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n a celebrated 1939 article, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," published in÷
 

 
, the New York art critic Clement Greenberg argued that figurative
painting was dead. "The alternative to abstraction," he wrote, "is not
Michelangelo but kitsch." Every attempt to make the painted image vie with
the photograph, he believed, would lead to disaster, as clichés took charge
of the canvas. Henceforth painting must provide its own subject matter: it
must be self-sufficient, pure, uncontaminated by the figurative image. The
future of painting lay with the "abstract expressionists," as Greenberg
described them: the artists who treated painting like music, as a medium for
expressing emotion through the use of abstract forms.

Greenberg was perhaps the most influential art critic of his day. His essay set
the agenda for an emerging school of New York painters and also set the
price tag on their works. Vast sums of public and private money have since
changed hands to stock American houses and American museums with
works that, to the ordinary eye, have nothing to recommend them apart from
their attempt to be abreast of the times. The avant-garde ceased to be a
realm of caution and experiment and became, under Greenberg's tutelage,
a mass industry. So long as you avoided the literal image, so long as you
defied all figurative conventions, you, too, could be a modern painter. You,
too, could establish your credentials as a pathbreaking artistic genius, by
doing something³no matter what, so long as it left a permanent mark on a
purchasable object³that no one had done before. And if you got lucky, you
could be rich and famous, like Cy Twombly, on account of images that look
like accidents³and might even be accidents, like the numbers that win on
the lottery.

Of course, some painters refused to take this path ³painters like Edward
Hopper, who worked to purify the figurative image and to see again with the
innocent eye. But critics and curators remained skeptical; they had invested
too heavily in the avant-garde to believe that it was, after all, only a fashion.
Hopper's success was therefore viewed as a freakish thing³a last-ditch
survival of an art that elsewhere had been killed off by the march of history.
For all truly modern peopl e, the critics went on saying, Greenberg's maxim still
held good: don't touch the figurative image, or you'll land yourself in kitsch.

The problem is, however, that you land yourself in kitsch in any case. Take a
stroll around MoMA, and you will encounter it in almost every room: avant-
garde, certainly³novel in its presumption, if not in its effect³but also kitsch,
abstract kitsch, of the kind that makes modernist wallpaper or is botched
together for the tourist trade on the Boulevard Montparnasse. The effu sions of
Georgia O'Keeffe, with their gushing suggestions of feminine and floral things,
are telling instances. Study them, if you can bear it, and you will see that the
disease that rotted the heart of figurative painting has struck at its successor.
[hat makes for kitsch is not the attempt to compete with the photograph
but the attempt to have your emotions on the cheap ³the attempt to
appear sublime without the effort of being so. And this cut-price version of
the sublime artistic gesture is there for all to see in Barnett Newman or Frank
Stella. [hen the avant-garde becomes a cliché, then it is impossible to
defend yourself from kitsch by being avant-garde.

f we look back over European art before the mid-eighteenth century, we

find occasional lapses into sentimentality³in Murillo, for example, or Guido
Reni or Greuze. [e also discover mechanical and cliché -ridden art, like the
music of Vivaldi. But we find nothing that really could be described as
kitsch³not even Vivaldi's D

   , which has survived its demotion to
Muzak without losing its unaffected simplicity. The artless art of primitive
people, the art of the medieval stonemasons and stained-glass makers³all
these are naive and devoid of high pretensions. Yet none is kitsch, nor could it
be. This art never prompts that half-physical revulsion³the "yuk!" feeling³that
is our spontaneous tribute to kitsch in all its forms. Of course, stained-glass
kitsch exists, but it is the work of Pre-Raphaelites and their progeny³the work
of sophisticated people, conscious of their loss of innocence. [e all admire
the craftmanship of Burne-Jones, but we are also conscious that his figures
are not angels, but children dressing up.

Critics noticed and lamented the capture of the visual arts by fake emotion
long before the word "kitsch" was invented. The art of Bouguereau was a
triumphant version of what was soon to be a mass-marketed product³and a
major import to America. 
  
, as it was later known³pumped-up
art³prompted Baudelaire's famous essay in defense of Manet, "The Painter of
Modern Life"; it led to the revolt of the Impressionists against the salons and to
the first conscious split between highbrow and middlebrow taste. Modernism
was in part a defense against the sentimentality of mass culture. And the first
desire of the modernists was to re-connect themselves to the innocent,
prelapsarian art of people uncorrupted by the modern media. Pound and
Eliot in literature, Bartók, Copland, and Stravinsky in music, Picasso and
Gauguin in painting³all were keen anthropologists, looking for those
"genuine" and unforced expressions of sentiment against which to weigh the
empty clichés of the post-romantic art industry.

