Dec 23, 2014 01:26 AM
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30439633
EXCERPT: Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch, but time and again it is drawn back to its lure... In the early years of the 20th Century, the arts entered a period of revolution. Enough of the escapism, the modernists said. Art must show modern life as it is. Only in that way can it offer real consolation.
Ornament is crime, declared the architect Adolf Loos, and all those baroque facades that line the streets of Vienna, encrusted with meaningless knobs and curlicues, are so many denials of the world in which we live. They tell us that beauty belongs in a vanished past. In the face of this message, Loos set out to discover a purer beauty - beauty that belongs to modern life and also endorses it.
[...] In the attacks on the old ways of doing things one word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch". Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it mustn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.
In a famous essay published in 1939, the American critic Clement Greenberg told his readers that there are only two possibilities available to the artist now. Either you belong to the avant-garde, challenging the old ways of figurative painting, or you produce kitsch. And the fear of kitsch is one reason for the compulsory offensiveness of so much art produced today. It doesn't matter that your work is obscene, shocking, disturbing - as long as it isn't kitsch.
[...] However, to avoid kitsch is not so easy as it looks. You could try being outrageously avant-garde, doing something that no one would have thought of doing and calling it art - perhaps trampling on some cherished ideal or religious feeling. But as I argued last week, this way also leads to fakes - fake originality, fake significance, and a new kind of cliche, as in so much Young British Art. You can pose as a modernist, but that won't necessarily lead you to achieve what Eliot, Schoenberg or Matisse achieved, which is to touch the modern heart in its deepest regions. Modernism is difficult. It requires competence in an artistic tradition, and the art of departing from tradition in order to say something new.
This is one reason for the emergence of a wholly new artistic enterprise, which I call "pre-emptive kitsch". Modernist severity is both difficult and unpopular, so artists began not to shun kitsch but to embrace it, in the manner of Andy Warhol, Allen Jones and Jeff Koons. The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch. Far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody. Pre-emptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch, and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials.
Take a porcelain statue of Michael Jackson cuddling his pet chimpanzee Bubbles, add cheesy colours and a layer of varnish. Set the figures up in the posture of a Madonna and child, endow them with soppy expressions as though challenging the spectator to vomit, and the result is such kitsch that it cannot possibly be kitsch. Jeff Koons must mean something else, we think, something deep and serious that we have missed. Perhaps this work of art is really a comment on kitsch, so that by being explicitly kitsch it becomes meta-kitsch, so to speak....
EXCERPT: Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch, but time and again it is drawn back to its lure... In the early years of the 20th Century, the arts entered a period of revolution. Enough of the escapism, the modernists said. Art must show modern life as it is. Only in that way can it offer real consolation.
Ornament is crime, declared the architect Adolf Loos, and all those baroque facades that line the streets of Vienna, encrusted with meaningless knobs and curlicues, are so many denials of the world in which we live. They tell us that beauty belongs in a vanished past. In the face of this message, Loos set out to discover a purer beauty - beauty that belongs to modern life and also endorses it.
[...] In the attacks on the old ways of doing things one word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch". Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it mustn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.
In a famous essay published in 1939, the American critic Clement Greenberg told his readers that there are only two possibilities available to the artist now. Either you belong to the avant-garde, challenging the old ways of figurative painting, or you produce kitsch. And the fear of kitsch is one reason for the compulsory offensiveness of so much art produced today. It doesn't matter that your work is obscene, shocking, disturbing - as long as it isn't kitsch.
[...] However, to avoid kitsch is not so easy as it looks. You could try being outrageously avant-garde, doing something that no one would have thought of doing and calling it art - perhaps trampling on some cherished ideal or religious feeling. But as I argued last week, this way also leads to fakes - fake originality, fake significance, and a new kind of cliche, as in so much Young British Art. You can pose as a modernist, but that won't necessarily lead you to achieve what Eliot, Schoenberg or Matisse achieved, which is to touch the modern heart in its deepest regions. Modernism is difficult. It requires competence in an artistic tradition, and the art of departing from tradition in order to say something new.
This is one reason for the emergence of a wholly new artistic enterprise, which I call "pre-emptive kitsch". Modernist severity is both difficult and unpopular, so artists began not to shun kitsch but to embrace it, in the manner of Andy Warhol, Allen Jones and Jeff Koons. The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch. Far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody. Pre-emptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch, and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials.
Take a porcelain statue of Michael Jackson cuddling his pet chimpanzee Bubbles, add cheesy colours and a layer of varnish. Set the figures up in the posture of a Madonna and child, endow them with soppy expressions as though challenging the spectator to vomit, and the result is such kitsch that it cannot possibly be kitsch. Jeff Koons must mean something else, we think, something deep and serious that we have missed. Perhaps this work of art is really a comment on kitsch, so that by being explicitly kitsch it becomes meta-kitsch, so to speak....
![[Image: koons-2.jpg]](http://www.creativeboysclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/koons-2.jpg)