The first effect of modernism was to make high-culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition. The hidden purpose was twofold: to protect art against popular entertainment, and to create a new barrier, a new obstacle to membership, and a new rite of passage to the adult and illuminated sphere. To those whom modernism excluded, the movement seemed like a betrayal of the past. Tonality and tunefulness in music; the human image in painting; the pleasing dignity of metre and rhyme – even the homely comfort of a story well told – all these ways in which art had opened its arms to normal humanity were suddenly rejected, like a false embrace. To the modernists, however, the past was betrayed not be modernism but by popular culture. Tonal harmonies had been corrupted and banalised by popular music; figurative painting had been trumped by photography; rhyme and metre had become the stuff of Christmas cards, and the stories had been too often told. Everything out there, in the world of naïve and unthinking people, was kitsch. Modernism was not an assault on the artistic tradition, but an attempt to rescue it. Such was the surprising thought expressed by Eliot and Schoenberg, and their eloquence transformed the high culture of Europe.31
Popular culture is too complex a phenomenon to be summarily dismissed – as it was dismissed, for example, by Schoenberg’s great champion, Theodor Adorno.32 In this chapter and the two that follow I shall therefore isolate certain elements in popular culture, and try to put them in their social and religious context. When faith is no longer a given, but either a precarious survival or a hard-won personal achievement, then the need for religion breaks out in novel forms, some acknowledging their religious basis, like the New Age spasms which briefly shake the young, some overtly denying it, as in the now extinct, or at any rate dormant, volcanoes of fascism and communism. But each represents a surge of visceral collective feeling, as people lose themselves in a cause that will swamp the psyche and drown the grief of solitude. These substitute religions are marked by the thing which the modernists deplored – sentimentality, by which I mean the desire for the glory of some heroic or transfiguring passion, without the cost of feeling it. Inevitably, the attempt to express them in artistic forms will go the way of the official art of communist and fascist societies: it will remain on the level of kitsch, like socialist realism or the Nuremberg rallies. Indeed kitsch, as I see it, is a religious phenomenon – an attempt to disguise the loss of faith, by filling the world with fake emotions, fake morality and fake aesthetic values.
The loss of faith which has infected popular culture has infected modernism too. Without the background of a remembered faith, modernism loses its conviction: it becomes routinised. For a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a ‘challenge’ to the ordinary public. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché. If the public has become so immune to shock that only a dead shark in formaldehyde will awaken a brief spasm of outrage, then the artist must produce a dead shark in formaldehyde – this, at least, is an authentic gesture. In place of Harold Rosenberg’s ‘tradition of the new’, we have the ‘cliché of the unexpected’. This is not the originality sought with such care and pain by the modernists, but a repetition of the would-be unrepeatable.
To understand the forms of post-modern culture we should examine three contemporary phenomena: the modernist establishment, kitsch and pop. In a curious way these things belong together; they are the great forms that lie beached on the shore of human leisure as high culture recedes.
The great modernists were catholic, open-minded and acutely aware of the need to build bridges to the public whose expectations they disturbed. They ended, like Eliot, Picasso, Moore and Stravinsky, by being genuinely loved by those who cared for the traditional high culture. But they began by being difficult – intentionally difficult, in order that an effective bulwark should exist between the high ground of art and the swamp of popular sentiment. And because they were difficult, there grew around the modernists a class of critics and impresarios, who offered initiation into the modernist cult. This impresario class began to promote the incomprehensible and the outrageous as a matter of course, lest the public should regard its services as redundant. It owes much to state patronage, which is now the principal source of funding for high culture; it shares in the serene unanswerability of all bureaucracies with power to reward the ‘experts’ appointed to oversee them. And it fosters a new kind of personality, animated by the snobbery of a vanishing era, and determined to move with the times, while understanding less and less what the times might actually be. To convince himself that he is a true progressive, who rides in the vanguard of history, the new impresario surrounds himself with others of his kind, promoting them to all committees which are relevant to his status, and expecting to be promoted in his turn. Thus arises the modernist establishment, which has dominated the official culture of Europe for the last three decades, and which shows no sign of loosening its grip.
Once institutionalised, modernism loses its character as an attempt to recover the tradition, and becomes instead a game, of no greater significance than the surrounding popular culture, and distinguished only by the erudite nature of the pain involved in enduring it. The presence of important financial incentives hastened the death of traditional painting, by devaluing the fund of artistic knowledge and encouraging minor talents to dispense with the humility which might otherwise have caused them to study and emulate the masters. Thus abstract painting embarked on an entirely new course – and this new course could fairly be called ‘post-modernist’, in that it follows in the footsteps of modernism, while repudiating the spiritual enterprise that gave modernism its rationale.
