Reclaiming Kitsch
Kitsch and commercialism are art’s not-part: they are what art or the avant-garde defines itself against, but what it is constantly in danger of becoming. Kitsch is, in a sense, art that lacks a certain quality which art aims for. Kitsch helps define art by its exclusion from it. In his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” influential critic Clement Greenberg tries to capture what kitsch lacks. He writes that kitsch is a product of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent universalization of literacy. The proletariat, he claims, “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.” The workers, hungry for distraction and leisure, but “insensitive to the values of genuine culture,” were fed kitsch: familiar, easy to process, explicit in its intended effects. It harnesses a “fully matured cultural tradition” for the raw materials for its hackneyed ends; and what provided kitsch with new tricks to water down for the masses, Greenberg argued, was nothing but the avant-garde.
Greenberg didn’t prophesize the (post-)modern obsession with the ironic reappropriation of kitsch, made most famous in the work of Andy Warhol, but also present to some degree in the high-brow fantasy of Terry Pratchett, the self-aware comics of Alan Moore, and the idea of camp investigated by Susan Sontag. These artists reversed the flow of cultural materials identified by Greenberg. The low-brow informed the high-brow, in an explicit subversion of tastes.
Panel from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ critically acclaimed Watchmen (1987). Image via
Still, the ironic re-appropriation of kitsch merely reinforces the avant-garde/kitsch divide, as what was once kitsch is converted to “true art.” It can only be appreciated ironically, that is, outside the intention of the original art. Kitsch still cannot be appreciated as kitsch.
With his acknowledgment of the reliance of the avant-garde on moneyed backers, Greenberg hints at a dialectic central to many discussions of art, one closely connected with the kitsch/avant-garde divide. It is virtually a truism to hold the demands of “art” to be in tension with those of “commercialism.” Popularity and quality are held, by some pretentious souls, to be related inversely. Greenberg’s opposition has, then, found another form to take. This tension is especially apparent in major label music. In rock this opposition manifests itself most often in debates over authenticity: who is and who isn’t, who sold out and who makes art. (Even when the two align we still talk as if they were diametrically opposed: did The Beatles make art that happens to be pop, or did they make pop that happens to be art?)
It is also worth noting that what gets labelled kitsch has historically been connected with the prototypical consumers of the genre or medium; our value judgments of the art is fundamentally tied to our value judgment of its consumers. What held (holds) no appeal for wealthy white men was presumed to be simply bad art, rather than art which spoke to the concerns and desires of others with different experiences informing them.
This is not to say that terms as “kitsch” and “art” and “avant-garde” are useless or harmful and that we should abandon them. But juxtaposing them is less useful than is supposed; this is related to the implicit point that “kitsch” and “art” are not stable designations. Focusing on what kitsch is obscures the more important question of what kitsch does – for art, for artists and for critics. What kitsch does is provide something with enough superficial similarities to art to resemble it, but is in some way defective. Nabokov, for example, claimed to “loathe” science-fiction while writing the very sci-fi Ada; science fiction was for him not a genre or set of conventions but a boogeyman, a prima facie bad thing to be avoided. Science fiction, as kitsch, was definitionally bad, and so anything which resembled it, but was good, must not be science fiction.
What do we lose when we talk in the terms of this tired – and, as showcased by Greenberg’s essay, latently classist – dichotomy?
Designer Jeremy Scott often turns to consumer culture as inspiration for his collections at Moschino, earning him a common attribution to kitsch. Image via
For his fall 2019 show, Jeremy Scott re-imagined kitsch by presenting a Price is Right inspired collection. Image via
The appeal of kitsch, Greenberg argues, lies in the immediacy of the response it provokes, the explicitness of its intended emotional effect. Kitsch is a simulacra of the true effects of art, designed for those not “sensitive” enough to understand the real thing. I disagree. Kitsch is capable of the same depth of feeling, the same ambiguity, the same imaginativeness as the avant-garde. This is not to say that all kitsch is meritorious, or that all art is the same quality. It is only to say that the quality of a work of art is not a property of its being kitsch or avant-garde or “true art”; bad is not synonymous with kitsch. Kitsch is just another category of art, rather than being diametrically opposed to it. It is just another way of going about doing art, and is therefore capable of reaching the same heights as “true art.” Kitschiness gives artists forms of expression not available otherwise, allows artists to do things which are impossible without it. Analyzing art, even “high-brow” art, in terms of kitsch lets us see aspects of it we might otherwise miss.
To display this further, let us examine a piece of kitsch: Harry Nilsson’s “Without You.” It’s kitsch, I believe, for three reasons. The song, as a cover song of a commercially successful song, is familiar in precisely the way kitsch is meant to be. Next, the song is not ironically reappropriating kitsch (or can at least be plausibly and fruitfully read that way), and finally it harnesses the language and conventions of a “fully matured cultural tradition.” The final point – that Nilsson’s song utilizes a fully realized tradition – needs no argument: “Without You” is a pop-rock song working within the strictures of a well-established genre. The other two, however, require some elaboration.
