Kitsch

WEBVTT
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Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán,
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And I'm Ellie Anderson.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It's just because we're super excited and it's our first time.
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And that went on for longer than I anticipated.
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So now we are getting to it.
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I'm so excited to talk about this topic today, David.
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We're talking about kitsch and I have to say ever since we started researching this episode, which both of us have wanted to do for quite some time, I have started to notice more and more kitsch elements in my life to such an extent that I become a little terrified.
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Like in your personal life?
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Uh,
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Yeah.
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And in the media that I consume, in the clothes that I wear, and the activities that I do, I've become terrified that my whole life is kitsch.
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And I started looking around my apartment.
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I have candles shaped like corn cobs.
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I have a set of marble grapes on my coffee table.
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I love Disneyland, especially the Storybook Land ride, which is a set of mini homes that are made to look like the castles from various Disney movies.
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Very kitsch.
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Yes, very kitsch.
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I mean, you also, live in LA.
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I think Disneyland is just something that frames your, your experience of a lot of things.
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Maybe even unconsciously.
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No, definitely.
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I, I actually blame if, if I, if I have anyone to blame for my kitschy lifestyle, I blame LA.
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This is just the kitschiest city.
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There are all kinds of pseudo architectural styles that are built up next to each other, constantly referencing say like the English countryside in one home and the next home is referencing Spanish colonialism.
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And then the next one is built to look like an Indian temple, you know?
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Just a hodgepodge, yes.
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Yeah, and okay.
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Actually, shout out for my LA folks here.
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There is this incredible kitschy building in LA.
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It's my favorite one.
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It's known as the David House and it's on 3rd Street and it's basically this kind of unremarkable, one story home that has reproduction after reproduction of Michelangelo's David on top of, or instead of its fence, just like all over the front yard.
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So like the fence is made of of statues?
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Is that?
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I can't remember if the statues are on top of the fence or if they're in lieu of a fence.
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Okay.
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I think we're splitting hairs.
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It's just seamed into my mind that there were Davids all over the front lawn.
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That's amazing.
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Point it out to me next time that I'm in LA, which is my way of saying, invite me to LA sometime soon.
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And, um, you know, as you're talking about kitschy places, I'm thinking about a very different kitschy place.
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Last year, I went on vacation with a bunch of friends to Malta, which is a Mediterranean island.
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And we went to this town in the north of the island, where there is this tourist attraction called Popeye Village, which was the set for the 1980s live action film Popeye with Robin Williams.
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I have heard about this, yes.
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So, yes, we went there and it is kitsch as kitsch can be.
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It's this set of houses that are built into the side of a cliff right next to the ocean.
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And the houses are all so exaggerated and cartoonish that they don't fit into the landscape at all.
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So they, they are almost absurd and there, there's just this jarring quality to this Popeye Village in the middle of, of the Maltese, uh, landscape and it's beautiful, but it's also kind of comedic and I think that's something essential to kitsch.
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Oh, definitely.
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And I've also heard that it's a very popular place for British tourists to get married.
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I'm just gonna go on record here and say that contemporary British culture is probably among the kitschiest cultures in the world, but I think it's interesting, cause Malta is so far from the only place where this is the case.
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It's definitely the case in Croatia, where people are obsessed with Game of Thrones tours and all this stuff where places that have been inhabited by humans for a very, very, very long time and have super old architecture and tons of history end up attracting tourists because of the, the media appearances that they've made.
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These fake elements are more interesting.
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Yeah.
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And I mean, thinking about Popeye Village in Malta, it was literally a movie set and now it's become a tourist spot.
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And as we will discuss later today, there is a very close connection between kitsch and media and consumerism and commodification.
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So it's just this melange of things that produce this effect of something that shouldn't be there in the first place, right.
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So when you talked about various architectural features of LA, what stands out is that they don't go well together and neither does Popeye Village.
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there's both a bricolage and an inauthenticity to them.
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Yeah, and a very forward inauthenticity, I would say.
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An inauthenticity that doesn't conceal itself.
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Today, we're talking about kitsch.
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How does kitsch define an aesthetic category that is different from art?
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Why has kitsch become so prevalent in the 20th and 21st centuries?
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And how does the kitschy get used as a tool of political propaganda?
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In 1939, the American art critic, Clemen Greenberg, whom I teach regularly wrote a really influential piece about kitsch called Avant-garde and Kitsch.
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And he argues that kitsch is basically the alter ego of avant-garde art.
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And by that he really means modernist painting from the late 19th and early 20th century.
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We know that for a very long time, painting was representational.
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It depicted real objects in the world, you know, a royal family, an animal, a natural landscape.
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And the idea was that painting would create an illusion of reality and it would fool the viewer into thinking that they are watching the thing itself.
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But according to Greenberg, at some point in the late 19th century, again, painting as an art form becomes essentially conscious of itself and a group of artists known as Avant-garde started trying to break away from this tradition of representationalist painting by moving in the direction of abstraction.
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And that is the essence of modernist painting.
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It's abstraction and an attempt to paint painting itself.
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And I think it's worth noting here that this is a direct response to the invention and proliferation of photography, right.
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I think this is also part of the narrative is that once photography is able to perfect representation, painting goes through this identity crisis.
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And so it makes a turn towards a meta reflection upon itself.
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Yeah, because photography can beat painting at representation, but painting cannot beat photography.
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And so that's why painters start moving toward pure abstraction, which is something that you cannot get out of photography.
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Now, Greenberg, who is also an art historian says that we ought to think about the emergence of the avant garde through two historical and philosophical events.
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The first one is the legacy of Immanuel Kant, which is a slightly weird choice because he doesn't even go to Kant's writings on art in the third critique.
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He goes to the very first critique and he says something like this, in the same way that Kant used the tools of reason in the first critique in order to expose the limits of reason itself, so too the Avantgarde artist, the modernist paintings, started using the tools of painting in order to expose the limits of painting itself.
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And so, again, that's what modernism in painting is.
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It's an, it's an attempt to delimit the proper domain of painting.
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The second event that is important for making sense of Avantgarde modernism is Marx.
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And that's just his materialism.
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So, Marx very famously draws our attention to material practices of production and the way in which they shape social relations.
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And there's a way in which modernist paintings are doing the same thing at the level of art.
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So they start asking the question, what are the modes of production of painting?
