Greetings Economists, Doyle, The concept of Kitsch as the Frankfurt school theorized about has had little impact upon my thinking about art. My approach is from the point of view of what is realism. During the 80's in the U.S. art market and perhaps too Europe (since the British had their Kitsch producers as well), Kitsch rose to the top of the market. It was touted as populist . The art markets conceptual counter to Kitsch being educated skilled artists doing complex work. I've never found this very useful insight into understanding what's going on.
To say Bush is Kitsch tells me little about what exactly is being done with the mass media. I can't tell what it means that it is degraded from a so-called higher art form. In any case the mass media of Twentieth Century States performs information production in a manner similar to books or printing in the broad sense that all such media are one-to-many (a way of describing a type of network information structure) forms of information production. Greenberg was talking about how totalitarianism makes Kitsch. In my view all that is being sought by totalitarians, or Walt Disney is a mass product using certain sorts of tools that the public will support with their money. None of this being a particularly recent analytical development upon the structure of expression. We have different information production tasks being done with a novel, painting, or film which the term Kitsch is meant to cover at once. Kitsch is debased, but from what? Is the movie debased to the level of a painting, the novel debased to a movie? And what is a realist to make of these conundrums? Kitsch seems to me to be about the networked properties (the architecture of the mass in a media product) in information structure. Does content have depth? That's a little like saying can I google a page of information or a page (out of 10 billion pages). At any rate Kitsch is about consuming content, and ignores the interactivity of the work process that really produces value in any commodity. I object to the one-sidedness of the Kitsch concept. LP writes, Marxist cultural theory has tried to come to terms with kitsch of this sort ever since the 1930s. Wikipedia states the term originates from the German and Yiddish 'etwas verkitschen' (which has a similar meaning to "knock off" in English). For Clement Greenberg, Hermann Broch, and Theodor Adorno, the avant garde and kitsch were opposites. Kitsch was perceived as an assault on culture. Adorno developed many of these ideas when he was living in Los Angeles and directed his wrath at Walt Disney cartoons, etc. When I read "Dialectics of Enlightenment" by Adorno and Horkheimer, I was put off by what appeared as snobbery mixed with academic Marxism. After seeing "Hitler's Hit Parade," I have a better sense of what was bugging these Frankfurt school Marxists. It is too bad that they went overboard. Broch called kitsch "the evil within the value-system of art" and argued that kitsch involved trying to achieve "beauty" instead of "truth." Doyle, The moral term, evil, is not a materialist concept. LP, In his 1939 essay titled "Avant Garde and Kitsch," written for the Trotskyist Partisan Review, Clement Greenberg lumped Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Stalinist Russia together when it came to the question of kitsch and mass society: "Where today a political regime establishes an official cultural policy, it is for the sake of demagogy. If kitsch is the official tendency of culture in Germany, Italy and Russia, it is not because their respective governments are controlled by philistines, but because kitsch is the culture of the masses in these countries, as it is everywhere else. The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects. Since these regimes cannot raise the cultural level of the masses -- even if they wanted to -- by anything short of a surrender to international socialism, they will flatter the masses by bringing all culture down to their level. It is for this reason that the avant-garde is outlawed, and not so much because a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture." In a few years, Greenberg would abandon socialism altogether and enlist in the war against Communism using avant-garde art as a heavy artillery weapon against the USSR. In 1984, the Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote about kitsch in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." According to Wikipedia, he argued that kitsch functioned to exclude everything that humans find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitized view of the world in which "all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions." Obviously he anticipated what would be happening in the USA twenty years later under a President who deploys down-home kitschiness on behalf of murderous imperialist wars abroad and assaults on the working-class at home. When he is challenged by his critics, he brushes them aside--assisted by a spineless press and Democratic Party. Someday, when this is no longer sufficient to stay the course, he might resort to more repressive measures. At that time, it will be useful to study the lessons of Hitler's rise. & Doyle, I don t think Kitsch is relevant to viewing what Bush does as far as his media image is concerned. Thanks, Doyle Saylor
