Responding to Mike Mallory;
Your elegant defense of kitsch confirms my fears. When the essence of a person is conflated to "American Culture"and that to mass produced commercial or entertainment icons, something is very wrong. I suppose the knee jerk reaction is to blame the people for their addiction to kitsch. But delight in the symbols of mass consumer culture does not outline the whole terrain of American Culture. I do agree that those symbols can reveal a deep sense of who Americans are, if one assumes an elitist overview, as in "poor dopes, they are as they use". That's the disagreeable academic undertone of the Cultural Theory explainers. They can explain the mystery of human psychology by means of simple signs and received opinion, as if each individual is not immersed in abstract and strange currents running deep. Oh, a pop up memory from Joyce: "I hear the noise of many waters making moan, Sad as the seabird is when flying forth alone." I am reminded of Robert Frank's book, the Americans, as one of the first instances where the everyday also revealed an amazingly complex and rich, difficult, demanding sense of Americans. That was the fifties, my coming of age era, and where is that depth and gravitas now? It is gone from everyday culture, replaced, as you say. by the icons of Americanism, but these are uniformly the cheery, bright, playful, entertaining, fully democratic images we see everywhere. They were invented by advertisers who rightly sought to extend the blessings of a great technological free enterprise market to all. It has a moral foundation in that aim to further justice and access through commodities and the better life they provide. This is where I have trouble with your view. It seems to ignore what I regard as the most fundamental trait of American Culture. Justice and fair play. >From the Mayflower Compact, to the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, (and even back to the Magna Carta as a model) Americans have been preoccupied with the quest for justice and fair play. It is the constant national debate, a contentious debate to be sure, often tipped toward self-interest, violence and just plain wrongheadedness and yet it is a moral and worthy endeavor and most Americans, whatever their limitations or abundances, believe that to the depths of their being. Americans have the consciousness for wanting to do the right thing. It is a profound quest. It has made America the greatest nation ever in the world, many times greater than any of the past. Not a hundred Romes can match it. Not a thousand Renaissances or any other civilization has ever devoted so much struggle for human rights and none has excelled as America has. Yes, it is a flawed endeavor, tragic beyond compare in many ways. What postmodern art can symbolize this euphoric and tragic paradox? Jeff Koons' work is now being exhibited on the roof of MOMA in NYC. MOMA is to contemporary art as our Capitol in D.C. is to America. To think of that great museum, the standard of modernist quality, being capped by Koons' Platinum Balloons is like seeing the U.S. President wearing a balloon party hat when delivering a State of The Union address. It's very difficult for me to criticize Jeff Koons. I have spent time with him. We shared a podium and a dinner. He is a fine person, decent, smart, not at all cynical and he truly seeks beauty in his art. He takes from life, yes, but he also digs into autobiographical "icons". Yes, I do think he makes important celebratory art and, yes, it's certainly true that American Culture is celebratory, even reverently celebratory as evidenced by mainstream American religions. But it takes more to symbolize the joy-angst of our time than brilliant, loving, innocent celebration. Because it's Veterans Day and I'm a vet, I can be excused for proclaiming my deep patriotism and faith in the American sensibility -- preoccupied by justice and fair play; that is, I mean human rights. Americans care about justice and doing the right thing and they are deeply and consistently engaged in a 300 year conversation about human rights. It's tough talk, troubling, dangerous, complicated and much more. It's not pop art. It's not kitsch. It's not cynical, ironic, goofy, cheap or demeaning. It's full of torment and hope, trying, trying again. It exposes the real culture. There's been more progress in that in America, by common-sense folk figuring it out the hard way, than anywhere else, ever. Ever! My family has been in America for 13 generations, from 150 yrs. before the Revolution and I know much about my ancestors. Some of them died in our wars. For some of them I have a scattering of their objects, their papers, their ephemera. Their individual histories tell the story of America perhaps as well as any. Some were good, some bad, some successful, some failed. Mostly they were ordinary people and they did their best. A few were in government. One way or another they represented the ongoing crisis of the pursuit for justice in the way Tocqueville summarized: The protection of minority rights assuming that the majority in a democracy can always attain its self interest. Can you tell me that's not the inner voice of every American, and the deep, profound consciousness that permeates every page of American history? Is that kitsch? Is that a flower doggie? No, Americans are not the One Dimensional Man. Who has shown the truth of our society in postmodern art? I'm old enough to have touched the hands of pioneers. Perhaps I belong to the last generation who did. These were people who bumped their way to the Dakotas in wagons. These were funny people. They had their kitsch. They were full of optimism. But they worked in dirt, out in nowhere, and lived among sickness and death. Tragedy was up close and personal. I have enormous respect for these people. They had a long view of life and for most of them it was a short time living it. I feel responsibility to them. I can't forget how hard they tried and how deeply they cared for justice and fair play. All thirteen generations did the same. And what of later immigrants? Were they defined by kitsch imagery? Were their deepest feelings sucked up and bounced back to them by a roadside sign, a glittery window display? I've been to the European cities you mention. I've been all over America. I've traced my ancestors' paths, their land, their endeavors and those of others. I can't make fun of them by trivializing my own life as an artist through silly art puns and sloppy work. I think a real modernism in art is interested in the fullest symbols of the human spirit. It is melacholy in the true sense of the term, meaning a sympathy for the tragic that underlies formation of moral aspiration. Good art springs from the tragic. It recognizes the sorrow of injustice and the violence of evil and It defies them. Kitsch art pretends that sorrow and evil are absent (as in mass consumer imagery) and thus falsifies life, people, and subverts the quest for justice and fair play. I firmly believe that American culture, its true culture -- complex, discursive, abstract, searching, trying, inwardly moral, is still the beacon for the world --and it has proven that by redeveloping half the world, including former enemy states, after WWII. Are we able to sustain that impulse for doing the right thing, admitting failures and trying again? What postmodern art symbolizes that? Robert Frank made genuinely high art with ordinary American reality. Who has matched that? Warhol?
