Abstract
In his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” now a landmark in the history of American modernism, Clement Greenberg lamented the paradox in which artists who produced high culture struggled to remain apart from bourgeois society, yet were tied to “an elite among the ruling class” by “an umbilical cord of gold.” Unhappy as he was that the primary support for high culture came from this tiny, wealthy faction, Greenberg was even more troubled that support for the arts among this class was fast disappearing, with no other champion in sight. “The masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture,” Greenberg bemoaned. They were satisfied with kitsch— “popular, commercial art and literature”— that he characterized as “the debased and cademicized simulacra of genuine culture.”1 In this enormously influential essay, Greenberg articulated binaries often used to define modernism, binaries that powerfully shaped critical understanding of the fine arts for the next several decades. Avant-garde and kitsch still echo in formulations such as high and low, fine and applied, elite and popular, art and commerce.
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Notes
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kirsch,” (1939) rpt. in Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965).
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kirsch,” pp. 4, 19, 21. Greenberg argued that avant-garde culture furnished “an historical criticism” that revealed “our present bourgeois social order was shown to be, not an eternal ‘natural’ condition of life, but simply the latest term in a succession of social orders” (p. 4). For a critique of Greenberg’s politics see T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art” (1982), rpt. in Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art, Howard Risatti ed. (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990).
Clement Greenberg, “Abstract Art,” The Nation 158 (April 15, 1944): 450–51
Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 9.
On Kant, see Shiner, The Invention of Art, pp. 146–151, and for commentary on his influence on twentieth-century art history see Keith Moxey, Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (1989; rpt: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 1–2.
Matthew Arnold, Anarchy and Culture, Samuel Lipman ed. (1869 rpt: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
John Storey, An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. 21–25.
For example, see Roger Fry, Vision and Design (New York: Bretano’s, 1921)
Clive Bell, Art (1913, rpt: New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Marius de Zayas, How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York, ed. Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge MA: M.I.T. Press, 1996), pp. 70
Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co, 1938), p. 120.
Quoted in Susan Fillin Yeh, “Charles Sheeler: Industry, Fashion, and the Vanguard,” Arts Magazine 54 (February 1980): 154–158
Samuel M. Kootz, “Ford Plant Photos of Charles Sheeler,” Creative Art 8 (April 1931): 264–267.
Miles Orvell, “The Artist Looks at the Machine: Whitman, Sheeler, and American Modernism,” in After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), pp. 3–27.
Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 53.
Sharon Corwin, “Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor,” Representations 84 (2004): 139–165.
Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
Lillian Sabine, “Charles Sheeler, New York City” 9 (June 1934): 253–258.
Frederick S. Wight, et al., Charles Sheeler: A Retrospective Exhibition (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1954), p. 28
Carl Sandburg, Steichen the Photographer (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 53.
Barbara Haskell, Edward Steichen (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2000).
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© 2006 Elspeth H. Brown, Catherine Gudis, and Marina Moskowitz
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Johnston, P. (2006). Art and Commerce: The Challenge of Modernist Advertising Photography. In: Brown, E.H., Gudis, C., Moskowitz, M. (eds) Cultures of Commerce. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07182-8_6
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