They were surely right that kitsch is a modern invention. But pre -modern
people are not proof against it. On the contrary, their immune systems seem
helpless in the face of this new contagion; today the mere contact of a
traditional culture with [estern civilization is sufficient to transmit the disease,
rather as tribes were once rescued from thei r darkness by colonial
adventurers and missionaries, only to die at once from smallpox or TB. A
century ago, no African art was kitsch. Now kitsch is on sale in every African
airport³antelopes, elephants, witch doctors, and hobgoblin deities, skillfully
carved in ivory or tropical hardwood, imitating the enchanted figures that
inspired Picasso but, in this or that barely perceptible detail, betraying their
nature as fakes.

Much of our present cultural situation can be seen as a response to this

remarkable phenomenon³not, I think, encountered before the
Enlightenment but now ubiquitous and inescapable. In all spheres where
human beings have attempted to ennoble themselves, to make examples
and icons of the heroic and the sublime, we encounter the mass-produced
caricature, the sugary pretense, the easy avenue to a dignity destroyed by
the very ease of reaching it. "Kitsch," wrote Greenberg, "is the epitome of all
that is spurious in the life of our times." And he had in mind not figurative
painting only, but Hollywood, popular music, the picture postcard, and
indeed, all the flotsam of mass culture. One's main thought, nevertheless, on
reading Greenberg's essay is: "How lucky he was to live then and not now."

he word "kitsch" comes to us from German, though its origins are obscure:
many suspect a Yiddish input, a knowing wink from the shtetl. German art
and literature of the last century certainly provide some of the choicest
instances³many of them gathered together by Gert Richter in his
invaluable c     . Nevertheless, the Germans should not
take all the blame. It is in America that kitsch reached its apogee, not as a
form of life but as a way of death. In Forest Lawn Memorial Park, death
becomes a rite of passage into Disneyland. The Americ an funerary culture, so
cruelly satirized by Evelyn [augh in    , attempts to prove that
this event, too³the end of man's life and his entry into judgment ³is in the last
analysis unreal. This thing that cannot be faked becomes a fake. The world o f
kitsch is a world of make-believe, of permanent childhood, in which every
day is Christmas. In such a world, death does not really happen. The "loved
one" is therefore reprocessed, endowed with a sham immortality; he only
pretends to die, and we only pretend to mourn him.

Those things that challenge us to transcend ourselves, to be something more

than dependent children, are the places where the kitsch-fly lays its eggs.
Death demands grief and dignity and suffering. It is therefore kitsched into a
sweeter and slushier condition, a childlike slumber that brings sentimental
tears, like the death of Little Nell at the end of Dickens's  

 
  (proof, if proof were needed, that great artists are not all immune from
kitsch). And such tears are easil y wiped away. ("A man needs a heart of
stone," as Oscar [ilde famously said, "not to laugh at the death of Little Nell.")
[hen tragedy enters the world of kitsch, it is denatured, purged of that
absolute sense of loss that is the proper response to the death of a moral
being. That's why kitsch tragedy tends so often to be played out with
animals³like the mother deer's death in [alt Disney's  , which elicits
grief harmlessly because the character is ³literally³a cartoon.

n my grandmother's piano stool was a stack of sheet music from the twenties
and thirties³Billy Mayerl, Horatio Nicholls, Albert Ketelbey ³and this was my
apprenticeship in popular culture. Such music was part of the family, played
and sung with intense nostalgia on wedding anniversaries, b irthdays,
Christmases, and family visits. Every piece had an extra-musical meaning, a
nimbus of memory and idle tears.

I got to know the once famous, now notorious, piece of light music by
Ketelbey called "In a Monastery Garden" in a piano reduction. Recen tly, I
listened to the full orchestral version, in which birds tweet above the corny
melody, while a choir of monks sings "Kyrie Eleison" from afar. This experience
provided another kind of insight into kitsch. Ketelbey's music is trying to do
what music cannot do and should not attempt to do³it is telling me what it
means, while meaning nothing. Here is heavenly peace, it says; just fit your
mood to these easy contours, and peace will be yours. But the disparity
between the emotion claimed by the music and the technique used to
suggest it shows the self-advertisement to be a lie. Religious peace is a rare
gift, which comes about only through spiritual discipline. The easy harmonic
progressions and platitudinous tune take us there too easily, so that we know
we have not arrived. The music is faking an emotion, by means that could
never express it.

