The Homage To Kitsch Series

Clement Greenberg remains the outstanding
critic of American Post War Modernism. His essay from 1939 on "The Avante Garde and Kitsch" laid the foundation for American Art as we know it today. After 60 years his description of Kitsch is the best I've read, "True enough simultaneously with the entrance of the avante-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial west: that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful name 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. For some reason this gigantic apparition has always been taken for granted. It is time we looked into it's 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...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 kind can provide. Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academized 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, strategems, 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 accumulatred experience. This is what is 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. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the average seeker of 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 avante-garde material for its own uses. Nor is every single item of kitsch altogether worthless. Now and then it produces something of merit..." Clement Greenberg
Vision of the St.Croix
The Homage To Kitsch Series by Mike Vye, not just a sentimental, nostalgic look at antique illustration but in conjunction with the Editorial Series a thorough revision of the founding thesis of American Post War Modernism; Clement Greenberg's essay on "The Avante Garde and Kitsch."

MEMORIES OF PARADISE

"Painted" in Photoshop

My point is that mass media is here to stay. The myth of the Shock of the New has blinded us to the fact that content not surface determines the depth of art. Some kitsch is worth more than what often passes as High Art in todays culture.
All work Copyright by Mike Vye 2000. All rights reserved.

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