The first point is really two: first, that cover songs are inherently kitschy, and second, that a cover of a commercially popular song adds to that kitschiness. Cover songs fit nicely into Greenberg’s criteria for kitsch. Because cover songs do not require writing original lyrics, or in some cases even instrumentation, they mirror the mass producibility of kitsch. (This is not to say that cover songs require no creativity – Nilsson definitively disproves that.) Furthermore, covering Badfinger’s “Without You,” a commercially successful pop song in the style of The Beatles (various members of which worked with Badfinger), adds to the familiarity with the work already present in a cover song. You’ve heard this song before, from the lyrics to the Beatlesque melodies (Christgau accused Badfinger of mining the territory of The Beatles too heavily). Covers take the idea of utilizing the raw materials of a “fully matured” tradition to nearly parodic levels, and ensure one’s familiarity with the work, then. Covering “Without You” can, I believe, be seen as a conscious decision to highlight this kitschy aspect of Nilsson’s proclivity for covers.
Finally, is Nilsson merely doing what I argued previous artists had done – namely, is he ironically reappropriating kitsch? At the very least, “Without You” can be plausibly read as a serious expression from Nilsson, and thus as a reclamation of kitsch; understanding the song in this way allows us to see a complexity we would otherwise miss. It is only by seeing it as kitsch that we can see the song in its full ambiguity and depth. Nilsson’s “Without You,” to this listener, seems plainly sincere. The instrumentation swells and shrinks according to the hyperbolic emotion of the piece, but does not overdo it. The instrumentation works primarily because of Nilsson’s vocal delivery: his performance is convincingly self-serious, showing no trace of irony. The vocals are over-the-top, and not too self-conscious about their own ridiculousness – held together by Nilsson’s impressive voice, capable of suppleness and strength at once. The two conspire to create the impression of entirely unironic melodrama. And why not? Is not melodrama a part of life?
Viewing the song as (at least partly) sincere kitsch allows an interpretation not open to the ironic interpretation. A kitschy cover of a kitschy song enables Nilsson to place a certain distance between himself and the sentiment of the song; after all, it could all be one big joke. The song is so over-the-top that Nilsson can shield himself behind the possibility of irony. This plausible deniability gives room for Nilsson to express himself in ways not open to him normally; as Wilde observed, a mask can give the freedom to tell the truth. The song thus takes on an element of tragicomedy as the listener confronts Nilsson’s absurd position, one of sincerity of feeling coupled with a sense of its own outlandishness. It hints at the curse of self-consciousness, familiar to Camus’ Sisyphus: the necessity of living one’s life and all the while feeling it to be ridiculous. And it suggests a way of living with that knowledge, one imbued with a sense of absurdist humor and balanced on the edge of irony and sincerity (which turn out to not be so opposed). The balance Nilsson achieves is fragile, susceptible to falling into either jaded irony or soppiness; the understanding of the silliness of one’s life must be paired with inhabiting it. The dialectic can never be resolved, only accepted.
The conflation of kitsch with commercialism, as opposed to “real art,” highlights a tension inherent in all works of art. Greenberg’s Marxist leanings led him to see kitsch as a manifestation of capital’s ability to infiltrate all forms of production, including artistic. Thus kitsch lands somewhere between art and utilitarian object, and helps set up another dichotomy in terms of which art can be understood. Greenberg also noticed, however, how the avant-garde’s dependence on rich patrons indebted them to capital as well, and worked to dissolve their revolutionary potential. The difference between the two is, then, not entirely clear; but the juxtaposition, the definition (of art) by exclusion (of kitsch) remains. Art is contemplated, passively spectated, purely aesthetic, while objects are used, active, teleological. Objects are commercial products, art is not. Kitsch lies between these two poles, the idea goes, thereby making it not wholly art.
Marina Abramović and Ulay. Image via
These notions of the conditions of spectatorship for art have come under increasing suspicion in recent memory. A theme of much postmodern work has been to draw attention to the theory-ladenness of seeing and of the constitutive role it plays in creating the work of art. “Performance pieces” like Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” force the spectator to play an explicitly active role in constituting the piece, rather than being allowed to passively view a completed art object. The relation of spectatorship is made two-way, with “art” viewing and shaping spectator and vice versa. Passive and neutral spectatorship, work like Abramovic’s seems to be saying, was never possible. Abramovic’s work is not kitsch (it seems to be a repudiation of kitsch, in fact), but it does highlight how the barriers between kitsch and art are permeable, how kitsch and art as we understand them cannot be defined in opposition to one another. Pop songs, similarly, call attention to the kitschiness of all art. It is easy to forget in the days of streaming that songs are objects, and are bought and sold. They are unequivocally commercial: they are unequivocally kitsch. That doesn’t lessen them as art.
If art cannot define itself without an opposition to kitsch, where does that leave it? I couldn’t presume to begin to answer that question, except to say that we haven’t lost much.
Feature image via.
