Potemkin Quoins of the Suburban Realm

I see a lot of this sort of architectural gimcrackery around my neighborhood.  It’s all EPS, expanded polystyrene foam.  The illustration below isn’t all that different from sales materials of 19th century Victorian gingerbread builders, but they used factory-cut wooden ornament. (Sometimes wood posed as structural stone.)

I am especially taken with quoins; I have always liked them, the massive, protectors of the corners of buildings.

Adolf Loos knew it all, and denounced it with his characteristic verve in this essay from Ver Sacrum (1898), Potemkin Village.  He was attacking the new Ringstrasse of Vienna, with its neo (pseudo) baroque splendor.

Yes, literally nail on! For these Renaissance and Baroque palaces are not actu­ally made out of the material of which they seem. Some pretend that they are made of stone, like the Roman and Tuscan palaces; others of stucco, like the buildings of the Viennese Baroque. But they are neither. Their ornamental details, their corbels, festoons, cartouches, and denticulation, are nailed-on poured cement. Of course, this technique too, which comes into use for the first time in this century, is perfectly legitimate. But it does not do to use it with forms whose origin is intimately bound up with a specific material simply because no technical difficulties stand in the way. It would have been the artist’s task to find a new formal language for new materials. Everything else is imitation.

Thomas Kinkade – Artist for the People

Thomas Kinkade, the “most collected,” “most successful,” most this-and-that artist of America today died a few days ago.  I come here neither to bury, praise, or damn him, but only to mull over the curious intersection of aesthetic and cultural issues that his work occupies.  His paintings bring to mind Walter Benjamin, of course, whom I have belittled in an earlier post.  I should read his work again since I refer to it so often: perhaps I would have a more favorable opinion today.  At any rate, Balzac may have said it best when he foresaw the pickle of modern art in the advancing machine age:

While working for the masses, modern industry progressively destroys works of art that had been as personal for the buyer as for the creator.  Nowadays, we have products; we no longer have works.

And products a-plenty we have by Kinkade!  I believe he rarely sold his original oils, but the reproductions, the franchises for furniture, dinnerware, galleries, pillows, and other items are a business with annual revenue in the many tens of millions of dollars.  He is an artist who is scorned by the ‘critical establishment’, although he claims the hostility is a one-way thing: he loves Franz Kline and Rothko.  The word ‘kitsch‘ comes up frequently in evaluations of his oeuvre.  (Beware, one man’s kitsch is another man’s living room!)

The image at the top is typical of a large number of his paintings, a serene landscape, while others are religious, genre, or even sci-fi almost surreal. One of the few art critics sympathetic to his work quips that he is a ‘conceptual’ artist because his work is driven by his desire to give visual form to his ideas and values:  Christianity; family; patriotism, among them.  Other academics cite the eerie similarity of his career to that of Andy Warhol, who referred to his studio as The Factory, and who made no qualms about blurring or completely rejecting the line between Art and Commerce. (see Heaven on Earth)

Kinkade’s art is a perfect target for the satire of Komar and Melamid, purveyors of ‘nostalgic realism,’ who also did a market resarch project to determine what paintings people want, and created images to meet the need.  Kinkade, judging by his commercial success, has the talent to sniff out what people want and need on their walls without the benefit of professional pollsters.  He acknowledges this, and is proud of it.  As far as he is concerned, what is the point of artists having contempt for the taste of most people on the planet?  Doesn’t he have a point?  It’s just that I would rather look at older art, skipping the contemporary stuff, instead of Kinkade’s art.  But let’s look at a few…

The two images below are very typical of his work, and I cannot bear to look at them.  I find them simply ugly, boring, meretricious, and profoundly irritating.  They are chock full of symbolism according to Kinkadists.  So are Renaissance landscapes and action scenes.  I was just looking at an engraving by Durer of Adam and Eve that Panofsky analyses in terms of the animals signifying the four humours of the body, among other things.  Personally, that rather arcane aspect of art history never interested me.

The seacape below on the left, the style is that of the bulk of his work, strikes me as soporific.  I feel I’ve seen it in countless waiting rooms.  Not painful to see, but nothing interesting.  The one on the right is simply weird, and not too exciting given the terrifying nature of the monster.  It’s a bit too literal for me. [Note:  comments by Sledpress lead me to wonder if this is not actually a Kinkade.]

