This article was downloaded by: [Jawaharlal Nehru University]On: 06 April 2014, At: 00:59Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK

Continuum: Journal ofMedia & Cultural StudiesPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20

Making looking public:Clement Greenbergimagines the kitsch publicWilliam D. Routt aa Teaches in the Department of CinemaStudies , La Trobe University ,Published online: 18 May 2009.

To cite this article: William D. Routt (1997) Making looking public: ClementGreenberg imagines the kitsch public , Continuum: Journal of Media & CulturalStudies, 11:3, 47-58

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304319709359452

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the Content) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Anyopinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions andviews of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor& Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon andshould be independently verified with primary sources of information.Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,

proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly inconnection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of accessand use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

Making looking public:Clement Greenbergimagines the kitsch public1

William D Routt

i

n 1939 The Partisan Review published an essay by Clement Greenberg entitledAvant-garde and kitsch' that was to have a profound effect on the way popularart would come to be perceived by the intellectual community in the United

States2. Since the mid-seventies, American writing on popular culture has apparentlyhad less time for Greenberg. However, in 1989 Andrew Ross dealt with him andMacdonald historically and very well in No Respect, and suggested that Greenbergat least may have been somewhat prescient in recognizing the limited choices Westernculture offers the rest of the world in the name of free market democracy (Ross, 1989:44). Rosss major point, however, is that Greenberg and Macdonald (and many others)hysterically opposed popular culture in the 1950s as they hysterically opposedcommunism. Yet in spite of the historical specificity of their origins, some of Greenberg sideas are regularly recycled in pieces critical of contemporary media culture, as I hopewill become apparent to the reader. His explicit place in academic writing may havebeen taken by Theodor Adorno, who seems to have made some of the same points thatGreenberg did, with the authority of philosopher of the left. In it Greenberg contrasts'the only living culture we now have* (Greenberg, 1957: 101) the avant-garde withthe 'rear guard' of kitsch, that is, with 'popular, commercial art and literature with theirchromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, TinPan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc. etc.* (102). He reveals a precariousantithetical balance between the two that is reflective of a modern 'cultural dichotomy(106) and may one day topple over into fascism.

Greenberg is not sympathetic towards kitsch or what I would call popular art. Hesays kitsch is 'ersatz culture... destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuineculture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can

47

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

ROUTT

provide' (102). He declares that it is parasitic on 'a fully matured cultural tradition*rather than independently generated; and the few worthwhile works it has produced areso because of their 'authentic folk flavor1 rather than because they have any merit of theirown (103). His tone throughout is one of disdain, almost revulsion.

The essays initial representation of the forms of kitsch is somewhat marred by thistone. It is a sententious litany of sins. The substance of what is said warrants detailedexplication nonetheless.

Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience andfaked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same.Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretendsto demand nothing of its customers except their money not even their time(102)

Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. This first point is a commonplace:popular art is doubtless mechanical in its materials and (partly) in its production.Moreover, formula is a morphological constant of this highly conventionalized art.Thinkers as diverse as Richard Wagner and John Cawelti have remarked on a similaralliance between formula and the machine.

Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. For all that, popular art does provideexperience and sensation, albeit these may be false, as Greenberg s next sentence declaresthem to be. Taken together, these first two sentences suggest a polarity between therigors of machine/formula and the chaos of experience/sensation.

Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. The third sentence altersthe terms of the discourse slightly, for to change according to style while remainingalways the same is to operate according to some kind of underlying dichotomy of repetitionand difference. It even, however vaguely, resembles something that might be said of art-with-a-capital-A, art for the ages. The idea that popular art 'changes according to style,but remains always the same' also comes close to a structural understanding of the field,implying as it does, that the perdurant elements in popular art are mental constructs:forms, ideas, relations.

Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. In crowning kitsch 'allthat is spurious' Greenberg sounds a pervasive theme of his essay: popular art is 'ersatz',false art. Here it is not, as one might presume, the media's ability to substitute replicationsfor unique artworks that is in question, as it was for Walter Benjamin and many of thosewriting 'after' him. On the contrary, Greenberg would welcome reproductions ofRembrandt (104). Instead, the original artworks of kitsch suffer from an interior flaw:from falsity of spirit. The point is taken up in more detail a few paragraphs further onwhere the tendency for popular art to extend its territory is viewed with alarm. Kitschthere is castigated as 'deceptive,' setting 'traps' for culturally-aspirant-but-naiVe lovers ofart.