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Well, that's literally paint brushes.
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It's a flat canvas.
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It's color.
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It's paint.
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And so what modernist painting tries to do is it draws our attention to those things.
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To surface, to line, to texture, again, as an alternative to maybe trying to be more representational.
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I think this is a great exposition that you're giving David of some of Greenberg's main points.
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And I think just to kind of recap that because there's so much to unpack here and it's so rich.
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It's interesting to think about there being these sort of two divergent influences on what then becomes avant garde or modernist painting to which kitsch will be the response.
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And we have on the one hand, this legacy of Kant that you mentioned, which is the reflective moment of this internal critique.
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And then on the other hand, this Marxist pull into the material conditions of the world.
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So one example to maybe think about here would be the work of the modernist painter Piet Mondrian.
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And if you look at a Mondrian painting, I'm saying Mondrian, Mondrian, I always pronounce it Mondrian, but I guess I've never had to like say it in public before.
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So I
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Well, I, I can't help you with my ESL status.
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You're on your own girl.
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But Mondrian paintings usually have a white background with then a few lines in primary colors.
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So if you look at a Mondrian painting and you see these basic lines on a canvas, what you see is that this painting is about color and shape, right?
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The work of Mondrian is about nothing besides the canvas, the painting itself, right.
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It encourages you to look at it as a surface.
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Yeah, it's abstraction, right?
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It's a, it's an exercise in abstraction.
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Put simply, yes.
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Yeah.
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And you know, one of the really important arguments that Greenberg makes when thinking about Mondrian pieces, about the whole entourage of modernist painting is that modernist painting has a fundamentally revolutionary drive because there is a critique of the tradition of representationalism that had been so dominant.
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So it's sort of taking an ax to the root of what has been mainstream in painting.
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But, he says, the problem with thinking about the Avant garde as necessarily revolutionary is that ultimately every artist needs to get buddy, buddy with a rich person who's going to pay them for their art.
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You know, basically every artist has to ally themselves with somebody from the higher class in order to have some form of income.
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And historically they did this through the practice of aristocratic patronage.
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Basically artists would do representational art, which would at the same time appease their patrons because they could paint their rich buildings or their families, or even do a portrait of them.
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And also be understood by the general masses.
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So historically representationalism allowed artists to serve two
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their patrons, and then the general masses at the same time.
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But in the early 20th century artists, again, like Mondrian, they want to be radical and critical and reject tradition, but they also still need to find a sugar daddy, which is according to Greenberg, the paradox of modernism that they want to be both revolutionary and also ally themselves with the higher class.
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And so the way they solve this dilemma is precisely by turning to abstraction because by painting abstract themes, they can appeal to the high culture value and education of their new patrons.
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While at the same time offering a critique of social institutions, especially internal to the art community.
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And unfortunately, this has the effect that their work ends up not being accessible to the general masses, which is why a lot of people complain about not understanding abstract art.
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Okay.
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So all of this that you're talking about, David is explaining the rise in modernism and the turn towards abstraction within the sort of high brow art community.
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Kitsch, of course, is not at all high brow.
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So, we are kind of setting ourselves up to talk about kitsch.
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How then does the move to kitsch happen?
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That's a really good question.
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And the answer here is precisely in terms of the masses.
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So suddenly the masses are being given art that they don't understand by the Avant garde.
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They see the Mondrian piece and they're like, if I had a ruler and some tape and paint, I could make that myself.
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I could do it myself.
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Yes.
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Yes.
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Classic line.
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And Greenberg does recognize that the reason that they don't have access to it is largely for social and economic reasons.
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They don't have access to education.
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They don't have access to museums and galleries.
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So it's not anything essential about the lower classes that prevents them from understanding it.
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It's their material reality.
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Nonetheless, the point is that a vacuum is created.
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An artistic vacuum, where suddenly you have all these people from the lower class, including a lot of people who have suddenly moved into cities because of the industrial revolution who don't have any access to culture and the culture that they see getting attention in the city, Avantgarde painting, they don't get.
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And so you have all these people who are hungry for some form of entertainment and culture.
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But who just don't get the culture that is around them.
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And so kitsch steps in, in the early 20th century to fill this void.
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It's, according to Greenberg, it's "art" for the lower classes, with "art" in, in air quotes.
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Okay.
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cause it, it's like not really art, according to him.
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Yeah.
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And there's a void filled by what we might otherwise call folk culture in the countryside, right?
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With all of these people moving now into cities and feeling alienated by the, the art that they're seeing in the fancy museums, these public museums around them.
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Okay.
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Because this is an episode largely about quote art or maybe, kitsch is not art.
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We will get to that in a moment.
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Let's think about another example here.
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And as you and I were researching this, David, we were thinking about examples of kitschy art and one that came to mind is the classic painting of dogs playing poker. And they're actually different versions of this painting, but one of them that's kind of old school is the 1894 painting called Poker Game by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.
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And in this painting, There are a few different dogs who are sitting around a table playing poker, and there's like some alcohol in the foreground.
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There's a lamp
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Yeah, whiskey specifically.
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Oh yes.
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Wait.
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It was an advertisement, right?
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Oh.
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But it was, it was an advertisement to advertise cigars, not to advertise whiskey, but the painting is actually exemplary of a pretty high brow representational style.
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But the content is pretty low brow, right.
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It's very silly and ridiculous.
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It's these dogs who are playing poker in an otherwise human setting.
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One of 'em has a pipe in his mouth or her mouth with glasses and they're trying to like
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We're gonna say his it's an 1894 painting of dogs playing poker.
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It's definitely his.
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And like, you know, they have glasses and they're holding their cards with their little paws and it's fun.
00:19:34.667 --> 00:19:35.718
It's ridiculous.
00:19:35.778 --> 00:19:48.103
And you can look at it and enjoy it without having to go into the highly intellectual terrain that you would have to, if you're looking, say, at that Mondrian, right.
00:19:48.103 --> 00:19:58.053
And so if you just put this painting next to a Mondrian abstract painting, you see the difference that Greenberg is getting at between avant-garde art and kitsch art.
00:19:58.323 --> 00:20:03.153
And thanks for going with us, listeners, on our description over an audio format of a painting.
00:20:03.333 --> 00:20:10.563
But the reason that we wanted to mention this painting example is because the term kitsch was originally applied exclusively to paintings.
