The avant-garde are the leaders in the art
world, right?
But if there's an avant-garde, meaning advanced-
garde, there’s also a rear-guard, right?
Let’s talk about that.
Hey guys, it's Karin.
Welcome to Little Art Talks and today is the
day we talk about Kitsch.
Now Kitsch is the German word for trash, which
probably gives you an idea of what Kitsch
is.
It’s used to describe things that are usually
vulgar, cheap and sentimental forms of popular
and commercial culture.
It's usually low-brow, mass-produced, using
popular or cultural icons.
The term was was used to refer to these type
of popular, commercial culture sometime in
the 1920s.
In 1939, American art critic Clement Greenberg
wrote in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch:
Where there is an avant-garde, generally we
also find a rear-guard.
True enough – simultaneously with the entrance
of the avant-garde, a second new cultural
phenomenon appeared in the industrial West:
that thing to which the Germans give the wonderful
name of Kitsch: popular, commercial art and
literature with their chromeotypes, magazine
covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp
fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap
dancing, Hollywood movies, etc, etc.
Hermann Broch argues that the essence of kitsch
is imitation: it mimics its immediate predecessor
with no regard to ethics, it's aim to just
copy the beautiful, not the good.
Walter Benjamin said that the difference between
kitsch and art was that unlike art, kitsch
is a utilitarian object - one that lacks critical
distance between object and observer: it "offers
instantaneous emotional gratification without
intellectual effort, without the requirement
of distance, without sublimation".
Kitsch is less about the thing observed than
about the observer.
According to Roger Scruton, "Kitsch is fake
art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose
is to deceive the consumer into thinking he
feels something deep and serious."
The word was first applied to artwork that
was a response to certain divisions of 19th-century
art with aesthetics that favored what later
art critics would consider to be exaggerated
sentimentality and melodrama.
Hence, 'kitsch art' is closely associated
with 'sentimental art'.
Kitsch is also related to the concept of camp,
because of its humorous and ironic nature.
But, around 1950, artists started taking an
interest in popular culture - and, in the
1960s, we got Pop Art.
This engagement with kitsch has continued
to surface in movements such as neo-geo and
in the work of artists such as John Currin,
Jeff Koons and Paul McCarthy.
I hope you guys learned something new today,
and if you enjoyed this video please give
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Talks for more videos on art history.
Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see
you guys next time!