48

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

CONTINUUM VOL. 11: 3 (1997)

Popular art also tempts avant-garde artists from their vocations at the same time as itoozes over the globe, wiping out folk culture' (103). It seems that the falsity of popularart is a particular issue because Greenberg feels that genuine, avant-garde, culture isendangered by it as well. He fears nothing less than a revolt of the masses, signalled by'this resentment toward culture... which expresses itself in revivalism and puritanism,and latest of all, in fascism* (107). In the end, then, Greenberg s aesthetic perceptions arequite firmly bound up with his perceptions of socio-political conditions. As we shall see,this understanding of popular art will result in his assigning a fundamental role to thepublic as the dictator of the essential form of kitsch.

Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money not even theirtime. The relation of audience to artwork is the explicit concern of the last sentence inGreenberg s initial summary of kitsch. Although he nowhere reveals what kitschs pretenseconceals, that is, whatever kitsch actually does demand, the implication here is that thepopular art s fakery itself is fake. Although kitsch may pretend to ask only for moneyand not even for time, in fact it asks for more than either of these.

In spite of the essays overt concern with the culture of the Soviet Union as well aswith fascism and capitalism, the 'more* demanded by Greenbergs kitsch is, I think,intended to be understood first culturally and then politically. Indeed, at other points inthe essay Greenberg seems willing to allow that kitsch constitutes a type of debasedgenuine culture with, presumably, genuine, if debased, cultural demands. He says, forinstance, that kitsch provides 'the diversion that only culture of some sort can* (102) which concedes that we are dealing with a form of culture and later he argues at somelength that peasants gain the same values from popular art that cultivated spectators gainfrom the avant-garde, 'on however low a scale* (105). Finally, he lumps kitsch togetherwith 'folk or rudimentary culture* as the culture of the exploited, the poor and the ignorant(106). Taken together there seems no escaping the idea that indeed something morethan fakery is operative in kitsch.

So, what is 'demanded* by kitsch? I confess I am not completely certain. I think itmust be taste, which is to say, intuitive cultural perception, and this is 'demanded* in thesense that money and time and taste are 'demanded' by a genuine artwork or spent* onit. The dire consequences of bad taste may ultimately be directly political (totalitarianismrather than fascism, the way I read Greenberg), but in the first instance they are moremysterious. Perhaps they have to do with being wrong about the beautiful. Perhaps ifwe get art wrong we begin to operate in all other sectors of life with our vision askew andthe times out of joint. This would be a cultural 'drip effect* of tremendous proportions,far more pervasive even than current media analysis would have us believe.

It is not easy to take the demands kitsch may pose on peasants and the like seriouslyin an essay that so obviously comes from and returns to an elite public. Moreover, as weshall see, the essay makes a case for holding the poor and the ignorant responsible for

49

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

ROUTT

kitsch rather than the other way around. Greenberg seems to say that the public at large'demands' kitsch at least as much as kitsch demands anything from the public.

IIIn the second paragraph of the piece, Greenberg announces that his intention is to

examine 'the relationship between aesthetic experience as met by the specific notgeneralized individual, and the social and historical contexts in which that experiencetakes place* (98). On one level at this point in the text there can be little doubt that thespecific individual in question is Clement Greenberg himself. But on another, the specificindividuals lack of textual specificity (it has not been named or otherwise identified)bestows on it miraculous rhetorical properties. The individual in question cannot beother than the author, but it can be that only insofar as the reader shares the authorsprejudices and tastes (only insofar as the reader is rather more than just semblable,frere).This doubled singularity (both specific and individual) is, thus, two again or, rather,is redoubled, twinned.

Some six pages further on, Greenberg, the author, does finally get to writing about aspecific individual, although you or I might be excused for thinking this specific individualhighly generalized, only a matter of form. For Greenbergs specific individual is 'anignorant Russian peasant* who is called upon to make an aesthetic choice between anunspecified painting by Pablo Picasso and one by the romantic realist, Ilya Repin, eventhough this peasant has looked at nothing like eithers work before (104-105). Ourpeasant chooses the Repin. This imaginary character is thus an important, if patentlydishonest, link in Greenbergs argument for its imputed reactions explain the appealof kitsch and at the same time refine our understanding of its formal properties.