00:20:10.623 --> 00:20:14.492
So I wanna talk a little bit about the etymology, you know, I'm a big fan of etymology.
00:20:14.553 --> 00:20:19.846
One of the interesting things about the word kitsch is that people don't know for certain how it originated.
00:20:20.012 --> 00:20:21.782
We know when and where it originated.
00:20:22.202 --> 00:20:28.262
It was in the 1860s and 70s among painters and art dealers in Munich, in Germany.
00:20:28.923 --> 00:20:34.113
And they used it to designate cheap artistic stuff.
00:20:34.772 --> 00:20:37.593
So just like what they thought was like crappy.
00:20:37.653 --> 00:20:39.403
They were like, this is kitsch.
00:20:39.873 --> 00:20:47.073
And later the word entered other European languages, such that by the end of the 1920s, it had become by and large, an international expression.
00:20:47.432 --> 00:20:55.502
And scholars have offered a few different potential candidates for the origin of this word among art dealers in Munich in the second half of the 19th century.
00:20:56.073 --> 00:21:01.712
One is that it's related to the German word "kitchen," which means to collect rubbish.
00:21:01.982 --> 00:21:10.173
But then I also read that it might be related to the English word "sketch." So a sketch as opposed to an actual artwork or painting.
00:21:10.472 --> 00:21:13.313
Maybe that entered the German word as kitsch.
00:21:13.712 --> 00:21:22.593
But whether or not this is the case, or maybe it's a different origin altogether kit is usually associated with what is vulgar, what is cheap, what is shallow, right.
00:21:22.593 --> 00:21:24.722
It's, it's superficial in a word.
00:21:24.722 --> 00:21:25.482
It's kitschy.
00:21:26.617 --> 00:21:37.357
And for me, kitsch does mean rubbish, maybe more so than sketch, but who knows, nobody knows the origin of the term, but Greenberg talks about the shallow point, the shallowness of kitsch itself.
00:21:37.357 --> 00:21:41.498
And he says that kitsch is mechanically produced.
00:21:41.498 --> 00:21:42.928
That's just what kitsch is.
00:21:43.228 --> 00:21:45.337
And it means that it can be consumed.
00:21:45.470 --> 00:21:47.450
Without any thought or effort.
00:21:47.750 --> 00:21:56.000
So it's like basically the Urban Outfitters of early 20th century culture, because as he says, it operates by formulas.
00:21:56.000 --> 00:21:58.460
It just repeats things without originality.
00:21:58.940 --> 00:22:07.430
And one phrase that he uses that stood out for me is he says that kitsch produces vicarious experience.
00:22:07.599 --> 00:22:16.109
It fools you into thinking that you are having a genuine aesthetic moment when in reality, you're just consuming something that has been mass produced.
00:22:16.950 --> 00:22:17.190
Okay.
00:22:17.190 --> 00:22:32.130
So, let's think about these different features of kitsch, then, in relation to an example of a song, I have chosen the country song by the Zach Brown band called "Chicken Fried," which was very popular when we lived in Atlanta, David.
00:22:32.519 --> 00:22:36.029
And yeah, let's listen to a little bit and, and go through this.
00:22:36.615 --> 00:22:44.085
"You knew, well I'm a chicken fried, a cold beer on Friday night, a pair of jeans that fit just right.
00:22:44.775 --> 00:22:45.545
And the radio."
00:22:52.670 --> 00:22:52.970
Okay.
00:22:52.974 --> 00:23:00.319
So, what does it mean to say that this song, if we're gonna call it kitsch, which I am very comfortable doing, operates by formulas?
00:23:00.549 --> 00:23:04.480
Cause that's one of the characteristics that you mentioned Greenberg associates with kitsch.
00:23:04.730 --> 00:23:13.714
Now, we can think about the fact that this song has a very classical verse chorus bridge type of structure, right?
00:23:13.720 --> 00:23:15.575
It's not reinventing the wheel.
00:23:15.920 --> 00:23:22.880
It is using existing musical formulas that are very tried and true within country music to produce a certain effect.
00:23:22.940 --> 00:23:27.920
And I don't know for certain about the way that this song in particular was produced.
00:23:28.400 --> 00:23:29.299
It's from 2008.
00:23:29.299 --> 00:23:49.174
So it might be a little bit before the rise of autotune and truly algorithmically driven songs, but it's super common nowadays, especially to find songs that literally are created by software systems rather than by people in order to maximize viral appeal on say, TikTok.
00:23:49.174 --> 00:23:55.115
"That mean the most, not where you live, what you drive over the price tag on your clothes."
00:23:55.285 --> 00:24:09.214
Well, and even beyond the musical formulas that are used within country music, people have been talking about the crisis of country music itself, recently, as being the fact that country music itself has become its own formula.
00:24:09.214 --> 00:24:15.005
So basically a lot of country songs sound the same and have the same structure.
00:24:15.005 --> 00:24:17.434
You just change a few words here and there.
00:24:17.674 --> 00:24:22.234
And so there, it, it might be that it's not just this country song that is kitsch.
00:24:22.444 --> 00:24:26.884
It might be that the entire genre of, of contemporary country.
00:24:27.095 --> 00:24:29.785
Um, I'm not going to include, uh, amazing ladies
00:24:29.954 --> 00:24:31.279
Old school, Dolly Parton.
00:24:31.384 --> 00:24:36.244
Or like Loretta Lynn, you know, like that would not be kitsch in this particular sense.
00:24:36.289 --> 00:24:36.714
I Mmm.
00:24:36.714 --> 00:24:36.775
Mm.
00:24:36.825 --> 00:24:37.115
Yeah.
00:24:37.115 --> 00:24:37.535
Yeah, yeah.
00:24:37.805 --> 00:24:44.615
And this also relates to another thing that you mentioned from his view, which is that kitsch produces vicarious experience.
00:24:45.065 --> 00:25:01.744
For Greenberg kitsch induces stock emotions, invoking emotions on a superficial level for a mere moment that gives the illusion of depth rather than actually creating a genuine emotional response, which, you know, maybe you're getting from a Loretta Lynn song, David.
00:25:02.269 --> 00:25:02.900
And I do.
00:25:02.960 --> 00:25:03.380
Yes.
00:25:03.740 --> 00:25:12.589
Yeah, there is in this song, the warm, fuzzy feeling of a cold beer on a Friday night, a pair of jeans that fits just right and the radio on, right?
