I wrote this after reading Greenberg’s seminal essay Avant-garde and Kitsch which was published in 1939.
| Clement Greenberg | Hello Chris. |
| Chris | Hi Mr. Greenberg, it’s a pleasure to meet you and a little surreal since I was just sitting here in my lush garden on a lovely teak chaise sipping a gin and tonic whilst reading a collection of your works. Am I dreaming? |
| Clement Greenberg | I see that you just finished reading my seminal first essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch.” What did you think? |
| Chris | Well, it says here you wrote it in 1939 and it was published that fall in the Partisan Review. (Please, have a seat.) |
| Clement Greenberg | That’s right. (Thank you.) |
| Chris | It also says you became an editor of the Partisan Review in January of 1940. |
| Clement Greenberg | That’s right. |
| Chris | Hmm. |
| Clement Greenberg | This is important to you, in some way? |
| Chris | I’m not sure, let’s come back to that. Anyway, you asked me what I thought of the article. Honestly, I didn’t think it was very readable. |
| Clement Greenberg | Do you mean that you found it difficult to understand? |
| Chris | No, although I will admit parts of it left me scratching my head and wondering what the hell you were talking about. Like the ending just came out of left field, all of a sudden you were talking about socialism saving culture or something— |
| Clement Greenberg | Well remember, first of all, that I wrote the essay in 1939. The Second World War had just begun. The Nazis and the Soviets were in Poland. Italy was fascist. It very much a politically motivated essay, in part a response to the destruction and repression of Modernist Art in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and its replacement with state ordained styles of “Aryan” art and “Socialist Realism”. |
| Chris | Yes, I understand that. I knew that you were closely tied with the American abstract art movement which came to be associated with democracy and social, political and artistic freedom. It was an “American” art-form, a symbol of progress and a brighter future, particularly when practiced by the Abstract Expressionists like your good friend Jackson Pollock. |
| Clement Greenberg | I think some might actually refer to Jackson as an action painter but yes you’re on the right track. |
| Chris | So this essay was your grand reveal as an art critic. |
| Clement Greenberg | I wouldn’t word it quite like that, but this essay was the first to be widely read. |
| Chris | You start the essay by problematizing the disparity within the frame of a single cultural tradition such as poetry, giving us the example of the difference between a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or the disparity within painting by considering the difference between a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. You meant Norman Rockwell’s art by that, right? |
| Clement Greenberg | Yes. |
| Chris | Okay. So you make an issue and a fact that there is a huge divide between these similar things. That there is very little in common between a painting by Braque and a painting by Norman Rockwell except that, essentially, they’re both called paintings. |
| Clement Greenberg | Go on. |
| Chris | Then you start in on Alexandrianism. I think you’re saying that a mature or static society risks lapsing into artistic sameness, that the same themes end up mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is ever produced. You give examples like mandarin verse, Beaux-Arts painting and Roman sculpture. It seems like you’re saying that we stay away from controversy and get stuck in a paradigm and don’t change things. |
| Clement Greenberg | I said there is a risk of that happening. Paradigm, though, is a good way of putting it. Thomas Kuhn? |
| Chris | Another discussion. |
| Clement Greenberg | Agreed. I’m going to go fix a gin and tonic. [Returns] So you were taking us through the essay. |
| Chris | You seem to say that around the same time Marxism was being developed and broadcast to the European intelligentsia, which I might add was also when photography was beginning to demonstrate its superior ability to literally represent a subject, a part of Western bourgeois society took this information and these changes and produced something new: bohemia and avant-garde culture. It was the new advanced intellectual conscience which allowed these bohemians to isolate and reject a concept of “bourgeois” in order to define what they were not. |
| Clement Greenberg | That makes me think of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and his concept of the Other. |
| Chris | You’re only saying that to tease me. I read part of that yesterday. I’ve been studying the gaze, the Other and the notion of discourse this week. |
| Clement Greenberg | Yes, I know. |
| Chris | Listen, am I dreaming? Can you read my mind or are you in my mind? Are you a personality bud about to disenfranchise from my self-construct and take me on the first step along the path to becoming a man-Cybil? |
| Clement Greenberg | No, Chris. Get back to the Marxism. |
| Chris | Well, the bohemians, the new avant-garde caste if you will— |
| Clement Greenberg | Caste or class? |
| Chris | Class, I guess. You write that it was with the moral aid of revolutionary political attitudes that the bohemians were able to assert themselves as aggressively as they did against the prevailing standards of society. |
| Clement Greenberg | But not too aggressively… |
| Chris | Right. Because unless they wanted to starve in a garret as you wrote, they needed to sell their art. |
| Clement Greenberg | A tough spot to be in. |
| Chris | Well I wonder about that. I envision that there is a topology of tension which artistic and cultural production in a capitalist society must negotiate. (Grandly) It’s simply the way art instantiates itself in our Western capitalism. |
| Clement Greenberg | It’s important to avoid making grand over-arching statements in this day and age. The contemporary cultural paradigm isn’t too fond of them. |