At this crucial juncture in the essay, Greenberg chooses to discuss kitsch, and ultimatelyto condemn it, by describing and condemning its audience. He sees and constructs adefining relation amounting to an identity of spectator and spectacle. Thus, and perhapsnot surprisingly, he displaces the problem of kitsch onto the problem of its audience3. Inthe broadest terms, it appears that what has gone wrong here is that taste has becomepublic.

I think that this is particularly apparent in the contrast between Greenbergs initialroll call of kitsch manifestation, from chromeotypes to Hollywood movies, and the sceneof judgement that he eventually sets up for us, in which one person stands before two oilpaintings. The taken-for-granted public qualities of the media Greenberg had cited inhis first list of kitsch the bad paper, the crude lines and colors, the blare, the crowd have all vanished on the stage of his subsequent imagining. Instead, a spectator standsalone before two works of art, as Greenberg or any cultivated person has stood in raptcontemplation innumerable times. One element alone is anomalous in the scene

50

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

CONTINUUM VOL. 11: 3 (1997)

Greenberg describes, and that is the identity of the spectator. It is difficult not to thinkthat this new spectator now signifies 'the public* in the same way that pulp fiction andtap dancing signified 'the public' in the original list. The public nature of the media hasbecome the public nature of the spectator4.

At the same time, and in a move that will turn out to be very important to theefficacy of the argument Greenberg is constructing, the traditionally private moment oftaste shared between a cultivated spectator and a work of art, is here revealed, exposed,made public. Not just the spectator, then, but the scene of judgement, the act of choosing.For the advent of this public spectator has altered the occult nature of the sensus communisof taste: what used to happen by magic through the mystical communion of sharedgenius, gestalten, now occurs on stage before the tyts of everyone. The chapel has becomea courtroom, private knowledge now public action. Alerted to these changedcircumstances by cultural antennae which were nothing if not exquisitely sensitive,Greenberg crafts his scene so that we will be misled by the novel specificity of the centralcharacter into believing that the buffoonery of what takes place depends upon thedisplacement of a peasant, not upon the ludicrousness of such scenes themselves5.

A great deal of this is signaled in the first word of Greenberg s characterization: theindefinite, generic article. We are invited to consider 'an ignorant Russian peasant', nota definite, specific individual after all. At the same time, this generic individual is madesingular, not plural. The rhetorical move must surely have been deliberate. The kitschessay was written in response to a piece, or series of pieces, on Soviet cinema by DwightMacdonald in which the latter had evoked plural, perhaps collective, 'ignorant peasants'in the role of what current film theory sometimes calls 'the historical spectator' (which is,I guess, a definite and specific generalized individual). By making all these folks singular-and-generic, Greenberg elegantly shifts the ideological terrain from a place wherematerialist and collective consciousness rules to an individual idealist, and eventranscendental, subjectivity that some would say is typical of bourgeois thinking.

Macdonalds ignorant Russians seem to have been primarily significant as figurativepeasants that is, as oppressed, thus of the left (or objects of the left), and as folk, thuspossessors of popular wisdom and shrewd innate judgement. Following the fashion ofthe times, Macdonald imagined the public as the people. One can almost see the painting(after Repin) of peasants talking animatedly between the reels of a rural screening ofEarth or The Old and the New. It is this kitsch concept that Greenberg sets out toreconfigure by representing the peasantry as a culturally deprived and historicallydetermined dolt.

Still, Greenberg's decision to stick with this peculiar fiction is not just a clever bit oftable-turning or a mere convention of intellectual debate. Almost everything that isspecified about this generic individual is specific in its difference from what is presumedabout the writer and reader of Greenberg's essay.

51

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

ROUTT

First, the individual is 'ignorant'. You might as well say 'first and last, the individualis ignorant', for both 'Russian and 'peasant' seem likely to have been heavily weightedwith connotations of ignorance in the climate of cultural debate in New York in 1939.But we are told of the individual's ignorance first so that we will not mistake this specificindividual for a cultivated or an intellectual Russian or, I suppose, for a wise peasant.Ignorance, which was originally one of Macdonalds collective peasant qualities, alsosuggests something of a tabula rasa, a blank waiting to be filled in, rather than, say,someone without prejudices. This specific individual, unlike you or me or ClementGreenberg, knows nothing worth knowing. And the individual's blankness is extremelyimportant in the end because, contra Macdonald, Greenberg will not allow historical orcultural explanations to account for the popularity of this kind of bad art. Ignorance,rather than culture or class inborn ignorance accounts for the taste for kitsch.