Kitsch is pretense. But not all pretense is kitsch. Something else is needed to
create the sense of intrusion³the un-wanted hand on the knee. Kitsch is not
just pretending; it is asking you to join in the game. In real kitsch, what is being
faked cannot be faked. Hence the pretense must be mutual, complicitous,
knowing. The opposite of kitsch is not sophistication but innocence. Kitsch art
is 
 to express something, and you, in accepting it, are pretending
to feel.

Kitsch therefore relies on codes and clichés that convert the higher emotions
into a pre-digested and trouble-free form³the form that can be most easily
pretended. Like processed food, kitsch avoids everything in the organism that
asks for moral energy and so passes from junk to crap without an intervening
spell of nourishment.

[hat brought this peculiar form of pretense into being? Here is a suggestion.
[e are moral beings, who judge one another and ourselves. [e live under
the burden of reproach and the hope of praise. All our higher feelings are
informed by this³and especially by the desire to win favorable regard from
those we admire. This ethical vision of human life is a work of criticism and
emulation. It is a vision that all religions deliver and all societies need. Unless
we judge and are judged, the higher emotions are impossible: pride, loyalty,
self-sacrifice, tragic grief, and joyful surrender³all these are artificial things,
which exist only so long as, and to the extent that, we fix one another with the
eye of judgment. As soon as we let go, as soon as we see one another as
animals, parts of the machinery of nature, released from moral imperatives
and bound only by natural laws, then the higher emotions desert us. At the
same time, these emotions are necessary: they endow life with meaning and
form the bond of society.

Hence we find ourselves in a dangerous predicament. The emotions that we

need cannot be faked; but the vision on which they depend³the vision of
human freedom and of mankind as the subject and object of judgment³is
constantly fading. And in these circumstances, there arises the temptation to
replace the higher life with a charade, a moral conspiracy that obscures the
higher life with the steam of the herd.

This explains why the Enlightenment is so important. For it changed our vision
of the moral life. Previously, the judgment that was in -voked in our higher
feelings was experienced as the judgment of God. After the Enlightenment, it
was experienced as the judgment of men and women. The greatest art of
the Enlight-enment is devoted to rescuing mankind from this predicament by
showing that human judgment is sufficient to raise us above the beasts and
to endow our works with the dignity that may come from human freedom.
Such is the message of  D
and of D
.

Unsupported by faith, however, the ethical vision falters. [hether it ought to

falter may be doubted; but it does so, and the proof of this is romanticism.
The romantic artist is attempting to invest human life with a religious aura ³to
rewrite those purely human experiences of conflict and passion as though
they originated in the divine. In this way, nineteenth -century art served to
sustain the vision of a highe r life in the midst of bourgeois mediocrity. But
behind the efforts of the romantic avant-garde, another force was gathering
momentum, and this force was kitsch. Romantic art involves a heroic attempt
to re-enchant the world: to look on human beings as though they had the
significance and the dignity of angels. To sustain this attempt requires moral
and aesthetic discipline, of the kind we witness in Brahms or Keats or [agner.
It also requires a work of the imagination, a searching of ordinary human life
for those sacramental moments when the light of freedom shines through.

his work of the imagination is not possible for everyone; and in an age of
mass communication, people learn to dispense with it. And that is how kitsch
arises³when people who are avoiding the cost of the higher life are
nevertheless pressured by the surrounding culture into pretending that they
possess it. Kitsch is an attempt to have the life of the spirit on the cheap.

Hence the earliest manifestations of kitsch are in religion: the plaster saints
and doe-eyed madonnas that sprang up during the nineteenth century in
every Italian church, the cult of Christmas and the baby Jesus that replaced
the noble tragedy of Easter and the narrative of our hard-won redemption.
Kitsch now has its pantheon of deities³deities of make-believe like Santa
Claus³and its book of saints and martyrs, saints of sentiment like Linda
McCartney and martyrs to self-advertisement like Princess Diana.
The First [orld [ar saw the rapid rise of patriotic kitsch, and the great crimes
and revolutions of our century have taken place behind a veil of kitsch: look
at the art and propaganda of Nazi Germany and revolutionary Russia, and
you will see the unmistakable sign of it³the gross sentimentality, the
mechanical clichés, and the constant pretense at a higher life and a noble
vision that can be obtained just like that, merely by putting on a uniform.
Socialist realism, Nazi nationalism, the Nuremberg rallies and May Day
parades³the best description of such things was once g iven to me by a
Czech writer, at the time working underground: "kitsch with teeth."