For Mondrian, Nicholson and Klee abstract art was just that: an art of abstraction. An artist like Ben Nicholson abstracted the visual essence from a figurative design, so as to bring out the secret harmony of things that inhabit our space. He was going one stage further down the path marked out for us by Cézanne – the path which leads away from fleeting appearances to appearances of another, deeper and more durable kind, in which spiritual order is discovered in the simplest things, by refining away the dross of present perception. Abstraction came about through the ever-narrowing focus of the aesthetic gaze.
The post-modern offshoots of abstract art may seem to be engaged in the same artistic project; but the appearance is, it seems to me, deceptive. Post-modern abstraction is really construction, in which abstract elements are combined ab initio, and without reference to the natural forms and perceptions which might first have endowed them with a meaning. The shapes, lines and colours may never have been bathed, for the painter, in the light of reality. Their purpose is not to capture and make permanent the hidden structure of appearances, but to glorify the sovereign role of the artist, who shifts and arranges them as would a child playing with coloured blocks. Constructionism is a ploy, which, by making the artist into the creator of his world, cuts off any external judgement, any comparison with things as they are. The world of the constructivist is no larger than the psyche of the person who makes it. The result has been a sudden narrowing of the artistic intention, and a launching of post-modern art towards bombast and doodling by turns.33
This triumph of the construct over the abstract is one part of the routinisation of modernism, and its conversion into the official style of an ‘avant-garde establishment’. The construct has art and not life as its model; it is built according to a system, and its very originality is contained in the rules for its production. It triggers the quick response of the establishment critic, who knows that he will make no mistake by praising it, for the very reason that no-one, not even the artist, will understand why he does so, and therefore no-one will be in a position to doubt his taste.
To the same cause may be attributed the invasive nature of post-modern art, its tendency to colonise every available inch of floor, wall or ceiling, in order to drive out from our perceptions all that is not art, all that is merely decorative, homely and unassuming. This tendency leads inevitably to the ‘installation’, in which art extinguishes competition, and takes up residence at the very point where reality should be. In the installation art becomes sovereign, and in consequence loses its nature as art.
When the works of the impressionists sought their public, they came sealed in baroque and Renaissance frames, whose lively designs and inescapable symmetries confined the paintings to a space of their own, maintaining their simultaneous identities, on the one hand as furniture, on the other hand as vistas into imaginary worlds. There was a tact, a modesty and a good nature about this, which gave confidence to the public and a focus to the artistic intention. A painting in a frame does not have a boundary: it is cut off by the frame, creating the illusion of a world glimpsed as from a window. You enter the painting by passing through the frame; the day-to-day reality remains un-contaminated by the work of art, just as the work of art is insulated from reality. The frame is there to create an imaginative space that stands in no spatial relation to the world of the observer. (It is above all its spatiality – the fact that it occupies some part of our space – that distinguishes the sculpted from the painted image.)
Constructionist paintings seldom come with frames; indeed, they tend to be unframeable, defying the symmetries that would enable us to confine them. They are in a certain manner imperious, often recognising no limit to their sovereignty over their surroundings. The place where they stand becomes an ‘exhibition space’, and their presence in a room turns it from a private home to a public gallery. They do not occur in the background of human life; rather, human life creeps around them, distracted by their presence, and unsure of the nature and extent of the reverence which is due to them. Their presence is an official presence, and their very dullness serves to emphasise their message, which is that art is no longer a reflection on human life but a mechanism for excluding it.
The routinisation of the modernist gesture should be set in its historical context – which is that of kitsch and kitschophobia. If we look back to the pre-history of modernism we find occasional lapses into sentimentality – we plainly observe it, for example, in Murillo, Guido Reni or Greuze. We also discover art which is mechanical and cliché-ridden – like much of Telemann and Vivaldi. But we find nothing that could be described without a sense of strain as kitsch – not even Vivaldi’s Seasons. The artless art of primitive people; the art of the medieval stone-masons and stained-glass makers; the art of the Minnesingers and of the Eddas and Sagas – all these are naïve and devoid of high pretensions. Yet none is kitsch, nor could it be. They never prompt that half-physical revulsion which is our spontaneous tribute to kitsch in all its forms.
At some point during the Enlightenment all that changed. And today the mere contact of a primitive culture with Western civilisation is sufficient to transmit the disease, rather as primitive people were once rescued from their darkness by our colonial adventurers and missionaries, only to die at once from smallpox or TB. Much African art today is kitsch; a century ago none of it was.
Here it is important to make a crucial distinction, without which the history of modern culture cannot be properly understood: that between the aesthetic object and the advert.