Okay, with these images below, we have evidence that Kinkade can certainly paint.  Both are rather attractive, though I find the one on the left to be a visual cliché for calendars and more office waiting rooms.  It is very much in the style of Andrew Wyeth, I think, and boy, is he popular!  I like the one on the right, but it is unusual in his catalogue. Technique is only part of being an artist, though a part too much scorned in the modern era.  On the other hand, as professor once remarked to me, we have Bougouereau, who we might call a great painter, and a lousy artist.

Below, a workmanlike urban landscape: glowing, unremarkable, and dull; a rural scene in Guatemala that captures some sense of the place, almost plein air impressionistic – pretty good, but atypical of his production.

The image on the left below is pretty good:  I happen to have a weakness for that type of color and light.  Kinkade is called, or refers to himself as The Painter of Light, a monniker that the Impressionists would have been happy with.  So too would the Luminists of the turn of the 20th century period.  The image on the right by Maxfield Parrish shows Kinkades stylistic pedigree, I think, but he would never include figures in such a bewitching state of languor.

The Whitney Museum of Art in NYC scorns Kinkade, and the hostility is returned.  He’d like to build his own museum (an anti-art museum, to his critics) right next door.  But as Heaven on Earth points out, The Whitney began as an institution championing American Regionalism – Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, etc. – against the effete strains of European modernism, an art historical irony.  Kinkade has affinities with this sort of art, as shown by his American slice-of-life image of the Indianapolis 500.  Reginald Marsh painted crowd scenes of American’s at play, but he was very prone to showing sex and violence, not in Kinkade’s line.

So Kinkade gives people what they want, and what they want is based on their unchallenged preconceptions.  Does art always have to be new?  Must it épater le bourgeois always?  (And are Kinkade’s buyers actually the same group as the bourgeois  so reviled by the avant garde?  One critic locates his market square in the working class, whatever that is these days in America.  That’s a nice culturo-politico irony too.) Where is it written that art must challenge the ideas of the day?  That’s a prejudice of the avant garde that developed during the 19th century and that is shot through with intellectual and political elitism, even when it’s directed at championing what it sees as the causes of the masses.

Much of the “great art” that is universally applauded by the cognoscenti, even as they condescend to it from the pinnacle of today’s art, was produced exactly as Kinkade’s was.  That is, for patrons who knew what they wanted, and wanted nothing else. Much of the art then was boring, and we don’t see it in museums:  we see only the best of it.  Think of all those Dutch still-lifes and landscapes: they aren’t all masterpieces!  Some of them seem to have been churned out pretty much by the numbers.  Kinkade simply adapts that approach to the age of consumerism, and broadens the reach of his patronage to include everyone!

Behind the critical disdain for his work is usually an intense strain of snobbism and elitism, and a failure to acknowledge that these days, we are all part of a market, a lifestyle segment, a target demographic, even if we don’t embrace the fact, even if we are acutely aware of the fact, even if it is a very small and select group after all.  Scorn and ridicule are out of place here.  If people like this stuff, then…so what?  If you find it boring, spend your time and money elsewhere.  Is there anything new under the sun here that should get you all hot and bothered?

A matter of taste, again…

Victory Arch - Iran/Iraq War .

Disgusting, vulgar, obscenely kitsch – some of the comments that are heard about Saddam Hussein’s Victor Arch, which is now being restored in Baghdad.  One scholar wrote an entire book on the subject of Saddam’s artistic output. [Edward Said felt that the author, Kanan Makiya, an erstwhile booster of the GWB invasion, had tainted motives for his critical tirade.]