00:25:12.619 --> 00:25:22.880
Like it's over determined by this nostalgic sense of tapping into an already familiar emotion rather than creating a new emotion.
00:25:22.940 --> 00:25:32.430
And it kind of reminds me of John Dewey's theory, which we talked about in the Art as Commodity episode, that we're no longer invested in truly perceiving art in the present day.
00:25:32.609 --> 00:25:36.269
We're rather just recognizing it so often, right?
00:25:36.269 --> 00:25:37.859
It's like, oh, that is familiar to me.
00:25:37.859 --> 00:25:40.019
It's a symbol of emotional significance.
00:25:40.019 --> 00:25:40.259
Right?
00:25:40.440 --> 00:25:46.829
"Chicken Fried" is a symbol of emotional significance rather than having emotional significance in itself.
00:25:47.440 --> 00:25:47.799
Yeah.
00:25:47.805 --> 00:25:52.619
And Greenberg would say it's a vulgar symbol of emotional significance.
00:25:52.750 --> 00:25:57.529
Uh, he, he does talk about the vulgarization of aesthetic experience through kitsch.
00:25:57.700 --> 00:26:04.900
And so far as, I mean, think about that, like the feeling of a cold beer on a Friday night, like what kind of emotion is that that's like, literally just a sensation.
00:26:04.900 --> 00:26:08.680
It's coldness in your hand with jeans that fit just right.
00:26:08.769 --> 00:26:09.160
Okay.
00:26:09.190 --> 00:26:16.759
That that's something that doesn't force you to any critical horizon of, of any sort.
00:26:16.759 --> 00:26:29.779
Whereas if you compare that to again, uh, Loretta Lynn song, that is a reflection on white poverty in, uh, the Appalachians, there, you evoke a critical emotion or at least an emotion that has critical potential.
00:26:30.109 --> 00:26:31.160
So like night and day.
00:26:32.105 --> 00:26:43.355
Yeah, well, and one of my favorite aspects of this song is that he goes from the cold beer on a Friday night to this weird invocation of American patriotism and the role of women in it.
00:26:43.355 --> 00:26:57.289
So he says, "See the love in my woman's eyes," my woman's eyes,"Feel the touch of a precious child and know a mother's love." And then says, "I thank God for my life and for the stars and stripes.
00:26:57.500 --> 00:27:03.769
May freedom forever fly, let it ring." And then it's, he says we have to salute the troops who have died.
00:27:03.890 --> 00:27:11.269
So there is American military industrial complex, vague invocations of the Christian right, notions of women's domesticity and maternal love.
00:27:11.539 --> 00:27:13.670
It is all there.
00:27:13.759 --> 00:27:19.609
And this reminds me of the work of the philosopher Tomáš Kulka whose work on kitsch I read in researching this episode.
00:27:19.924 --> 00:27:27.305
And one of the things that's quite interesting about Kulka's view of kitsch is that he adds something that is not already there in Greenberg.
00:27:27.305 --> 00:27:33.454
It's what he calls the third feature of kitsch in addition to this vicarious experience and operating by mechanical formulas.
00:27:33.815 --> 00:27:42.454
And this third feature of kitsch for Kulka is that kitsch doesn't substantially enrich our associations that relate to the depicted objects or themes.
00:27:42.484 --> 00:27:45.994
It just ends up reinforcing what we already know about a topic or theme.
00:27:46.115 --> 00:27:49.174
So I think this is obviously closely related to vicarious experience.
00:27:49.174 --> 00:27:50.974
That was kind of how I was already describing it.
00:27:50.974 --> 00:27:58.859
Maybe I'm influenced by Kulka, but I think what is important is that it's a reminder or reference point rather than an invitation or reflection.
00:27:58.859 --> 00:28:14.359
And this means that in addition to having that vicarious experience, whatever that vicarious experience is, a feeling of nostalgia of patriotism, of comfort, what really rises to the fore above all is a dominant theme of reassurance.
00:28:14.539 --> 00:28:24.019
And this is for Kulka is what distinguishes kitsch from art, because art invites reflection through complexity and distance from the observer.
00:28:24.230 --> 00:28:31.259
Whereas kitsch invites reassurance based on simplicity and, uh, kind of proximity to the observer.
00:28:31.720 --> 00:28:37.109
Well, in the simplicity or, I mean, we could say the basicness of, of kitsch.
00:28:37.355 --> 00:28:40.444
Does it get, does it get more basic than "Chicken Fried?" does it?
00:28:40.849 --> 00:28:42.109
No, it really does not.
00:28:42.259 --> 00:28:49.759
And it seems that for Kulka, the basicness of kitsch is what allows us to differentiate it from art so that we can say kitsch is not really art.
00:28:50.029 --> 00:29:02.359
For Greenberg, that basicness is what makes kitsch also so politically dangerous because it sinks us into an experience of what he calls unreflected enjoyment.
00:29:02.555 --> 00:29:08.644
Yeah, we can enjoy it, but we don't reflect either on the thing itself or our enjoyment of it.
00:29:08.825 --> 00:29:12.095
And so it makes us passive in the face of the status.
00:29:12.734 --> 00:29:38.234
So, David, in prepping for this episode, we really wanted to have a debate about kit.
00:29:38.654 --> 00:29:43.525
But what we realized is that there's actually very little by way of defenses of kitsch.
00:29:43.775 --> 00:29:59.984
The vast majority of what is written about it seems to be an agreement that it is a dangerous form of pseudo art and its dangers can range from it being banal, kind of deadening us to the status quo to actually being extremely politically harmful.
00:30:00.255 --> 00:30:05.234
Let's talk a little bit about the senses in which kitsch can be politically harmful.
00:30:05.950 --> 00:30:14.710
So to do that, let's go back to the Greenberg piece because that's where we find what I think is one of the most acute criticisms of kitsch along political lines.
00:30:14.829 --> 00:30:19.329
Because Greenberg just straight up says, kitsch is fascist.
00:30:20.194 --> 00:30:24.095
So it's not just politically dangerous, it's like the highest political danger in some way.
00:30:24.605 --> 00:30:45.884
And he gives a really interesting historical example, which highlights his theoretical point, which is that kitsch is a form of propaganda that speaks to the masses by regurgitating back their values so that they don't have to ever engage in any kind of reflection about their condition.