And the individual is 'Russian', which is to say not-Anglo-American and not-European.A strong cultural difference (what some would call 'ethnic difference') is being articulated.But at the same time, this difference is not so strong as other, unstated, cultural differences.African' and Australian' (in the sense of Aboriginal') are two that may have been inGreenbergs and Macdonalds minds at the time according to Andrew Ross's account ofthe circumstances of the essay (Ross, 1989: 43-44), and these identities, of course, mightalso be regarded as something 'in excess of cultural difference. By confining himself to'Russian', as Ross suggests, Greenberg avoids charges of racism and also certain questionsabout the cultural value of'primitive' art traditions. But also, what has been set up heremay be thought of as a 'soft contrast' by comparison with the 'hard contrast' of race, andmade all the softer in the light of Greenbergs own ethnic identity as the American childof migrant, Jewish parents. On one level, 'Russian-ness' in the sense of European identityis exactly what Greenberg and many of his readers have escaped through the circumstancesof their births. On another, European-ness is still kin enough to be represented withauthority, invoked with some nostalgia, if not respect.

Disingenuously, the citizenship of this Russian goes without saying in the essay,although surely the specific individual standing in front of those generalized paintings isa citizen of the Soviet Socialist Republics. In 1939 Soviet citizenship was not invokedlightly by The Partisan Review; and there is no doubt that the choice before Greenbergsand Macdonalds Russians was a political as well as an aesthetic choice, a choice betweenpast and future, in some sense a choice made, at least temporarily, on the twenty-third ofAugust of that year, in the Hitler-Stalin pact.

A 'Russian, however, is not a 'Soviet' or a 'communist'. A 'Russian is identified bynationality and culture against the grain of the identifications preferred by the Sovietstate and by the Communist Party; and is thus positioned outside the collective,maintaining a genuine identity, a selfhood. A 'Russian might have a choice even whenhistorically the choice has already been made. In 1934 the Soviet state and the Party had

52

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

C O N T I N U U M VOL. 11: 3 (1997)

decisively chosen Repin, in the form of the Socialist Realism he might be said to haveforeshadowed, just as they chose Hitler in 1939; and if the aesthetic choice was a keyreason for the founding of The Partisan Review (as it was), the diplomatic and militarychoice became a key demonstration of the validity oftheReview s political and culturalposition. The two added together made it absolutely necessary that there be Russians'inside the Soviet Union, specific and not generalized individuals, 'conditioned' perhaps,but redeemable, fundamentally free.

But while identification with Russia may endow this specific individual with thepossibility of a certain freedom, class identification takes it away (or at least this appearsto be Greenberg's specific argument against Macdonald). What we are dealing with hereis a 'peasant', even in Marxian thought a notorious ally of feudalism and reaction. Thisgeneric individual exists outside of or prior to your or my culture. There are no peasantsin the United States in 1939, and there never were. Peasants are old world creatures,impossible to extricate from an impoverishment of past and land. Ox-like, limp andleaden eyed, they know only the village and the endless cycle of the seasons. In the SovietUnion of 1939 the peasantry is undergoing progressive erasure: for more than twentyyears it has been the object of uplift, the target of re-education ('conditioning'), subjectto neglect, expropriation, systematic and haphazard murder and still it survives, butnow only with 'hypothetical freedom of choice' according to Greenberg, the bio-historicaldeterminist, sounding not unlike Sheriff Lucas Buck (Greenberg, 1957: 105).

Here again, the contrast can be rethought as a soft one when the circumstances ofGreenbergs class affiliations are taken into account. One of the urban mirrors of thepeasantry is the petit bourgeoisie (another is the lumpen proletariat). Greenbergs fatherwas a pharmacist. In 1939 Greenberg was working at the post office and writing artcriticism. He seems to have been engaged in repositioning himself into the intellegentsiaby means of connoisseurship, as other cultural critics had done before. The strategy ofchampioning an avant-garde enables such a critic to move both up and out: up to acultivated class and out from the (closed) class of established taste. In a crude Marxianaccount of capitalist society, then, avant-garde intellectuals might also be thought of asoccupying a position which is a structural transformation of the position of the peasantryin that same society. Neither are, strictly speaking, fully-fledged members of a structurethat contains only capitalists and workers. Peasants are capital and labour in one;intellectuals are neither capital nor labour. The justification for the peasantry is undeniable they produce food whereas the justification for the intelligentsia is alwaysproblematic and often it is characterised, like the aristocracy, as engaged only inconsumption. Peasants, however, are survivals of the past; intellectuals are the vanguardof the future.

