Cakitschalism

In his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, Clement Greenberg investigates the notions of avant-garde and of kitsch by attempting to provide their relation to each other and to the capitalism;  also to evaluate critically the use of art (yet, for Greenberg, the art-status of these works are questionable) as a fascist propaganda apparatus by dumbing-down the aesthetic appreciation level of masses in order for them to value and to be influenced by lower-cost, easily-reproducable, low-culture kitsch rather than the avant-garde as the higher art of the modern world. Greenberg first starts his essay by asking a valuable and intelligible question of what does it that makes both an Eliot poem and a poem by a third-class poet (or even the commercial lines on billboards and TVs) belong to the same culture. He wants to investigate how can the term culture can be such a wide-encompassing term to cover such distant works in under one tent. To answer this question comprehensively, he first deals with the process in which the avant-garde has come to the stage of art. Art, for him, is differentiated as high and low art. In the form of avant-garde, as the work of art has become more abstract and non-objective, non-representational, reflecting on its medium more than before, one may say that it provides more superious aesthetic experience than the representative (at the extremes, nothing more than mere imitation of “old masters”) classical art. The avant-garde represents the constantly-moving nature of modernity and is a result of the quest for pure and absolute art. Greenberg points out the importance of the support given by upper class of a society to the production process of that society’s art. In the capitalist society, on the other hand, bourgeoisie abandoned the development of avant-garde art, instead the upper class of capitalist society supports the “kitsch” as they can shape the kitsch according to its utilitarian ends also as propaganda means for the fascist parties that are in rise in Europe−it is a corollary of argumentation of Greenberg who has a sharp political perspective around these issues, that the fascist parties are representatives for the bourgeoisie class. Greenberg sees the kitsch as inevitable result of industrialization and mass culture, and depends hugely on consumerists capitalist society. What is the most controversial in this essay for me is that his argument that equates the kitsch and the academic art. Methods of industrialism leaves art devoid of its authentic content, and turns it in to the ends of commercial uses. He ends his essay on elaborating the ease in the use of kitsch as a propaganda means for fascists, because with these works it is easier to lead the masses most of which are devoid of developed critical capacities to appreciate avant-garde art.

Terry Eagleton, in his essay “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism”, presents a similar hostile position against postmodernism by situating its position theoretically in terms of capitalism and modernism. He starts with rejecting Fredrick Jameson by claiming that the postmodernist culture is not only described by the notion of pastiche (imitation of various art works without irony) but the notion of parody as well is an important part of postmodern culture. Then, for Eagleton, what postmodernism parodies is the avant-garde art of modernism. Anti-representationalism is acknowledged by avant-garde artists as a means for pure, critical, creative compositions of art. Yet, in the parody of postmoderns, the art no longer reflects the reality because there remains nothing in the reality that is not the imitation itself. From this line of reasoning, one may get close to the explanation of kitsch given by Greenberg. For Eagleton as well, modernist art resists the process of commodification with the supporting aid of avant-garde, yet it could not help it to escape another form of commodification brought about by postmodernism. Postmodernism is a blend of modernism and avant-garde, by taking fragmentary side of the former and the dissolution of art into social life from the latter, postmodernism ends in a dark parody of both which is “depthless, styleless, dehistoricized and decathected”.