exact opposite of the truth, because no art seems to us to
have less reference to something outside itself than music. However, aside
from the fact that in a sense Aristotle may still be right, it must be
explained that ancient Greek music was closely associated with poetry, and
depended upon its character as an accessory to verse to make its imitative
meaning clear. Plato, speaking of music, says: "For when there are no
words, it is very difficult o recognize the meaning of the harmony and
rhythm, or to see that any 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 itself to find a
constraint or original. This is found in the various means of its own
composition and performance. 2. I owe this formulation to a remark made by Hans Hofmann, the art teacher, in one of his lectures. From the point of view of this formulation, Surrealism in plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is attempting to restore "outside" subject matter. The chief concern of a painter like Dali is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium. 3. See Valéry's remarks about his own poetry. 4. T. S. Eliot said something to the same effect in accounting for the shortcomings of English Romantic poetry. Indeed the Romantics can be considered the original sinners whose guilt kitsch inherited. They showed kitsch how. What does Keats write about mainly, if not the effect of poetry upon himself? 5. It will be objected that such art for the masses as folk art was developed under rudimentary conditions of production -- and that a good deal of folk art is on a high level. Yes it is -- but folk art is not Athene, and it's Athene whom we want: formal culture with its infinity of aspects, its luxuriance, its large comprehension. Besides, we are now told that most of what we consider good in folk culture is 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 English countryside, to survive in the mouths of the folk long after those for whom the ballads were composed had gone on to other forms of literature. Unfortunately, until the machine age, culture was the exclusive prerogative of a society that lived by the labor of serfs or slaves. They were the real symbols of culture. For one man to spend time and energy creating or listening to poetry meant that another man had to produce enough to keep himself alive and the former in comfort. In Africa today we find that the culture of slave-owning tribes is generally much superior to that of the tribes that possess no slaves. |
|
