A fine line between art and kitsch

Roger Scruton
Contributor
Our world is hungry for meaning and I explore our ways of finding it.
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Feb 21, 2014,05:41pm EST
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One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of
kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why? In a famous essay that appeared in Partisan
Review in 1939, the Marxist critic Clement Greenberg challenged the artistic milieu of his day
with the stark choice between ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’. There was, for Greenberg, no way back to
the old figurative ways of painting. All the images had been deprived of their aura, and if you
attempted, in the world of the 1930s, to paint a beautiful nude in the manner of Ingres, then the
result would be kitsch. The only way forward was the way of the avant-garde, which either
eschewed representation altogether, or presented figures that had been, as it were, discomposed
and reassembled, like those faces of Picasso that look forwards and sideways at once, or those
figures of de Kooning that seem to have been slapped on the canvas as a punishment, and then
eaten alive by the paint.

For half a century or more Greenberg’s view was orthodoxy. To be a modern artist you had to turn
your back on the literal image, since the very attempt to produce traditional art would turn oil-
paint to candy-floss and emotion to kitsch. You must go forward with the avant-garde, and forward
everybody went, to the point where nobody quite knew just where he was going, and art had
ceased to be something to look at and become something to think about instead. Then, in a burst of
inspiration, Andy Warhol began producing Brillo Boxes. These were not figurative paintings,
since they were indistinguishable from the originals. But nor were they ‘avant-garde’, since they
were neither abstract squiggles, nor demolitions of reality. They were just there, with no
explanation, because that was what the artist had done.

After a while, with the emergence of pop art and advert-art, and a few more attempts at conceptual
art, the way was once again open for kitsch. Careful though: you had to show that you were
sophisticated in the matter, that you were not so naïve as to suppose that kitsch was real art. But
you could make it into real art if you placed it in quotation marks – producing not kitsch but
‘kitsch’, something so blatantly awful that it could not possibly be merely awful – like the Michael
Jackson images and balloon dogs of Jeff Koons, which litter museums and public spaces all across
the country.

This new kind of art – pre-emptive kitsch, as I call it, since it is trying to pre-empt critical
judgment – turns everything upside down again. ‘Hey,’ says the naïve student of modern culture,
‘I thought we were supposed to puke at this kind of thing.’ ‘No,’ replies the critic, ‘things have
moved on since those days. You have to hear the laughter behind the puke. So to speak.’
PROMOTED

Whatever we think of the history of modern art since Greenberg, we have to admit that the kitsch
question is still with us. Just what is kitsch? And if it is awful, why is it awful? Those questions
are not about the visual arts only. There is plenty of kitsch in music. Critics have used the word to
describe (and condemn) not just the grosser products of the Christmas market, but some of the
best loved pieces in the classical repertoire, from the symphonies of Tchaikovsky to the operas of
Puccini. I don’t say that they were right. But we sort of know what they mean. There is something
over the top about those works. They tug too insistently at the heart-strings, as though not really
convinced that they contain as much in the way of sentiment as you are supposed to think they do.

There is kitsch in literature too. Those ghastly scenes in Dickens, where the little victim dies,
blessing from his innocent heart the grieving bystanders; those greeting-card lyrics by Patience
Strong, dedicated to ‘dear old dad’ or ‘the new arrival’; those would-be profundities from Maya
Angelou – all such things seem to be infected with the same disease. You can’t take them
seriously, even though seriously is the only way they can be taken if they are taken at all. Oscar
Wilde famously said that you need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell (in
Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop). He meant that Dickens’s unscrupulous stirring up of sentiment
conceals a total lack of it. Dickens is in fact writing about nothing, and has used all the clichés of
compassion in order to disguise the fact that he his more interested in his own compassion than in
the poor little excuse for it. If he felt what he claims to feel he would find it hard to write; the
words would come from him tarnished with the pain that prompted them, like the words of King
Lear , holding the dead Cordelia in his arms. In short, he doesn’t care. The heart of stone is there
on the page.

Wilde was right of course. But does this get us any nearer to a definition of kitsch? Two things
have particularly struck me, when thinking of this problem. One is the fact that kitsch is
immediately recognizable. The ‘yuk’ feeling is there on the canvas, on the screen, in the notes, in
the words. Whether it is a garden gnome, the sound of Bing Crosby launching into ‘White
Christmas’, the blinking innocent eyes of Bambi or the words of Patience Strong, the kitsch
phenomenon is there as strong and recognisable as your mother’s face. You seldom if ever have
the question, whether this is kitsch or not. If you think it might be, then it is.

The second thing that has struck me is the strange fact that kitsch is a modern phenomenon. No
art, music or literature before the end of the 18th century seems to display it. Those medieval
frescoes of sinners being forked into hell or wafted to heaven are primitive, even absurd. But
somehow the feeling is real, however crudely presented. 18th century opera is packed with
emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ of Victorian poetry
does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
So where do we go from here? What made the difference and what kind of difference was it? Mass
production? The Enlightenment? The loss of religious faith? Or is it just that taste is a fragile
thing, and not every age of civilisation can really provide it?