00:30:46.055 --> 00:30:50.369
And that's that notion of unreflected enjoyment that you mentioned a moment ago.
00:30:50.404 --> 00:30:50.464
Mmm.
00:30:50.704 --> 00:30:51.305
Yes.
00:30:51.365 --> 00:31:02.585
And his concern is that when kitsch is deployed by somebody in a position of power, it allows that person to ingratiate themselves with the masses.
00:31:02.585 --> 00:31:15.285
So it, it has a populist appeal so that you can win over the masses very easily just by feeding them kitsch independently of what sort of political program you have in mind for those people.
00:31:15.674 --> 00:31:20.085
And here he uses the example of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
00:31:20.654 --> 00:31:26.900
He says, "In the 1930s, there were two different views within the Nazi party about art.
00:31:27.410 --> 00:31:34.839
One was Hitler's view and another one by this Nazi high ranking general named Goebbels.
00:31:35.420 --> 00:31:43.069
Now, Hitler we know was a Philistine who really did not like, uh, modernist art because he thought it was degenerate.
00:31:43.630 --> 00:31:59.509
Goebbels on the other hand was somebody that really like avant garde art and he would try to get modern painters to come to Germany and show their work in Germany because he thought it was the artistic embodiment of the superiority of the Aryan race.
00:31:59.690 --> 00:32:09.765
So anyways, among the Nazis, they really couldn't agree whether it was avantgarde painting or kitsch that really reflected Nazi values.
00:32:10.365 --> 00:32:13.845
Greenberg says in the end, Hitler won.
00:32:14.265 --> 00:32:32.065
He won this cultural battle and the official party line became that we move away from modernist painting and we start using kitsch as political propaganda, which is why, if you look at Nazi posters from the 1930s, they are all super kitsch.
00:32:32.285 --> 00:32:46.384
Like they are the definition of kitsch itself and so the success of the Nazis, he says, was directly linked to the fact that they mobilized art as propaganda, which is kitsch.
00:32:46.880 --> 00:32:47.329
Yeah.
00:32:47.329 --> 00:32:57.140
And you know, I actually don't know that I agree with Greenberg entirely on that point because the filmmaking of Leni Riefenstahl for instance, is complete Nazi propaganda.
00:32:57.140 --> 00:33:00.029
But I, I don't know if I would consider it kitsch.
00:33:00.049 --> 00:33:02.930
Actually it's much more on the avantgarde side of things.
00:33:02.930 --> 00:33:14.660
But I hear that general point, David, which is that Hitler found a way to tap into the desires and the identity of the Aryan people living in Germany.
00:33:15.049 --> 00:33:20.069
And one of the ways that he did that was through propaganda stick quote art, which we would actually call kitsch.
00:33:20.480 --> 00:33:22.559
But I think this raises the question.
00:33:23.089 --> 00:33:27.529
Is kitsch an aesthetic category in the same way that art is?
00:33:27.529 --> 00:33:34.039
Right, that can be used for politics, or is there actually a category of political kitsch?
00:33:34.220 --> 00:33:34.640
Right.
00:33:34.789 --> 00:33:40.220
So is it, is it an aesthetic category that can be used for politics or can it be a political category itself?
00:33:40.220 --> 00:33:49.309
And I think the view that you're describing is more the former you're thinking about kitsch as an aesthetic category that can be employed for propagandistic political purposes.
00:33:49.595 --> 00:33:54.694
And I think that's definitely the dominant view, but there's a book by Catherine A.
00:33:54.694 --> 00:34:12.250
Lugg that asserts that there is actually a political category of kitsch that she calls political kitsch and she defines political kitsch as a type of propaganda that incorporates familiar and easily understood art forms aka kitsch to shape the direction of public policy.
00:34:12.250 --> 00:34:28.179
And she mentions all kinds of examples from early 21st century American politics that she considers to be political kitsch, whether it's in the speeches of politicians or in Forest Gump as a film-- hilarious example of this, um, although, you know, she actually thinks it's quite nefarious.
00:34:28.715 --> 00:34:28.954
Yeah.
00:34:28.954 --> 00:34:40.344
I mean, I can see how one could think about a political kitsch, especially if we define kitsch in terms of mass production, following formulas, things that produce these fake vicarious experiences.
00:34:41.255 --> 00:34:46.905
When I think about things like, you know, the political platforms of contemporary politicians, they fit that category.
00:34:47.164 --> 00:34:52.474
You know, there're mass produce repeated, they repurpose elements independently of context.
00:34:52.775 --> 00:35:04.664
And in general, regurgitating ideas to the masses that have mass appeal with a pretense to being original and new and countercultural.
00:35:04.664 --> 00:35:09.320
So, so in that sense, I think a lot of politics can very easily be described as kitsch.
00:35:09.940 --> 00:35:15.429
And one thing that you might think about here is what happened with 9/11.
00:35:15.820 --> 00:35:28.659
There was a unthinkable tragedy that occurred and then an almost immediate move to processing this national trauma through kitsch because kitsch is American culture.
00:35:28.659 --> 00:35:31.420
Like I said, I've just started to see it truly everywhere.
00:35:31.900 --> 00:35:48.815
There was a news article that came out around the time, noting things like all of these sweet and kind of pat messages of children with big eyes mourning the tragedy of 9/11, or we have the Dixie Chicks who are now known just as the Chicks, super kitschy name, right?
00:35:48.820 --> 00:35:49.625
Dixie Chicks.
00:35:49.954 --> 00:35:53.224
This kind of reference to a nostalgic American culture.
00:35:53.375 --> 00:35:54.375
Going back to the country music.
00:35:54.949 --> 00:36:02.809
The Dixie Chicks at the time then saying the star Spangled banner, there were all of these inspirational quotes that were going around and such and such.
00:36:02.809 --> 00:36:17.210
And so this way that as a culture, we oversimplify through kitsch in order to process what cannot actually be processed, especially in this kind of pat immediate way, we wanna just get over it.
00:36:17.329 --> 00:36:18.769
And so we have the inspirational quotes.
00:36:19.489 --> 00:36:42.425
Yeah, and the political category of kitsch exerts this pull downward at the level of thought where it's not only that you are just lost in this unreflected enjoyment, but that, that enjoyment prevents you from formulating interesting nuanced thoughts, because I think about the, in the aftermath of 9/11, and by the way, I moved to the U.S.
