Pop Culture and Kitsch Criticism
Rosenberg, Harold
Mass Culture,* compiled by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, is the first book that has ever tempted me to apply the reviewer's cliche, "definitive." The theoretical,...
...In the present organization of society only kitsch can have a social reason for being...
...Nor does art aspire to a higher moral plane —kitsch is much more prone to exclude personal malice, for example, the source of so many superb passages in poetry, music, painting...
...On peut finir avec la sculpture," Giacometti once said to me...
...As Cummings said thirty years ago, poetry competes with elephants and motor cars...
...The Rocky Mountains have resembled it for a century...
...Kitsch has captured all the arts in the USA...
...As against the symbol searchers, on the one hand, and the wailing women of culture, on the other, I'd take a TV actress any day...
...The injuries inflicted by American mass art affect mainly the psyche and its possibilities...
...Kitsch is art that has an audience at a time when art speaks to a blank wall and reaches the public only after it has bounced off and exploded into a rubble of critical platitudes...
...Yet some of these recruiting Sergeants to kitsch proclaim as the chief issue the need of the individual to "hold his own against the spreading ooze of MassCulture...
...Thus by his exposures of absurdity in Time-Life, movies, ads, Dwight Macdonald becomes a bloodbrother of De Tocque ville, Nietszche, Ortega...
...Inspired by physical objects, the American Circus is more seductive than the fables generated by the hollowedout Idea that rules the regions of Communism...
...The result is, of course, kitsch...
...They gave him a sense of being crowded...
...The argument that the mass-culture intellectuals come not to bathe in the waters but to register the degree of its pollution does not impress me...
...The statement is false...
...Art also attempts to hurl itself out of both life and popular art, to enter its own realm, that of creation liberated from things...
...Several Mass Culture authors sound as aggrieved as Ortega by the Industrial Revolution...
...Modern art, however, revolts him, tempting him to get to know it about as much as would the gases in a condemned mine...
...If it is possible to be done with an art—and this is an age when artists keep trying to finish theirs off—it ought likewise to be possible to make an end to talk about comic books and science fables...
...Social Science apart, will anyone deny also that in recent years mass culture analysts in the literary world have been ceaselessly distracting to themselves and to the junk they deal with the attention that ought to go to writing, painting, music...
...The art world is full of kitsch, literary magazines brim over therewith...
...It turns out, unhappily, that the counterconcept is unreal...
...They have put into practice the notion that a bad work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding to the mind than a masterpiece wrapped in silence...
...Most have taken only one or two shots at the matter, and I know none who has not had better things to say on some other topic...
...Personally, I dislike Ortega more than I do crowds...
...19...
...Anyone who expresses hostility to kitsch appears automatically to 15 be a lover of the arts...
...It is a fact that artists today cannot put up with art for long periods and turn to kitsch for relaxation...
...And since the interpretation is everything, why pin it to a novel or poem when more people are likely to have seen The Prince and the Showgirl...
...But if art distinguishes itself from the automobile ride or reading the newspaper, if it arouses a unique psychic tension, it becomes disturbing, a risk...
...Mass art is the product of talent put into the service of a) art that has established rules...
...Genuine art in our time has made this point again and again—in Cubist collages, the prophylactics of Neo-Plasticism, in Surrealist poetry...
...Poetry yields to kitsch its traditional forms, retreats to free verse, abandons that too 18 when copywriters begin to chant in the new style about refrigerators...
...Yet the best art of our time restricts its appeal to other artists, a group that has neither money nor social glamor to bestow and whose members are for the most part bitter and miserly in handclapping...
...In other words, politics is the only legitimate reason...
...Both these assumptions are correct...
...Qualified counterconceptually, he expresses his views on contemporary painting or poetic diction for The New Yorker...
...Nevertheless, genuine artists like Stuart Davis or Bill de Kooning continue to make good use of billboards or lips that sell rouge...
...It deals with life in the same way...
...As a result kitsch is manageable at a time when art comes into being only through tragedy, irony or a cast of the dice...
...To do away with kitsch it is necessary to change the land scape, as it was necessary to change the landscape of Sardinia in order to get rid of the malarial mosquito...
...It is also more humane: its celebration of brutality is restricted to nightmares of comfortable consumption —business or sex racketeering, political sadism by pre—or past—market types, such as Southerners, militarists, Red— and, unlike the popular spectacles of other civilizations, is singularly devoid of metaphysical justification...
...MASS ART is a phenomenon of the world of art and can be understood only in relation to conditions in that world...
...To affect the landscape is the only legitimate reason for investigating the processes of popular art...