One man’s kitsch is another man’s living room. Tolstoy had the same opinion of Napoleon as we have of Saddam, but Boney is a “great man,” and his monuments are gawked at with admiration and reverence by millions of civilized westerners

Napoleon celebrates Austerlitz

Iguan-erot

Iguan-erot:  (noun) Images of women with lizards, primarily iguanas, intended to produce erotic arousal or laughter.  [Derived from iguana + erot(ic);  "Among the most bizarre manifestations of displaced erotic force is ... R. von Craft-Dubbing, Psychopathis Sexualis, 1901]

The Wave

As I posted earlier, I have been venturing into Japanese flower arranging.  The pull of the Japanese minimalist aesthetic is very powerful for me, and I was first introduced to it in college when I took a survey course on Japanese art.  I have thought about it a lot, and I decided to write my professor a thank-you note about it – thirty years late.  It took a bit of doing to locate her – her name has changed – and in searching, I came across a talk she gave about this famous print by Hokusai, “The Great Wave.”  [Complete talk  here:  Totebags, Teeshirts, and Tableware: The Domestication of Hokusai's Great Wave.]

In her talk, she addresses issues of the commercialization of art, mass reproduction of images and commoditization for the consumer economy, cultural appropriation of icons, and the history of japonisme in Western art.  The latter has been known for a century among art scholars as an important influence on Art Nouveau, Impressionism, and other trends, but it was brought to the fore in the public mind with one of Thomas Hoving’s first “blockbuster” exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Among the ironies Professor Guth points out is that in Japan in the 1970s, Hokusai, and the Ukiyo-e genre in which he worked, was not exactly a universally lauded high point of Japanese culture.  Indeed, he was considered a practioner of a rather disreputable art form, and not a member of the high-art pantheon, not the least  because he worked in woodblock prints, a medium intended for popular mass consumption.  Ukiyo-e, the floating world, is the culture of the pleasure district, if not the red light district, and one of his more kinky essays in that direction is shown here:

Imagine this on display in a high-profile exhibit of loan works from Japan during its heyday as the International Bogeyman of the American economy!

Guth takes a broad minded view of the inevitable mixing of art and commerce, tracing the ways in which museums aided the transformation of The Great Wave into one of the most recognizable images of Japanese art today.  She dismisses the attitude of one critic whom she quotes early on as saying that museums must hold the line between art and mass-consumption, accepting the situation of today.  After all, anytime you put a person in front of art, you never know what kind of experience they will have.  An opposing view, whether from the right or the left of the political spectrum, decries the degeneration of cultural capital in favor of profit, spectacle, kitsch…etc., sharing a remarkably similar lack of confidence in the power of ordinary people to evolve imaginative responses of their own to art works.

I became aware of the ubiquity (highlighted at this blog) of the Hokusai print myself when I noticed the logo of a clothing line with which my son was obsessed during his skateboarding phase.  I don’t think I have seen another example of the appropriation of the image through such abstraction.

Everywhere at home??

One of these days, I’m going to visit the strange Park of the Monsters at Bomarzo, Italy. If I go, will I be greeted and led to the Hell’s Mouth by a sultry nymph with delightful long legs like this one?  Will my wife, and all my family obligations and history melt away, my middle age fly off to leave me youthful and desirable, my heightened emotions and vigor to be quenched in a unique, bizarre, erotic embrace within some weird grotto?

Not likely…This renaissance (Mannerist) oddity is nicely photographed and discussed in this fine book which I own.  I’ve known about the park for a very long time, but it seems that it was forgotten by Europe for centuries, until being rediscovered and somewhat restored by the efforts of Salvidor Dali and Mario Praz.  Popularity followed, and now it’s a “family destination” for tourists.

The image is from a catalog for Schneider’s of Austria, a clothing manufacturer, that was all shot in the garden.  What is going on here?  Their slogan is “Everywhere at home.”  This reminds me of the classic formulations of kitsch consciousness, i.e., that everywhere kitsch-man goes, everywhere he looks, he seems himself.  Thus, he is never open to new, genuine, experience.  Do I believe this?  Ich bin ein kitschmensch!

Fashion advertisement, and in this case, a pretty high-end, classy example of it, trades on all sorts of moods, half-understood cultural allusions, snobbisms, innovations, cultural quotes, etc. to endow the product, the look, with a feeling, a cachet.  Moody, hip, sophisticated, mannered, mysterious, cultured, refined and esoteric, sooo European…These are a few of the things this catalog has to say about Schneider’s clothes.  And you know what?  I buy it, all of it!  I want that raincoat I saw in Century 21!!  I’m a pretty unremarkable dresser, and I don’t think my appearance turns any heads, but I look at other people’s looks a lot.  Sometimes I become fixated on a woman’s coat, a man’s shoes, a purse, a pair of glasses…okay, it’s probably 80/20 when it comes to the time I spend on women/men – it’s not just fashion that catches my eye.