00:36:42.635 --> 00:36:45.949
as a teenager, like two months after nine 11.
00:36:45.949 --> 00:36:49.079
So this was my first experience of American culture.
00:36:49.079 --> 00:37:12.675
It was that attempt to process what had happened and what was very fascinating to me as a foreigner is that you couldn't possibly say anything nuanced about 9/11 or about international politics or about the nature of terrorism in that context, without it leading to the reaction that you're just anti-American.
00:37:12.894 --> 00:37:22.644
So yeah, you have this reductive pool that undermines critique, which again, as we saw Greenberg associates, not with kitsch, but with modernism.
00:37:22.795 --> 00:37:30.885
So maybe we would wanna think about whether there is a political modernism that offers an alternative to political kitsch.
00:37:31.295 --> 00:37:38.344
Yeah, because, you know, when I was first thinking about whether there is a category of political kitsch, my instinct was no.
00:37:38.554 --> 00:37:47.965
Because my instinct was well, when we're talking about these kind of responses to 9/11, for instance, we're talking about aesthetic responses, the inspirational quotes, the cheesy paintings, the songs, right?
00:37:48.184 --> 00:37:50.284
And those are being used for political purposes.
00:37:50.820 --> 00:38:02.159
But I think one of the things that comes up a lot in the critiques of kitsch is that kitsch is bad because it is a replacement for art and art invites, that critical reflection that kitsch does not.
00:38:02.340 --> 00:38:08.614
And I actually think that you see kitsch in this context as a replacement for politics, right?
00:38:08.614 --> 00:38:15.065
It's not necessarily that what we needed was the modernist art piece reflecting on 9/11, although perhaps we also needed that.
00:38:15.215 --> 00:38:26.675
What we actually needed was open dialogue, a coming together through processing trauma, policy changes, these things that have to do with the social and political life and go beyond the aesthetic.
00:38:26.675 --> 00:38:31.125
And so kitsch is foreclosing those by offering an illusion of depth in their place.
00:38:31.547 --> 00:38:49.367
And I really feel like the term formulaic is apropos here, because once you have a formula that you have to apply mechanically, you know, like a cookie cutter to very different settings, well, it means that you yourself are becoming kitsch in the sense of a mass produced subject, right?
00:38:49.367 --> 00:38:55.992
Like who thinks mechanically in the same way that artistic kitsch is produced through mechanical reproduction.
00:38:56.061 --> 00:39:01.891
Yes, hence my fear that my entire life is kitsch because this is the society that we live in.
00:39:02.222 --> 00:39:16.342
And, you know, I, I was also thinking so much after starting to reflect on kitsch about the Instagram explainers that were everywhere in June 2020 after the death of George Floyd.
00:39:16.552 --> 00:39:20.572
And even before the Instagram explainers, there were the infamous black squares.
00:39:20.751 --> 00:39:29.032
So people were posting these black squares on their Instagram then realizing like, oh no, this is preventing people from getting valuable information about racism in the U.S.
00:39:29.092 --> 00:39:36.501
And so then there was this move to all of these pat Instagram explainers, like the history of slavery in the U.S.
00:39:36.501 --> 00:39:38.902
and how that leads to racism today.
00:39:39.141 --> 00:39:43.411
And post after post about racism in one to four slides.
00:39:43.652 --> 00:39:47.521
And I think the black squares are political kitsch.
00:39:47.612 --> 00:39:50.351
And I also think that the Instagram explainers are political kitsch.
00:39:50.376 --> 00:39:53.822
And that's not to say that there wasn't any purpose for those.
00:39:53.822 --> 00:40:11.387
Like there was, I think some education that happened through those Instagram explainers, but I also think that at the end of the day, reposting those Instagram explainers became a replacement for meaningful anti-racist political action and work.
00:40:11.927 --> 00:40:28.226
Yeah, and I mean, around the same time, if we wanna take the notion of political kitsch a little further, we could say that the whole Trump era was the ultimate form kitsch, not only because of the use of clear propaganda desired to ingratiate oneself with the masses.
00:40:28.286 --> 00:40:31.137
Invocation of completely meaningless symbols.
00:40:31.577 --> 00:40:32.356
Exactly.
00:40:32.362 --> 00:40:38.686
Um, but now I'm just like imagining all of the people in Trump's cabinet as the dogs playing poker.
00:40:39.496 --> 00:40:40.496
political kitsch.
00:40:42.947 --> 00:40:44.206
Oh, my God.
00:40:52.186 --> 00:40:56.777
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00:41:08.327 --> 00:41:43.577
So, I mentioned earlier that I've been feeling like my whole life is kitsch after researching this and listeners will remember if you've really been with Overthink for quite some time, that in a very early episode on nostalgia, David and I had a critique of the cottage core fashion slash lifestyle trend, which is basically a return to a pastoral, idyllic dream of making bespoke pies and wearing fabulous prairie style outfits.
00:41:43.697 --> 00:41:45.556
And I was so critical of it at the time.
00:41:45.556 --> 00:41:54.137
And I just have to say, since we recorded that episode almost two years ago, I have kind of gotten into some cottage core style.
00:41:54.496 --> 00:42:01.052
I have bought a few like white flowy, lace Victorian type of dresses.
00:42:01.052 --> 00:42:08.521
And there's no way to explain this interest of mine other than out some kitschy nostalgia.
00:42:08.552 --> 00:42:10.382
Like I'm just gonna put myself on blast there.
00:42:10.382 --> 00:42:16.652
It totally partakes of this myth of like a film, like Picnic at Hanging Rock, which I love.
00:42:16.891 --> 00:42:19.561
1975 Peter Weir movie, highly recommend.
00:42:20.177 --> 00:42:22.617
The myth of pure white femininity.
00:42:22.827 --> 00:42:23.166
Uh
00:42:23.306 --> 00:42:24.577
Yes, yes, no, no, no.
00:42:24.621 --> 00:42:26.297
Like I said, putting myself on blast here.
00:42:26.297 --> 00:42:32.777
I, I think this is like one way that I'm finding myself getting taken in by kitsch culture.
00:42:33.347 --> 00:42:33.677
Okay.
00:42:33.677 --> 00:42:34.396
I, I'm.