...In any case, there is no audience for art and no luxury for artists...
...Certain social scientists have a great deal to answer for in this...
...Art will continue its maneuverings of retreat between beauty and anti-art, between reality and esthetic counterfeit, revolution and nostalgia...
...There is no surer way of making oneself ridiculous...
...If the spirit of poetry had no other resource than the poem it would Iong ago have signed a lifetime contract with Omnibus...
...If only popular culture were left to the populace...
...Art succeeds, but the situation of art is hopeless...
...He not only dislikes mass art, he dislikes the masses themselves...
...Also, by a law of retribution, its deadliest mutations are visited upon those who produce it and collect its tolls...
...KITSCH is right about art, but art aims at changing the landscape, art norms or no art norms, audience or no audience...
...But one aspect of mass culture is kitsch criticism of kitsch...
...I CAN'T IMAGINE a more representative assembly of thought on this greedy theme than Rosenberg and White's book...
...Using kitsch is one of art's juiciest devices, and a comic revenge for the looting of art by kitsch...
...As a snobbery, the craziness of ad images and copy is as passe as going to Harlem or reading thrillers...
...In the phantasies generated by this material fetich the background is endless refurnished—mining towns or hospitals, the underworld, the Near East —to provide decor for the recurrence of a single adventure: the breeding of new customers...
...The discussion of popular art in America is thrown out of shape by the vacuum of positive interest in art...
...There are probably less than 100 persons in the USA today fully supporting themselves through the production of works of literature, painting, music—probably far less than 100...
...it might be more important than kitsch itself, since it relates to the morale and capacity of the intellectuals who are not yet in the service of mass manipulation...
...No doubt they believe that the true substance of their existence is poetry, paintings, concertos...
...Yet who can count the number of those who are living well off the literature and arts industry...
...Every discovery of "significance" in Li'l Abner or Mickey Spillane helps to destroy the distinction between kitsch and art...
...One of the grotesqueries of American life is the amount of effort that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies and in proving that modern art is meaningless...
...There is no counterconcept to kitsch...
...Besides, whatever their aim, and often it's not so easy to figure out, the chief effect of writings like those of Leites, Riesman, Rolo and * Free Press...
...With so much bought interest in bad art, there would hardly seem any need for volunteers...
...One of the best American poets has produced Iittle else for years —in 30 seconds I could name five painters in the same state...
...Particularly, when one considers the shrinking quantity of thought being devoted to anything worth while...
...criticism of kitsch that has the air of emanating from an art lover put upon by inescapable kitsch...
...Art is not the sport of starving hermits...
...The theoretical, historical, statistical, cultural, anthropological, depth-analytical, polemical, pro phetical articles in it on TV, the movies, pulp fiction, advertising art, etc., more than exhaust their subject...
...561 pp...
...More and more the condition of art turns into its own affair, resistant to the generalizations of those who would fit it into their system of functions...
...While Macdonald's taste for kitsch is largely negative, it is genuine...
...ORTEGA is consistent...
...Academicians insist on a separation and an opposition, on the counterconcept of an idealistic art...
...True, some of my best friends are mass-culture analysts...
...Yet very little has been written on kitsch criticism, probably not enough to constitute a section of Mass Culture...
...b) art that has a predictable audience, predictable effects, predict able rewards 17 Kitsch is art that follows established rules at a time when all rules in art are being constantly put into question by each artist...
...In America kitsch is Nature...
...Had he not been disputing with them possession of the most prominent places, he could have found plenty of room...
...Whatever can be said of the "distortion of reality" by popular art can be said in equal measure about art...
...I should like to believe that it will now be considered closed for some time to come...
...In each case, no question of dishonesty, of "selling out," but of muscular slackness resulting from the discovery of an audience passively responsive to certain norms...
...I never heard of anyone who tore himself away from Walden Pond or his cork-lined isolation cell to fulfill a duty to study best sellers or Tin Pan Alley...
...Krrscx is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations...
...Both go to kitsch, which earns them by believing and consenting to the fact, that art and human nature remain the same throughout the ages...
...For half a century it has been forced to surrender one position after another...
...That kitsch and life are grown together into one monstrous limb may very well be at the bottom of the new delusion that the secrets of existence can now he read on the movie screen...
...Such self-delusion can be enormously stultifying...
...The counterconcept to popular culture is art...
...One so occupied gains the protection of the principle of indifference —exemplified in Mass Culture by Edmund Wilson's testimony, one of the few by literary personalities: "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd...
...6.50...
...This, too, deserves to be studied...
...When painter X or playwright Y begins to turn out X's and Y's for his readied audience— kitsch...