Ãerious artists are inevitably aware of kitsch: they fear it, are constantly on
guard against it, and if they flirt with kitsch it is with a sense of risk, knowing
that all artistic effort is wasted should you ever cross the line. No artist better
illustrates this than Mahler. Time and again in his great symphonies he finds
himself tempted: he himself admitted it, though in other words, to Freud. The
mass-produced nostalgia of the Hapsburg empire is waiting at the door of
consciousness and could burst in at any time. [aiting, too, is that winsome,
folk-inspired evocation of adolescent love, with its horn chords and lingering
upbeats, its lilting rhythm and familiar tonal phra ses. Listen to the slow
movement of the Sixth Symphony, and you will sense it hovering out of
earshot, held back by phrases just that bit more angular than the cliché
requires, by [agnerized harmonies, and by an instrumentation that lets in a
breeze of saving irony. In the adagietto of the Fifth Symphony, by contrast,
kitsch is triumphant. The result is film music par excellence ³and used as such
by Visconti, in his kitsched-up version of Mann's   .

This fear of kitsch was one of the motives behind modernism in the arts. Tonal
music, figurative painting, rhyming and regular verse ³all seemed, at the time
of the modernist experiments, to have exhausted their capacity for sincere
emotional expression. To use the traditional idioms was to betray the higher
life³which is why Clement Greenberg told his readers that there was, be-
tween abstract art and kitsch, no third way.

At the same time, there is something utopian in Greenberg's condemnation.

Kitsch is omnipresent, part of the language, and a seeming ly inevitable
aspect of cultural democracy. It is the debased coinage of the emotions.
Kitsch is advertising, just as most advertising is kitsch. It is an attempt to turn
value into price, the problem being that its subject matter has a value only
when it is not pretended and a price only when it is. Hence the market in
emotion must deal in simulated goods.

This is why the loss of religious certainty facilitated the birth of kitsch. Faith
exalts the human heart, removing it from the marketplace, making it s acred
and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion, our deeper feelings
are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life, the life lived
in judgment. [hen faith declines, however, the sacred loses one of its most
important forms of protection from marauders; the heart can now more easily
be captured and put on sale. Some things ³the human heart is one of
them³can be bought and sold only if they are first denatured. The Christmas -
card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be:
hence the emotion that they offer is fake.

Kitsch reflects our failure not merely to value the human spirit but to perform
those sacrificial acts that create it. It is a vivid reminder that the human spirit
cannot be taken for granted, that it does not exist in all social conditions, but
is an achievement that must be constantly renewed through the demands
that we make on others and on ourselves. Nor is kitsch a purely aesthetic
disease. Every ceremony, every ritual, every public displ ay of emotion can be
kitsched³and inevitably will be kitsched, unless controlled by some severe
critical discipline. (Think of the Disneyland versions of monarchical and state
occasions that are rapidly replacing the old stately forms.) It is impossible to
flee from kitsch by taking refuge in religion, when religion itself is kitsch. The
"modernization" of the Roman Catholic Mass and the Anglican prayer book
were really a "kitschification": and attempts at liturgical art are now poxed all
over with the same disease. The day-to-day services of the Christian churches
are embarrassing reminders of the fact that religion is losing its sublime
godwardness and turning instead toward the world of fake sentiment.

n art, there comes a point where a style, a form, an idiom, or a vocabulary

can no longer be used without producing cliché. Fear of this debasement led
to the routinization of the avant-garde. By posing as avant-garde, the artist
gives an easily perceivable sign of his authenticity. But the result, I have
suggested, is kitsch of another kind and a loss of genuine public interest.
Patronage keeps the avant-garde in business; but patronage lacks the
power to sustain the avant-garde's position as the censor of modern culture.

This is one reason for the emergence of a wholly new artistic enterprise, which
some call "postmodernism" but which might better be described as
"preemptive kitsch." Having recognized that modernist severity is no longer
acceptable³for modernism begins to seem like the same old thing and
therefore not modern at all³artists began not to shun kitsch but to embrace
it, in the manner of Andy [arhol, Alan Jones, and Jeff Koons. The worst thing
is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch; far better to produc e kitsch
deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody.
(The intention to produce real kitsch is an impossible intention, like the
intention to act unintentionally.) Preemptive kitsch sets quotation marks
around actual kitsch and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials. The
dilemma is not: kitsch or avant-garde, but: kitsch or "kitsch." The quotation
marks function like the forceps with which a pathologist lifts some odoriferous
specimen from its jar.