00:42:34.396 --> 00:42:40.487
Well, first of all, I'm surprised because we literally did a whole episode about this and I thought you would've gotten the message.
00:42:40.592 --> 00:42:48.331
I know, although part of my political view is that we can only limit our hypocrisy to a certain degree under the conditions of late capitalism.
00:42:48.391 --> 00:42:58.472
And so I do also espouse the fact that although we should try and minimize hypocrisy where possible some hypocrisy is bound to occur and you can't always force your feelings in line with your beliefs.
00:42:58.847 --> 00:42:59.507
No, that's fine.
00:42:59.512 --> 00:43:01.836
And I mean, who cares if you bought a lacy dress.
00:43:02.836 --> 00:43:08.536
Like, I, it's not as if this is like the most egregious political act that one can perform today.
00:43:09.106 --> 00:43:14.086
Patreon subscribers, the bonus content will include, um, me holding up one of these dresses.
00:43:15.226 --> 00:43:21.347
And I do have some like postcards that are kind of kitsch that I like, and that I've saved over the years so whatever.
00:43:21.347 --> 00:43:25.177
I mean, like aesthetically, I think there is something interesting about some forms of kitsch.
00:43:25.277 --> 00:43:31.967
So you're not on your own here, which does bring me to ask a question that is really
00:43:31.967 --> 00:43:34.996
what should we do?
00:43:35.702 --> 00:43:36.561
With kitsch.
00:43:36.751 --> 00:43:41.882
I mean, we mentioned already that we looked for defenses of kitsch and we couldn't really find any.
00:43:42.121 --> 00:43:46.411
Most people seem to be in agreement that it's dangerous in art and in politics.
00:43:46.862 --> 00:43:56.690
And I'm wondering whether we should spend some time thinking about either the potential benefits of kitsch or the dangers of emphasizing the benefits of kitsch.
00:43:56.690 --> 00:44:00.336
Yeah, I have two responses there.
00:44:00.786 --> 00:44:10.086
One is that arguably a Greenberg style critique of kitsch in favor of modernist art is pretty classist.
00:44:10.237 --> 00:44:30.996
Seems kind of ironic that I'm following up my talking about buying a fancy Victorian style dress with this point. But if you think about the "Chicken Fried," for instance, or the dogs playing poker, arguably, because we live in a society where so many people don't have the educational tools needed in order to understand abstract art.
00:44:31.626 --> 00:44:35.976
We shouldn't judge them for having kitsch as a response to that.
00:44:35.981 --> 00:44:56.617
And sure, even if you wanna say they're okay, we're not politically judging them, but we're still judging kitsch as an overall dangerous trend, a potential response to that could be that it is out of the very impoverishment of art and the transformation of art for the lower classes into kitsch that the ground might be paved for more revolutionary art.
00:44:57.097 --> 00:44:59.347
So, so that's, that's one initial response.
00:44:59.351 --> 00:45:02.612
I have, I have another thought, but I'll but what, what do you think in response to that one, David?
00:45:02.612 --> 00:45:10.237
Well, yeah, let's put a pin on the second one, because I wanna talk about the class point and I am amicable to that argument.
00:45:10.237 --> 00:45:21.367
I do worry about valorizing things that are accessible only, or legible only to certain classes either because of educational reasons or literally economic reasons.
00:45:21.367 --> 00:45:28.867
Who has $20 to spend on each member of one's family to go to the MoMA, uh, on a, on a Sunday afternoon?
00:45:29.436 --> 00:45:29.766
Yeah.
00:45:29.766 --> 00:45:31.507
And it's like, oh, you don't understand Picasso?
00:45:31.507 --> 00:45:36.577
That's not your fault, but it is contributing to the complete demolition of democracy.
00:45:37.086 --> 00:45:38.197
Like, that's problematic too.
00:45:38.347 --> 00:45:38.617
Yeah.
00:45:38.617 --> 00:45:43.206
So it, yeah, it definitely does seem like it blames the wrong target.
00:45:43.717 --> 00:45:50.347
Nonetheless, there's a way to invert the argument about classism and argue that kitsch itself is classist.
00:45:50.706 --> 00:46:03.657
And I'm thinking here about an argument that Greenberg makes in his essay where he says, look, what really bothers me about kitsch is that it spreads like a disease because it's mechanically reproducible.
00:46:03.657 --> 00:46:10.286
So, literally you can produce a lot of the same thing and because it's very cheap, suddenly it becomes hyper accessible.
00:46:10.706 --> 00:46:21.416
And the problem here is that a lot of the lower classes that he's talking about, he says, these are people that have pastoral or rural traditional values.
00:46:21.802 --> 00:46:24.711
Traditional music or traditional folk dance.
00:46:25.192 --> 00:46:35.302
And so the problem with kitsch is that it exists in a liminal space between that rural culture and the high class high brow culture of the modernist.
00:46:35.306 --> 00:46:36.411
It's somewhere in between.
00:46:37.041 --> 00:46:40.431
Unfortunately, because it is mechanically reproducible.
00:46:40.612 --> 00:46:59.601
It starts spreading in both directions and it starts destroying both avantgarde painting and also more authentic traditional modes of art that have historically belonged to the lower classes, the working class, and let's just say the rural class as if that's that's coherent category.
00:46:59.601 --> 00:47:00.981
I do think it is, by the way.
00:47:01.442 --> 00:47:01.731
Okay.
00:47:01.851 --> 00:47:03.771
And so yeah, there, there's a way in which it.
00:47:04.581 --> 00:47:12.411
It's actually serving the interest of the upper class to keep the lower class in a passive unreflective state.
00:47:12.822 --> 00:47:24.666
Mm mm-hmm, well, and even from a high brow perspective, this is a slightly different point, so many of the gallery shows that you go to see in New York and LA are are just total kitsch at this point, too.
00:47:24.936 --> 00:47:30.007
Which I think also speaks to the way that the American education system works for all of the classes actually.
00:47:30.012 --> 00:47:39.527
So I mentioned Catherine Lugg earlier who has this category of political kitsch, and she thinks that the American education system operates based on kitsch.
00:47:39.547 --> 00:47:43.146
We have, instead of actual history lessons, we have a historical kitsch.
00:47:43.376 --> 00:47:48.867
We learn about George Washington and the cherry tree, rather than learning about the massacre in Tulsa.