To sell a product, you must inform the world of its existence. For this purpose the message must be undemanding and accessible. But advertising has acquired a life of its own; it acts not on the customer’s beliefs but on his desires, by offering a fantasy form of membership. Advertised goods exist in two worlds – one real, the other imaginary. And the second attracts the frustrated emotions which the real world cannot satisfy.
The advert is similar to the aesthetic object, but crucially different in this: that it must neutralise the critical faculty, and arrest the process whereby the actual is compared with its ideal and the ideal with the actual. The work of art endows its subject with intrinsic value, and therefore upholds the distinction between things with a value and things with a price. The advert erodes that distinction; it creates a fantasy world in which value can be purchased, so that price and value are one and the same. The advert is analogous to Freud’s ‘dream-work’ – an exercise in wish-fulfilment. But by fulfilling the wish in fantasy, it creates the wish in fact.
Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralised, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement. When faith declines, however, the sacred is unprotected from marauders; the heart can be captured and put on sale. When this happens the human heart becomes kitsch. The clichéd kiss, the doe-eyed smile, the Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be. They therefore commit the salesman to nothing; they can be bought and sold without emotional hardship, since the emotion, being a fantasy product, no longer exists in its committed and judgement-bearing form.
Much of our present cultural situation can be seen as a response to this remarkable phenomenon – never, I think, encountered before in history (although noticed in other terms by Théophile Gautier, in his preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal). Kitsch reflects our spiritual waywardness, and our failure, not merely to value the human spirit, but to perform those sacrificial acts which create it. Nor is kitsch a purely aesthetic disease. Every ceremony, every ritual, every public display of emotion can be kitsched – and inevitably will be kitsched, unless controlled by some severe critical discipline, such as Arnold and his followers have conceived to be the social role of high culture. (Think of the Disneyland versions of monarchical and state occasions which are rapidly replacing the old stately forms.) In one of the few existing studies of the phenomenon the novelist Hermann Broch suggests that we speak not of kitsch art or culture, but of the ‘Kitschmensch’ – the kitschified human type – who lives in this culture and also requires it.34 This is one reason why you might doubt that Eliot’s pilgrimage is still available. It is surely impossible to flee from kitsch by taking refuge in religion, when religion itself is kitsch. The ‘modernisation’ of the Roman Catholic Mass and the Anglican Prayer Book were really a ‘kitschification’: and attempts at liturgical art are now poxed all over with the same disease. The day-to-day services of the Christian churches are embarrassing reminders of the fact that religion is losing its sublime godwardness, and turning instead towards the world of mass production. And surely Eliot was right to imply that we cannot overcome kitsch through art alone: the recovery of the tradition is also a reorganisation of our lives, and involves a spiritual as well as an aesthetic transformation.
For a long time the official art of the modernist bureaucracy derived its credentials from kitschophobia. The critic Clement Greenberg famously presented the task of the contemporary artist in a stark dilemma: avant-garde or kitsch, and then did his best to ensure a stampede towards ‘abstract expressionism’, as having the sole title to critical acclaim.35 Since Greenberg’s essay was published, figurative painting (as in John Wonnacott and David Inshaw), tonal music (as in David Del Tredici or Robert Simpson), and classical architecture (as in Quinlan Terry or Léon Krier) have been regarded with suspicion: they seem manifestly to ignore the kitsch-strewn path onto which the artist strays, once he puts aside the lamp of rectitude that was lit for us by Baudelaire and Manet. Of course, the bureaucracy says, you can turn back to figurative painting, to tonality, to classicism -but you will only be imitating these things, never actually doing them. You can make the old gestures; but you cannot seriously mean them. And if you make them nonetheless the result will be kitsch – standard, cut-price goods, produced without effort and consumed without thought.
However self-serving that reaction may be, all cultivated people feel the force of it. In art there comes a point where a style, a form, an idiom, or a vocabulary can no longer be used without producing kitsch. Fear of kitsch led to the routinisation of modernism. By posing as a modernist, the artist gives an easily perceivable sign of his authenticity. But the result is cliché of another kind, and a loss of genuine public interest. Patronage (much of it from the state) keeps the modernist bureaucracy in business; but its position as the censor of modern culture is inherently unsustainable.
This is one reason for the emergence of a wholly new artistic enterprise, which some call ‘postmodernism’ but which might better be described as ‘pre-emptive kitsch’. Having recognised that modernist severity is no longer acceptable – for modernism begins to seem like the same old thing, and therefore as not modern at all – artists began not to shun kitsch but to embrace it, in the manner of Andy Warhol, Alan 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. (The intention to produce real kitsch is an impossible intention, like the intention to act unintentionally.) Pre-emptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch, and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials. The dilemma is not: kitsch or avant-garde, but: kitsch or ‘kitsch’ – kitsch insolently laughing at itself.