And so modernist severity has given way to a kind of institutionalized

flippancy. Public galleries and big collections fill up with the predigested
clutter of modern life, obsolete the moment it goes on permanent display.
Such is the "art" of Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili (winner of this year's Turner Prize),
Gilbert and George, and all the other poseurs who dominate the British art
scene. Art as we knew it required knowledge, competence, discipline, and
study. Preemptive kitsch, by contrast, delights in the tacky, the ready-made,
and the cut-out, using forms, colors, and images that both legitimize
ignorance and also laugh at it, effectively silencing the adult voice ³as in
Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons. Such art eschews subtlety, allusion, and
implication, and in place of imagined ideals in gilded frames it offers real junk
in quotation marks. It is indistinguishable in the end from advertising ³with the
sole qualification that it has no product to sell except itself.

But here we should look again at those postmodernist quot ation marks.
Maybe, after all, they are what they seem: not a sign of sophistication but a
sign of pretense. Quotation marks are one thing when localized and
confined, but they are another thing when generalized, so as to imprison
everything we say. For then they make no contrast and lose their ironical
force. Generalized quotation marks neither assert nor deny what they contain
but merely present it. The result is not art but "art"³pretend art, which bears
the same relation to the artistic tradition as a d oll bears to human beings.

And the sentiments conveyed by this "art" similarly are elaborate fakes, as
remote from real emotion as the kitsch that the "art" pretends to satirize. The
advertising techniques this "art" employs automatically turn emotional
expression into kitsch. Hence the quotation marks neutralize and discard the
only effect that postmodernist "art" could ever accomplish. Preemptive kitsch
offers fake emotion and at the same time a fake satire of the thing it offers.
The artist pretends to take himself seriously, the critics pretend to judge his
product, and the avant-garde establishment pretends to promote it. At the
end of all this pretense, someone who cannot perceive the difference
between advertisement and art decides that he should buy it. Only at this
point does the chain of pretense come to an end and the real value of
postmodernist art reveal itself³namely, its value in exchange. Even at this
point, however, the pretense is important. For the purchaser must believe that
what he buys is real art and therefore intrinsically valuable, a bargain at any
price. Otherwise, the price would reflect the obvious fact that anybody ³
even the purchaser³could have faked such a product.

½an we escape from kitsch? In real life, it surrounds us on every side. Pop
music, cartoons, Christmas cards³these are familiar enough. But the escape
routes are also kitsched. Those who flee from the consumer society into the
sanctuary of New Age religion, say, find that the walls are decorated with the
familiar sticky clichés and that the background music comes from Ketelbey
via Vangelis and Ravi Shankar. The art museums are overflowing with abstract
kitsch, and the concert halls have been colonized by a tonal minimalism that
suffers from the same disease. Nor is the world of politics immune. The
glimpses that we see of life in Baghdad show a return to the high kitsch of
Nazi Germany, with portraits of the Leader in heroic postures and
architectural extravanganzas that outdo the most camp of Mussolini's stage
sets. But look at our own political world and we encounter kitsch of another
and more comical kind. The kitsch-fly has laid its eggs in every office of state,
and gradually the organism is softening. [hat is Monica Lewinsky if not kitsch,
object and subject of the most expensive fake emotion since Caligula? The
epic of which she was a part is in the style of [alt Disney, and the object of
her affections was not a president but a "president."

Art resists the disease; if it ceases to resist, it is no longer art. The wri ters,
composers, and painters whom we admire are those who portray the
uncorrupted soul, who show us how we might feel sincerely, even in an age
when fake emotion is the currency of daily life. The task of criticism is surely to
guide us to these artists and to teach us to measure our lives by their
standard. It should dwell on the art of the past, which offers such moving
instances of humanity in its exalted and self-redemptive state. And it should
select from our contemporaries poets like Rosanna [arren and Geoffrey Hill,
composers like Arvo Pärt, and novelists like Ian McEwan: not that they are
without faults, but they have retained the ability to distinguish the true from
the false emotion and so offer comfort to the contrite heart.

But each of us, in his own way, conducts his solitary fight against the loss of
dignity. Through family, religion, and the forms of public life, we shield
ourselves from the horrific vision that surrounds us³the vision of ourselves as
fakes. That is perhaps why we should value kitsch. It flows all about us and
warns us that we must tread carefully and be guided by those who know.
Never before in the history of civilization has art³true art³been so morally
useful.