And at the same time, broadly speaking, 'the ignorant Russian peasant' is theorientalised creation of the author/reader's colonising mind not just Greenbergs but

53

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

ROUTT

yours and mine insofar as we (even the ignorant Russian peasants among us) apprehendthis figure immediately for the otherness it makes our own. This peasant only exists inthe measure that we like the Soviet state can devour him, transcend him, effacehim. Put in another way, the Russian peasant only names a part of ourselves bigger thanboth of us, a point of view, not another consciousness.

Now I have tried to keep this specific peasant carefully desexed, although the kitschessay does not. For Greenberg the Russian peasant is a 'he', but that is no fault ofGreenberg or of Macdonald, who in 1939 had not the advantage of the heightenedawareness of the 1990s. This specific individual 'he' is certainly intended as 'he/she''.'His* gaze is not 'the male gaze' but rather 'the ignorant Russian peasant gaze' and mightemanate from beneath a babushka as easily as a fur cap. Or, at least, that would seem tohave been the intention of Greenberg and of Macdonald. If issues of gender re-enter thescene because of whatever the pictures the peasant is looking at represent (the Repinpicture is of a battle, the Picasso is of a woman), it is perhaps only as the result of adeplorable, but common global masculinisation that is, nonetheless, beside the point.

Or so it would seem...This peasant, we ought to recall, represents the public that public, moreover,

which is a public for magazine covers, ads, slick fiction and Tin Pan Alley music, amongother varieties of kitsch. Which is to say, the public represented by Greenberg as anignorant Russian peasant man is the same public which kitsch itself tended to imagine asa distracted Euro-American middle class woman. Doubtless the coincidence is notsurprising. It is not surprising that sensibility gendered feminine is maligned in the guiseof an/other or, for that matter, that an/other sensibility includes an unstated, repressed,feminine.

There is an\other, more overt, present absence that is looking in the kitsch essay, ofcourse: the doubled or quadrupled author/reader, whom I mentioned before. Thischaracter, invisible in the scene as described, yet inhabits it and acts within it. Thischaracter marks the place of the private in this scene of the public; it represents trueculture, illuminated taste. To that extent and to the extent that this unstated voyeuristiccharacter defines itself in opposition to overt masculinity as well as to overt ignoranceand Russian-ness and the peasantry it too is feminine, that other feminine which isourselves, and from whose face the light shines.

But if all of this is so, it seems that all of the essays careful effort to write differencemust be so much sham. The substitute spectator is not-generic, not-ignorant, not-Russianand not-peasant, not even substitute. It is only Them: our bad self (again), repressedmemories, the evil twin. That these aspects of ourselves can be named, with ourpermission, 'an ignorant Russian peasant', shrieks disavowal; and it is indicative of allthat is unpleasant about Greenberg's essay that he will name Them thus and deny Them

54

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

C O N T I N U U M VOL. 11: 3 (1997)

rather than, like Walter Benjamin, attempt to understand and to redeem Them. ButGreenberg is, as I have said, us. If I am making him my Russian peasant, it is only topoint out that he and I and you are one. Our mutual identity is no reason to ignore ourspecific individual fiction, waiting patiently in front of our fictional paintings. On thecontrary, that is the best reason in the world to pay close attention to what it is about todo.

IllThe peasant in front of the paintings looks at something hitherto unknown and

unsurmised. Only a peasant could be so ignorant. Only the old world could haveinsulated people so completely from all that has occurred in the past centuries. Only anavant-garde intellectual could imagine so soberly a scene so fantastic. The paintings,although both are European like the peasant, represent what is totally new to the peasantry,a sudden shifting of time, a brutal revelation of places beyond imagining. At the sametime the peasant-ness of the peasant will be proof against this assault, for that stubborn,dull brain is not equipped to take in the rest of the world, much less the future. Thepeasant will remain a peasant, no matter what opportunities present themselves.

