Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
had its “social basis” in “an elite among the ruling class . . . from which it
assumed itself to be cut off but to which it has always remained attached by an
umbilical cord of gold.” On the other hand, industrial capitalism produced the
phenomenon called in German Kitsch, “popular, commercial art and literature.”
Both “a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover” are products of
“one and the same civilization.” 38 But today as in the past, in Greenberg’s view,
art attempts to create occasions for experiences apart from the assumptions and
values of everyday life, while kitsch borrows art’s techniques and imagery to provide
comfortable versions of the experiences people already have. If Pollock’s
Autumn Rhythm is a perfect representative of art as Greenberg understood it,
Beaton’s photograph including it is a perfect representative of his concept of
kitsch. The intimate relation between avant-garde and kitsch only shows, in
Greenberg’s view, that “advances in culture, no less than advances in science and
industry, corrode the very society under whose aegis they are made possible.” 39
In the same way that modern science makes possible ever more destructive
weaponry, artistic advances provide new stylistic means for the culture industry’s
destruction of sensibility. Where Baudelaire hoped to discover the beautiful in
the spirit animating commercial culture, Greenberg believed the history of capitalism
led instead in the direction of the swallowing up of art by the cultural
complacency of the market.
In this, an obvious ancestor of T. J. Clark’s analysis, Greenberg drew on the
opposition of culture and capitalist economy fundamental to the modern idea of
art. As we saw in Chapter 3, art has been conceptualized since the eighteenth
century in terms of distance from the mundane world of getting and spending—
from what art talk typically refers to as “everyday life.” In his classic text of
1913, Clive Bell put it this way: “Art transports us from the world of man’s activity
to a world of aesthetic exaltation.” 40 Greenberg’s thinking similarly rests on a
distinction “between those values only to be found in art and the values which
can be found elsewhere.” 41 While in Clark’s use the phrase “everyday life” carries
a whiff of the Situationist critique of bourgeois “banality” present also in the
language of “colonization,” it indicates that his thinking, however original,
remains within the terms of the modern ideology of art.
Like all ideology, this view is based on a reality: the distinctive social character
of art objects, as handmade luxury goods in a world dominated by mechanized
mass production. This difference provides art producers with a domain for the
exercise of individual creativity (“genius”), as opposed to the alienated labor
under the direction of others that is the lot of most people, and allows the
products of genius to provide their consumers with an experience outside the
38 Greenberg, “Avant-garde and kitsch,” pp. 8, 9, 3.
39 Ibid., p. 21.
40 Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), p. 27.
41 Greenberg, Art and Culture, p. 13.
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