...I believe they have chosen to play in this stuff because they like it, including those who dislike what they like...
...when he speaks about art it is plain his ideas are kitsch...
...In practice, the counterconcept to kitsch is more kitsch...
...There is no way of setting up art as the opposite of kitsch...
...16 Art has no official attitude toward "poetic crap" (Rimbaud) . When kitsch first began to spread in European cities, excellent poets found it cute...
...at least genuine enough to yield him the time to become familiar with it...
...I confess that one of the reasons I hope that the wares of the cultural supermarket will now be left for their proper customers is that I find something annoying about the mental cast of those who keep handling the goods while denying any appetite for them...
...The people I am complaining about are the mass-art specialists, particularly the profound ones, those who can't switch to Channel 4 or roll over with a paperback without beholding hidden patterns of the soul and society of contemporary man...
...It is art that has all the difficulties...
...Must the mite of the PhD and the literary critic be tossed in too...
...Art drinks the corn of the popular, takes it in limited doses as a poison, as a vaccine...
...LIFE AND IITSCH have become inseparable...
...By now there is too much of it around for it to be a mode of the intellectually exotic...
...ENVOI The force of a constantly growing pyramid of cartons stuffed with the good things of the world transforms itself into the anxious eloquence of a million salesmen with their train of preachers, rhapsodists, limners, crooners and clowns...
...Cultural Anthropology pays better than New Criticism...
...But it is nothing else than the intellectualization of kitsch, in which the universities, foundations, museums play their part, that makes popular media into such a tremendous social force against the individual in this country, as in the Soviet Union...
...For the sensibility, it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment...
...Thus art loses itself if it becomes an extension of daily life, it becomes a commodity among commodities, kitsch...
...Kitsch is thus art produced in obedience to the basic assumptions of the Art Of The Ages: the assumption that traditional forms can be put to new uses through technical means...
...it states simply that detective stories stink, that those who read them enthusiastically are probably in no better condition, and that he, Wilson, will debate no further on their qualities...
...With regard to the norms of art there is nothing wrong with kitsch, whether represented by Leonard Bernstein or the draughtsman of Little Orphan Annie...
...There is only one way to quarantine kitsch: by being too busy with art...
...Popular art is their meat, whether as a clue to current relations, as an object of moral protest, as an occasion for self-expression, or just for the grinder...
...What is true about Macdonald is true about most of the contributors to Mass Culture...
...It is a trap for the critic of popular culture that, an esthete by implication, he will also begin to consider himself an aristocrat...
...One might as well walk on Fifth Avenue leading two greyhounds...
...Its antagonist is not an idea but reality...
...Labelled FOR CERTAIN MOMENTS ONLY, it dissociates itself not only from the millions who regardless of their "level of culture" have never passed through comparable experiences but from normal life in general, including that of the artist himself...
...Naturally, I am not referring to any of them...
...People don't need works of art any more for entertainment—there are too many commodities more directly designed for that purpose...
...Art implies an audience, if only as a source of easy money and applause...
...But every fabricator of kitsch looks down on other people's kitsch...
...When Macdonald speaks against kitsch he seems to be speaking from the point of view of art...
...Or it appeals to introverted adolescents, to people in crises of metamorphosis—a small-town girl who has met an intellectual, a bachelor forced to give up drinking, a business man who feels spiritually falsified— all these being more attentive to themselves than to the work...
...Some modes of kitsch criticism of kitsch: criticism of kitsch that ducks the question of the quality of the object it is examining—"the swampy ground of esthetic dispute," as one expert puts it...
...criticism of kitsch that ignores the fact that, given the social and psychic conditions under which popular art is produced, a coherent expression of any kind is all but impossible in it...
...As if there weren't already too much talent and intellect in America steadily draining into the dreck of the mass media...
...To study kitsch as propaganda is legitimate—e.g., the Berelson-Salter piece in Mass Culture on the treatment of minorities— since the aim of this is not knowledge alone but action, to dissolve the "old crap" by means of a new reality...
...Mass Culture,* compiled by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, is the first book that has ever tempted me to apply the reviewer's cliche, "definitive...
...The counterconcept to popular culture is art," says Leo Lowenthal...
...14 others in Mass Culture is to add to kitsch an intellectual dimension...
...But art never makes the mistake of regarding itself as a counterconcept...
...Will anyone deny that to these people their own insights are superior to those of art, or that their attitude toward the artist is a blend of philistinism, condescension and malice...
...the assumption that these forms retain an intrinsic power to move people...
Vol. 5 • January 1958 • No. 1