Greenberg imagines a kitsch public by making looking public: the public publiclylooking at artworks. His scene surely is intended to demonstrate the absurdity of makingpublic what has always been decently sequestered: the gallery and the privileged aestheticdeliberations of cultivated people. He wants to shame the peasant who aspires to taste inpart by displaying how out of place he is in a gallery. But he also wants to reveal theignorance in a peasants in the publics doing publicly what cultivated people doamong themselves, and for this he needs to make public the peasant s judgement of taste,to expose its badness as consubstantial with the peasant s public character. This he doesin a lengthy passage quite simply by making explicit the peasant s preference for romanticrealism, because it is recognisable and sensational, over modernist abstraction, which isiconic and demanding. First the public peasant looks at the painting by Picasso.

Let us see... what happens when an ignorant Russian peasant such as Macdonaldmentions stands with hypothetical freedom of choice before two paintings, oneby Picasso, the other by Repin. In the first he stes} let us say, a play of lines, colors,and spaces that represent a woman. The abstract technique to acceptMacdonald s supposition, which I am inclined to doubtreminds him somewhatof the icons he has left behind him in the village, and he feels the attraction of thefamiliar. We will even suppose that he faintly surmises some of the great art valuesthe cultivated find in Picasso. He turns next to Repins picture and sees a battlescene. The technique is not so familiar as technique. But that weighs verylittle with the peasant, for he suddenly discovers values in Repins picture whichseem far superior to the values he has been accustomed to finding in icon art; andthe unfamiliar technique itself is one of the sources of those values: the values of

55

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

ROUTT

the vividly recognizable, the miraculous, and the sympathetic. In Repins picturethe peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he recognizes and seesthings outside of pictures there is no discontinuity between art and life, noneed to accept a convention and say to oneself, that icon represents Jesus becauseit intends to represent Jesus, even if it does not remind me very much of a man.That Repin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident immediatelyand without any effort on the part of the spectator that is miraculous. Thepeasant is also pleased by the wealth of self-evident meanings which he finds inthe picture: 'it tells a story'. Picasso and the icons are so austere and barren incomparison. What is more, Repin heightens reality and makes it dramatic: sunset,exploding shells, running and falling men. There is no longer any question ofPicasso or icons. Repin is what the peasant wants, and nothing else but Repin6

(105)Structurally, there are two conclusive moments in this paragraph, one following on

the other, and both repeated for each painting. The first moment is a moment of looking,and this is the moment in which all of us (Greenberg and you and me and the fiction) areinvolved. In that moment certain things about the paintings are perceived: their differingsubject matter, but also their difFerent styles, and the distance or closeness of those stylesto what is generally revealed by looking. These things are apprehended in an instant.

Following that instant is the moment of seeing, a rather longer period that involves aconscious recognition and weighing up of the Values' of each painting, resulting injudgement. On the one hand, this moment belongs to the peasant alone. On the other,we see him seeing the paintings (we interpret his interpretation). Unremarkably, he optsfor the painting the rest of us see as retrogressive. It is worth pointing out that inGreenbergs fiction of the peasant it is the Repin that the peasant sees as truly new,although in our and Greenbergs sight it is old. The essay is not unaware of that irony('the alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch* [Greenberg 1957: 104]), andcertainly does not honour the peasant s choice, but that is because the idea that Picasso swork resembles traditional Russian icons is a point conceded only for the sake of argument,there to be refuted by what the peasant really sees, or how we see his seeing.

When all of the looking and seeing is over, there is very little difference between thepeasant s seeing and our own. The specific individual of Greenberg s essay differs fromus only in its ignorant preference for Repin over Picasso. We share the same perceptions,physiological and cultural: that is, we both thoroughly understand the formal propertiesof kitsch.

I must reword my main point about this paragraph again in a third way because Iknow you will still not have believed your own eyes: Clement Greenberg shows us thatthe peasant s taste is bad only by making the processes of the peasants judgement public, notby demonstrating the badness of that judgement. All that Greenberg has had to do is to liftthe veil. He has not had to show us whether the peasant is actually wearing clothes ornot. Exposure alone accounts for the public taste for kitsch. This condemnatory gesture

56

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

CONTINUUM VOL. 11: 3 (1997)

of exposure is all the more notable because its display contrasts so markedly with theauthor/readers occult reticence about the workings of our own judgement: Greenbergnever needs to explain the goodness of the choice of an imaginary painting any paintingat all by Picasso over an imaginary painting any painting at all by Repin.

Finally, then, Greenberg sees and makes us see, while the ignorant public peasant canonly look.