00:47:49.317 --> 00:47:57.331
I see like a, kind of a political folklore, just these cute little stories and maybe even some rituals associated with the way in which we learned history.
00:47:57.601 --> 00:48:08.762
When I first moved to the US., I was taken aback by, by some of the ways in which they taught history here, like making you memorize the, the Declaration of Independence and like performing it in front of the classroom.
00:48:08.766 --> 00:48:10.291
I was just like, what is this?
00:48:10.291 --> 00:48:11.242
This is bizarre.
00:48:11.661 --> 00:48:12.351
Totally.
00:48:12.411 --> 00:48:29.061
And this leads me, I think, into, to the second possible defensive kitsch that I'm thinking about, which is that kitsch is bad when it is replacing art or politics or something that invites more reflective, critical distance and action.
00:48:29.391 --> 00:48:32.362
Reflective, critical distance in the case of art, action in the case of politics.
00:48:33.101 --> 00:48:41.077
But when you have kitsch where otherwise there would just be nothing, that actually seems kind of fun and whimsical to me.
00:48:41.077 --> 00:48:46.896
So I'm thinking here back to the example of the David House on 3rd Street that I introduced at the beginning of the episode.
00:48:47.556 --> 00:48:53.467
That house is just like, you know, whatever one story house in LA that's mid-century ranch style.
00:48:53.467 --> 00:49:08.016
It's not particularly pretty, but by putting all of those David statues on the front lawn, the owners have created this super iconic house that brought me so much joy as a child that has been a conversation point over the years with various friends.
00:49:08.077 --> 00:49:14.626
And that just has, yeah, like, like I said, this whimsical element that doesn't seem to be in place of actual art.
00:49:14.626 --> 00:49:19.936
I, I don't wish that there were a single, genuine Roman statue in this person's random front lawn.
00:49:19.936 --> 00:49:21.646
It's just like in place of nothing.
00:49:21.652 --> 00:49:24.387
Seeing with the garden gnomes, which are a classic example of kitsch.
00:49:24.407 --> 00:49:26.181
Like why not have a garden gnome?
00:49:26.362 --> 00:49:29.942
Yeah, I, yeah, I think the whimsicality.
00:49:30.112 --> 00:49:30.862
Whimsy?
00:49:31.001 --> 00:49:31.851
The whimsy.
00:49:31.907 --> 00:49:45.556
I think that's actually a much more compelling argument than it seems at first glance, especially because it can incite people into reconfiguring their relationship to their environment.
00:49:45.556 --> 00:49:57.952
So, you know, I, I imagine like a, a young kid whose first experience of art is something kitschy in their parents' living room, or, you know, you as a, as a young girl walking around and being like, "Oh my god, look at the funny house.
00:49:57.952 --> 00:50:01.791
I didn't know that you could play with architectural features like that."
00:50:02.237 --> 00:50:03.226
Brief, brief sidebar.
00:50:03.226 --> 00:50:04.817
We're driving around, not walking around.
00:50:04.817 --> 00:50:05.847
This is LA we're talking about.
00:50:05.847 --> 00:50:06.097
In LA.
00:50:06.097 --> 00:50:06.686
Yes.
00:50:06.711 --> 00:50:10.942
Um, and additionally, I wanna make the point here that.
00:50:11.686 --> 00:50:23.371
It's not even as if catch and high art can be entirely dissociated from one another because there are forms of kitsch that are high art.
00:50:23.822 --> 00:50:37.021
We can think about something like a Warhol piece, which is kitsch, but it's also, you know, in the fancy museums, in large urban settings, or even a lot of contemporary art, like.
00:50:37.282 --> 00:50:44.722
Think about Koons', uh, balloon dogs, or really insert any of the major dudes in the contemporary art scene.
00:50:44.902 --> 00:50:48.291
There is something kitschy about them, especially because they do play with formulas.
00:50:48.297 --> 00:50:54.802
They do play with pop culture and there is an irreducible kitschiness to that.
00:50:55.222 --> 00:51:02.152
I have my own concerns about a lot of contemporary art, but it does fit into both categories, simultaneously.
00:51:02.152 --> 00:51:03.867
Kitsch and high brow art.
00:51:04.186 --> 00:51:04.657
I don't know.
00:51:04.672 --> 00:51:14.422
I mean, I, I think one response to that though, might just be that the replacement of art with kitsch has transcended into the upper echelons of art nowadays.
00:51:14.422 --> 00:51:22.766
And that, that might actually be an even more dangerous phenomenon than what Greenberg was diagnosing, which was the replacement of art with kitsch for the lower classes.
00:51:23.177 --> 00:51:30.016
Well, and no, he does also talk about the replacement of the high forms of art in the, in the upper classes.
00:51:30.016 --> 00:51:50.927
And he says that because kitsch is so profitable because it has wide appeal, it's just like dangling this apple in front of artists who would otherwise do critical work to be like, "please sell out, all the people will love you," just like the fascist leader who wants to be in the arms of, of the masses.
00:51:51.166 --> 00:51:59.086
And in fact, one of the arguments that, that is often made about many of these contemporary artists is that they have sold out completely.
00:51:59.297 --> 00:51:59.536
Right.
00:51:59.536 --> 00:52:11.237
They've just like, like stepped on the gas and not looked back and given up any kind of hope or promise of, of launching a critique through their art.
00:52:11.237 --> 00:52:15.496
If anything, it's just a defense or an apology for the status quo.
00:52:15.887 --> 00:52:26.356
Well, cause perhaps it's no surprise that the collectors of art are probably not the ones who are really gonna hold forth this torch of revolutionary artwork, right.
00:52:26.387 --> 00:52:32.157
They're likely to be the ones who are most invested in the perpetuation of the status quo.
00:52:32.507 --> 00:52:36.077
And they are the sugar daddies of the contemporary artists.
00:52:36.077 --> 00:52:37.907
And so you have to ally yourself with them.
00:52:38.416 --> 00:52:40.487
And or try and find ways out of that.
00:52:40.487 --> 00:52:43.211
But in the meantime, maybe just get a garden gnome.
00:52:48.351 --> 00:52:50.146
We hope you enjoyed today's episode.
00:52:50.447 --> 00:52:55.697
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00:53:07.202 --> 00:53:12.431
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00:53:13.021 --> 00:53:16.711
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