Prompt: What is the avant-garde? What are the politics of the avant-garde according to Clement Greenburg? How does Greenberg describe the relationship of the avant-garde to bourgeois culture? To mass society and culture? How does Greenberg describe the relationship between the avant-garde and kitsch?
In his essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), Greenberg describes the avant garde as an extremely self conscious, form-preoccupied style of art which came into being some time in the mid nineteenth century. It was born, according to Greenberg, out of a certain cultural necessity, wherein the erosion of certainty and objective truth in the nineteenth century gave way to an "Alexandrianism" in culture, which is a stagnation of culture in which certain controversial issues are consciously avoided, and all new creative activity defers to the 'old masters.' The avant-garde is brave where Alexandrianism is timid, active where Alexandrianism is static. It moves culture forward precisely with its historically conscious outlook which seeks to imitate processes of art and its old masters, rather than reproduce and imitate the forms themselves. Greenberg calls this highly self conscious sense of aesthetics "the imitation of imitating." In painting, the avant garde is preoccupied with the "arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc. to the exclusion of whatever is not implicated in these factors" (9). In poetry, the emphasis is on "the effort to create poetry the 'moments' themselves of poetic conversion, rather than on experience to be converted into poetry" (9).
Greenberg sees the avant garde as having a slightly confused relationship with politics. Originally, the avant garde was so preoccupied with questions of form and the relative values of aesthetics, that it did not have a political program--its program was decidedly apolitical. It soon found it necessary, however, to borrow from revolutionary politics the courage needed to defy social convention and to position itself critically against social (and artistic) establishment. Yet, it is interesting to note that the birth of the avant garde in or around the 1860s in France also coincided with what has been called "the great divide" when high and low cultures began to diverge. Thus, that which would rather divorce itself from class and the social/political world is in fact inextricably bound to the bourgeoisie by what Greenberg calls "an umbilical cord or gold" (11). In the end, neither the revolutionary facet, nor the anti-social, apolitical facet of the avant garde is tenable. Greenberg notes that academicism (which results in Alexandrianism) and commercialism (which results in kitsch) "are appearing in the strangest places" (11).
This encroaching stagnation is particularly frightening for Greenburg because he sees the avant garde as really the only living culture we have. We can see here an intersection with Benjamin, where the superstructure (culture, technology, etc.) begins to develop assymetrically with the base (the mode of production). If the base does not socialize in time, then the avant garde will be assimilated into the very economic and power structures which produce kitsch.
Because the avant garde is active, form-obsessed, historically conscious and (somewhat) revolutionary, it is the cultural opposite of kitsch. Kitsch, however, develops roughly a half-century after the appearance of the avant garde, as a result of the industrial revolution ('the machine age'). Kitsch depends on the avant garde because the former defines itself against and alongside the latter. It is not sensitive to history, but it is sensitive to the avant garde itself, and to public taste. In an attempt to become as universally acceptable as possible, it constantly changes with public taste yet can never express what the avant garde cannot.
Greenberg thinks of kitsch as something of a disease or tumor on the side of the avant garde, imitating its effects on viewers, without developing the form. Thus, it takes a shortcut; a viewer can experience similar effects looking at a kitsch painting, but a Picasso painting is intelligible only by those who have the resources and leisure to become educated. As a result of this simplicity in expression and reception, kitsch has become the official culture of fascist governments, populist governments, and virtually all powers who rule by demagogy. In democratic countries, however, kitsch is the universal culture as well, if not the official.