Notes1 After I had given this paper at the Conference I spoke at length with an American

scholar who had done considerable work on Clement Greenberg and was very distressedwith the tone of what I had said. In the course of our conversation he gave mebiographical information on Greenberg which has found its way into this version ofthe paper, but he did not convince me that my treatment of Greenberg is any moreunjust that Greenbergs treatment of Russian peasants or, as I would say, the public. Inthe way of such encounters, I did not record his name, but I should like readers to beaware of my debt to him and of his strong opposition to what this paper claims. Forreasons which will be obvious to those attending the session at which the paper waspresented, this version is dedicated, with my wholehearted admiration and appreciation,to Tara Brabazon.

2 The references here are from the essay as reprinted in 1957 in Mass Culture: ThePopular Arts in America, for many years the standard reader on popular culture. MassCultures citation is to a 1946 volume, The Partisan Reader. In addition, Greenberg'ssalient points were explicitly resumed in Dwight Macdonald's 'A theory of mass culture',written in 1953, and also included in Mass Culture (Macdonald thus returned thecompliment of having himself been cited in Greenberg's essay, as will be seen). AbrahamKaplan's piece, 'The aesthetics of the popular arts', in Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism (24), thirteen years later, still showed so much of Greenberg's influence thatit might have been a gloss on the kitsch essay. Kaplan's article was, in turn, cited as themost worthwhile thing written on the aesthetics of popular art by David Madden in1973 ('The necessity for an aesthetics of popular culture', Journal of Popular Culture7:1-13).

3 The displacement does not originate historically with Greenberg. At least part ofHerman Broch's 'Notes on the problem of kitsch', the seminal essay on the topic, wasapparently written in 1933. On the first page of the version of it with which I amfamiliar, which seems to have been revised in 1950-51, Broch writes that 'Kitsch couldnot, in fact, either emerge or prosper without the existence of kitsch-man, the lover ofkitsch... This is the phenomenon with which we shall concern ourselves' (Broch, 1969:49).

57

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4

ROUTT

4 I don't want to pretend that there is no problem about how we are to understand the'public' that had been attending art exhibitions at least since the eighteenth century.Yet, in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt's The Triumph of Art for the Public, that public appearsto have been carefully circumscribed by an intersection of class and taste, a bourgeoispublic at most. In art criticism until the twentieth century the word seems usually tohave been used to designate those looking at works of art who were not in some wayotherwise directly involved in producing or consuming art. Greenberg, like Broch,was clearly involved in attempting to identify a broader public than this.

5 A series of such scenes dot the landscape of western culture. Kate Bowles has told methat she is interested in one such scene described by Herbert Read, in which an ordinaryEnglishman happens upon a painting which provokes an unexpected aestheticexperience. More recently, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari begin the chapter on artin What Is Philosophy? with an abstracted version of the scene, without a subject (Deleuzeand Guattari, 1994: 163-164).

6 At the risk of making this quotation ridiculous, which is not my intention here, I mustnonetheless point out that Repin was not the painter Greenberg intended. Indeed, theart critic confessed as much in a television documentary about him, which I have seenbut for which I cannot find a reference. Repin is simply not a painter of battles,although he was promoted as a precursor of Socialist Realism (Valkenier, 1990: 199-204). I think it is likely that M V Grekov may have been the artist Greenberg wasthinking of, although there are also others who painted battles in the way he suggests(V V Vereshchagin is another possible candidate). In quite another context, I haveclaimed that this kind of error, of which I am often guilty myself, is endemic to 'trashcriticism' ('Bad for good', in Eric Schaefer [ed], The Trash Film Reader, Austin: Universityof Texas Press, forthcoming, I hope). I am very grateful to Professor Michael O'Toolefor bringing Greenberg's error and his confession of it back to my attention.

ReferencesBroch, Herman (1969) 'Notes on the problem of kitsch' [1950-51, 1933] in Gillo Dorlfes(ed), Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, New York: Universe Books, 49-76.Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1994) Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (trans)What Is Philosophy?, London: Verso.Greenberg, Clement (1957) 'Avant-garde and kitsch' [1939, 1944] in Bernard Rosenbergand David Manning White (eds), Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, Glencoe:The Free Press, 98-107.Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore (1980) The Triumph of Art for the Public, Washington: DecaturHouse Press.Ross, Andrew (1989) No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, New York: Routledge.Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl (1990) Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art, New York:Columbia University Press.58

Dow

nloa

ded

by [J

awah

arlal

Nehr

u Univ

ersity

] at 0

0:59 0

6 Apr

il 201

4