| Chris | Yes I know. Local knowledge and all that. I disagree with this. I think I still retain some of Formalism or Structuralism’s investment in a deep structure. I like to think almost anything can be organized into an equation. |
| Clement Greenberg | Well, that’s a shame. |
| Chris | Don’t be like that. Let’s keep it professional. |
| Clement Greenberg | Conceded. I apologize. |
| Chris | [sighs] Accepted. Anyway, I was saying that there is a tension to being an artist in a capitalist society, that the bohemian avant-garde is tied, as you put it, by an umbilical cord of gold to the bourgeois because the aristocratic patron has disappeared. Personally I think that in Western society the aristocratic patron has morphed into the government-funded museum or gallery or arts council, such as we have in Canada, or the Arts Foundation a la U.S. Eastern Seaboard model, but I digress. Back to the bohemians. You wrote that if they can retire from public life altogether and divest themselves of all politics and other worldly concerns, they can keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence by expressing their art without subject matter or content. Art for art’s sake. Pure poetry. All relativities and contradictions resolved or beside the point. You know, I have to say this is very antagonistic to current trends in cultural studies like pluralism and post-structuralism. |
| Clement Greenberg | I have been criticized for being too narrow in this essay. |
| Chris | It does seem to say that a developed art is an art which is unconcerned with politics which really is anathema to the way things are viewed today. Then you go into all this Aristotle stuff— |
| Clement Greenberg | You realize that I later came to reject much of the essay. |
| Chris | I’m going to skip that part for now. |
| Clement Greenberg | In fact, let’s stop going through the essay, Chris. Just tell me in your own words what you think about what I wrote. |
| Chris | Okay. Well, you seem to be dividing art into high-brow and low-brow, or avant-garde and kitsch in the capitalist paradigm. It’s reductionist and binary and you privilege the high-brow over the low-brow. What you call kitsch is what we would call mass-produced art or commercial art or even, if you’re going to be a little snarky, the left-over materials of capitalist culture. Maybe popular culture. I agree that it is a product of the Industrial Revolution. People can read and write now. They have time to relax. They’re not in the fields all day. People are urban and bored. They need something that doesn’t require concentration or training. Kitsch is fun and bright and easy and entertaining. It’s profitable. |
| Clement Greenberg | I didn’t call it fun and bright and easy and entertaining, but I did write profitable. |
| Chris | What I don’t understand is what you mean by the best artists are artists’ artists, or the best poets are poets’ poets. I guess you mean that only other artists like their work or other poets? You even called the New Yorker Magazine high-class kitsch. I never thought of it like that. |
| Clement Greenberg | Don’t lose track of where you’re going. |
| Chris | Right. You write that kitsch is the dominant art-form in Soviet Russia and in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. These nations endorsed it as official in order to appease the population, the common people, who felt that they were in closer contact, that they could have more in common with their leader this way. That is, you suggest that since these totalitarian regimes coudln’t raise the cultural level of the masses—though why that should be you never adequately explain—they flattered the masses by bringing all culture down to their level. You know, that’s a little bit elitist. |
| Clement Greenberg | I’m not sure it’s quite elitist but I do understand in hindsight how that can be read as elitist. |
| Chris | Same thing in some circles. You write just a few sentences later that if the masses wanted avant-garde art, that Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin wouldn’t hesitate in satisfying the demand. I’m not so sure that would have happened. Do you really think that’s the way it works? Do you think the population would know what to ask for if there was no avant-garde to be aware of and specifically crave? |
| Clement Greenberg | Well, at the time I did, but I already mentioned that there was political motivation to this essay. And I was only 29. |
| Chris | Mm-hmm. And now this is where you confuse me a little. The last page or two. You’re talking about art, in some weird sort of Marxist-elitist fusion, and then you end by saying that capitalism spells the doom of art and culture and society as a whole, and that we need socialism in order to preserve culture. I’m sorry, I just don’t think it’d very well written. It doesn’t flow. The essay doesn’t slide into this statement or even lead up to it, it just seems a little kaboom there’s the solution, but I don’t see how it is a solution to the problem you introduced. And this whole socialism thing. That doesn’t sound very American to me. Didn’t that get McCarthy after you during the early fifties and the Communist witch hunts? |
| Clement Greenberg | Oy vei. You don’t know. |
| Chris | Wise guy. It just seems incommensurate to me. One the one hand you advocate Marxism which dispels any notion that there is room for class or elitism in the grand solution for humanity, and yet you advocate high-brow art over low-brow art, claiming that the latter is basically capitalist junk made for profit, and that the former should exist as avant-garde art for art’s sake in order to make humanity a better species. |
| Clement Greenberg | You’ve read this article quite thoroughly. |
| Chris | Yes. |
| Clement Greenberg | You sound like you understand many of the main points but you feel like you’re getting mired in some of the finer details. |
| Chris | Yes, that’s right [sip]. |
| Clement Greenberg | When I wrote this essay I believed that only socialism could elevate the taste of the masses. |
| Chris | I remark upon your feeling that they needed to be changed, and specifically that you considered them in need of being “raised”. |