In the place of modernist severity, therefore, there comes a kind of institutionalised flippancy. Public galleries and big collections fill with the pre-digested clutter of modern life, brash items of salesmanship which pass their sell-by date the moment they go on permanent display. Art as we knew it required knowledge, competence, discipline and study, all of which were effective reminders of the adult world. Pre-emptive kitsch, by contrast, delights in the tacky, the ready-made, and the cut-out, using forms, colours and images which both legitimise ignorance and also laugh at it, effectively silencing the adult voice. Such art eschews subtlety, allusion and implication, and in place of imagined ideals in gilded frames it offers real junk in quotation marks. It is indistinguishable in the end from advertising – with the sole qualification that it has no product to sell except itself. In this connection it is worth quoting an interview given by Damien Hirst, in the September 1997 issue of Dazed and Confused.
‘When I think about it,’ Hirst says, ‘my whole understanding of art has been based on images. I spent more time in the art library and watching TV than ever I did in galleries. I used to go into the art library and say to myself: “I wish I could be like these guys; these are the guys, these are the dons.” Sitting there, looking at 5x4 images of paintings, that was the world that I grew up in. At the same time, though, I spent a hell of a lot of time talking about commercials when I was at art school, conversations like, “My God, did you see the Coalite advert where the dog kisses the cat and then the cat kisses the mouse? Fantastic!” That’s the one that Tony Kaye did a few years back where the theme tune plays [singing] “Will you still love me tomorrow?” Just a brilliant advert. I didn’t realise at the time, but that was where the real art was coming from – the rest of it was in the art library going: “Shit, I wish I could understand all this stuff”.’
That is the authentic voice of the post-modern culture – not quite discarding the high culture of our civilisation, but reluctant to make the effort to embrace it. Things have moved on since then, partly under the influence of Hirst himself, and the advert, the comic and the photographic image have now de-throned the painted image and all that it stood for. It is a law of human nature, confirmed by social revolutions throughout modern history, that old authorities, when they fall from their eminence, are instantly trampled on before being kicked aside. We should not be surprised, therefore, to discover that sacrilege and blasphemy have been such important ingredients in ‘Young British Art’. Modernism was a last-ditch attempt to save the religious view of man; pre-emptive kitsch asserts its sovereign rights by scorning all religion, all attempts to rescue the ‘higher’ vision of our nature, and by showing every human hope as kitsch of another kind.
But here we should look again at those post-modernist quotation marks. Maybe, after all, they are what they seem: not a sign of sophistication, but a sign of pretence. Quotation marks are one thing when localised and confined. But they are another thing when generalised, so as to imprison everything we say. For then they make no contrast and lose their ironical force. Generalised inverted commas neither assert nor deny what they contain, but merely present it. The result is not art but ‘art’ – pretend art, which bears the same relation to the artistic tradition as a doll bears to human beings.
And the sentiments conveyed by this ‘art’ are similar: elaborate fakes, as remote from real emotion as the kitsch which they pretend to satirise. The advertising techniques automatically turn emotional expression into kitsch. Hence the inverted commas neutralise and discard the only effect that postmodernist ‘art’ could ever accomplish. Pre-emptive kitsch offers fake emotion, and at the same time a fake satire of the thing it offers. The artist pretends to take himself seriously, the critics pretend to judge his product and the modernist establishment pretends to promote it. At the end of all this pretence, someone who cannot perceive the difference between advertisement and art decides that he should buy it. Only at this point does the chain of pretence come to an end, and the real value of postmodernist art reveal itself – namely, its value in exchange. Even at this point, however, the pretence is important. For the purchaser must believe that what he buys is real art, and therefore intrinsically valuable, a bargain at any price. Otherwise the price would reflect the obvious fact that anybody – even the purchaser – could have faked such a product.36
This chapter has traced the history of visual art since modernism. The modernists tried to rescue high art from the sea of fake emotion; but the new barriers with which they marked off the higher life were captured by a priesthood of impresarios; modernism was thereafter routinised and deprived of its point. Artists ceased to defend themselves from kitsch, and adopted it instead, in a pre-emptive form. The result might be called cultural ‘pre-emptiness’: not a new form of art, but an elaborate pretence at art, a pretence at appreciation, and a pretence at criticism. And this story shows something about our cultural situation. You will not understand modern high culture, it seems to me, if you do not see that much of it – perhaps the major part of it – is a pretence.