| Clement Greenberg | The essay introduces the seeds of my notion of Modernism. Listen, I grew to believe that Modernism provided a critical commentary on experience. I believed that it should constantly change in order to adapt to kitsch pseudo-culture, which was itself always developing. I believed that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America rather than Europe. I thought, and still do think, that avant-garde and Modernist art is a means to resist the leveling of culture produced by capitalist propaganda. |
| Chris | Well that makes sense. But piles of fat in the corner of a room? Someone painted in gold glitter walking around with a dead hare and making talky sounds at it? |
| Clement Greenberg | I agree that the definition of art is broadened and challenged by the avant-garde and not always in a way that everyone finds relevant or appealing. But the avant-garde explores the conditions under which we experience and understand the world. It does not simply provide information about it in the manner of an illustratively accurate depiction of the world. It can`t always be comfortable or easy to look at. It challenges. If you want realistic, literal depictions… |
| Chris | Right, that’s what photography is for. So what you were basically saying is that there’s high-brow art which is good and low-brow art which is not as good (and which is often old watered-down high-brow art), that high-brow art and specifically avant-garde high-brow art which is abstract and inspired by the medium is what keeps culture from stagnating in a capitalist society. You believe that Marxism gave intellectual impetus to new movements in art and society by denaturalizing the bourgeoisie amongst other things, and that the resultant social revolution included the creation of a new class, the bohemian, who rejected the bourgeois standards but accepted that s/he operated within the bourgeois markets of capitalism. |
| Clement Greenberg | Go on. |
| Chris | Well, if I want to try “reading” your essay more critically, I guess I have to say that you were really transparently motivated by religion and politics to write this essay but your understanding of the latter at least was a little superficial. For example, one of the first British socialists, William Morris of the English Arts and Crafts Movement in the 1850s, espoused the philosophy that art should be affordable, hand-made, and that there should be no hierarchy of artistic mediums or differences between fine art and applied arts. He wanted to introduce Marxist or socialist principles to the vocabulary of the arts by including the more commonplace crafts of the masses within the realm of the arts. It was the Modernists like Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group who fought to keep artistic endeavour exclusive, esoteric, and elitist. You seem to fall into the second category, the elitists, despite your so-called Marxist tendencies. |
| Clement Greenberg | We’ve already discussed the political reasons for this essay. You mentioned religion? |
| Chris | Yes, I’ll get there. I find this Marxism of yours confusing and illogical, perhaps even hypocritical or maybe it just demonstrates that you didn’t fully understand Marxist principles. William Morris worked closely with Marx’s daughter and Hegel himself to found the British socialist movement. He proposed what I am confident are incontrovertibly Marxist changes to art. You claim to be a Marxist. Yet you also claim that kitsch, or popular art, is inferior to avant-garde or high-brow art. The two stances are at antipodes. Which is the more consistent point of view? As we have indeed discussed, I can only surmise that this is largely a political decision based on the ideology of the day. And then you write that it is only through Marxism that the low-brow culture can be elevated. Wow. So are you a Marxist or what? Wait, don’t answer that. It’s rhetorical. It seems to me that you became part of the hegemony. You took advantage of events in Europe to introduce an idealism based on democracy and Western-style freedom, one that gained expression in the art world and Western culture in general through deliberately non-European, patently American forms. And finally, though we’re not really supposed to think about things like this these days, which in and of itself is a demonstration of the power of discourse and hegemony, I also wonder that if, as a Jewish American, you felt it incumbent upon yourself to advocate whatever position was in opposition to the anti-Semitic Nazi regime, including its programs of so-called “Aryan” art. So. My final word? I appreciate where you’re coming from and I can appreciate that you were only 29 when you wrote this essay, and there are some very interesting and relevant ideas in it, but in a word, this essay is flawed. |
| Clement Greenberg | Admittedly. You know, Chris, I later came to identify the threat to high art as coming from middle-brow taste, which in any event aligns much more closely with the Academic than kitsch ever did. |
| Chris | Okay. Well, I think that’s enough for now. I’m going to try reading Towards a New Laocoon next. |
| Clement Greenberg | I’ll pop by when you’ve finished reading it. |
| Chris | Sounds good to me. By the way, I like your suit, is that linen? |
| Clement Greenberg | Why yes it is. |
| Chris | It looks heavenly. How’s Helen doing? |
| Clement Greenberg | Just fine. I’ll tell her you asked after her. |
| Chris | Yes, please give her my best. |
| Clement Greenberg | Good-bye, then. |
| Chris | Bye-bye. |
| Clement Greenberg | Oh Chris, just one more thing. |
| Chris | Yessir? |
| Clement Greenberg | What was all that business about me becoming an editor of Partisan Review after I wrote this essay? |
| Chris | Well it just seems odd that after one single essay you were made an editor. No offense, but the paper’s not that great and so I can only surmise then that neither was the Partisan Review. I also wonder that they must have been strapped for help. Or maybe you were really, really charismatic and they were beguiled by your charms. Or maybe you brought an infusion of capital with your editorship… |
| Clement Greenberg | Good-bye, Chris. |
| Chris | Bye Mr. Greenberg. |
2008