I’ve never been able to figure out or come to terms with exactly what is going on here.  It feels dreadfully superficial, even childish or stupid in a way.  On the other hand, it feels totally human and natural.  Does there have to be a moral evaluation involved?

I told my wife once about an incident when I was twenty years old, and I saw a Panama hat in a window of a shop in Europe during my summer travels there.  The “vision” of that hat stayed with me for days.  On the long train ride, I imagined myself wearing it in all sorts of situations – how it would make me feel all sorts of ways just by being on my head.  (Hats – the mediator of the man-sky interface.) She rolled her eyes.  That’s one reason I married her.  She keeps me somewhat tethered to reality.

Bring on La Maniera. Hail to La dolce vita!

Kitsch Police

I just purchased this resin figurine of the mysterious bird-postman in The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Hieronymous Bosch.  It came very nicely packaged with minature folding reproduction of the complete triptych, inside and out! 

The Kitsch-mavens, e.g., Gillo Dorfles etc., say that all transposition of art from medium to medium is inherently kistch, or at least risks it mightily.  Mona Lisas on bath towels, Venus de Milos in plaster replicas with ashtrays, collectible procelaine minature versions of scenes from the Old Masters…all kitsch.

Ich bin ein kitschmench?  Is there anything inherently kitsch in my enjoyment of this tchotchke ?  I think not.  I study art history, and I like it! There is no confusion in my mind about the relationship of this figure to ART and the works of H. Bosch.  I just think it’s really cool!

Check out the others avaialble at Parastone.

Ich bin ein kitschmensch!

When I am old, I shall write criticism; that will console me, for I often choke with suppressed opinions.

-Gustave Flaubert in a letter to George Sand, 1868

I am a kitsch-man! Thirty years on, and it’s time to finally wrestle with the demon.  Sorry in advance, but those of you with an interest in kitsch are used to long-winded posts, I’m sure.

As an undergraduate, I wrote my thesis on “Kitsch in the Age of Mechanical Mass Production.”  My advisor loved it; my second reader said “I should just go and be angry,” and that it wasn’t enough of an art history thesis.  The chairman, following protocol when thesis reviewers disagreed strongly, knowing I was a refugee from the philosophy department, and trying to be helpful, gave it to the only philosopher in that coven of Anglo-American Empiricists who was interested in aesthetics, and he said it wasn’t enough of a philosophy thesis.  So much for inter-disciplinary thinking.  Well, I’m embarrassed to read it now anyway…

My interest in this topic was spurred by my encounter with the English version of this book by Gillo Dorfles while in high school.  It’s an anthology of materials on the topic of kitsch – I was fascinated to find that the stuff had a name!  I was particularly taken by the weighty Germanic metaphysical arguments of Herman Broch, especially when he posited kitsch as the anti-system to art.  I love rhetorical absolutes!  Seeing junk as part of an apocalyptic metaphysical wave, “vomiting over the entire world,” as one writer put it, I recall, appealed to my love of abstruse analytical reasoning and over-the-top ranting.  I adopted this point of view with gusto in my thesis, arguing that kitsch was not just a consequence of mass production society, but embodied its inner metaphysical principle.  Marx, Benjamin (obviously), Hegel, Adorno, Marcuse, Hauser, etc. etc…all grist for the mill.

At one point, I toyed with the idea of making the entire piece a philosophical meditation on the archetypal souvenir, the snow globe.  As Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man wrote…apropos of the falling snow…  Why do those things fascinate so?  The wonder of the miniature – a world in a world – a mini stage – the God-like perspective they confer on us – the urge to collect them?  What is it!

The dominant position on kitsch for much of the intelligentsia was for a long time Clement Greenburg’s essay, Kitsch and the Avant Garde.  He did soften his position against Academic Art in the end, but only a little.  (Academic art, art of the establishment against which the avant garde, e.g. the Impressionists, rebelled was often referred to as l’art pompier, or pompier art.  A pompier is a fireman, the late 19th century equivalent of our contemporary American Joe Sixpack, or the Hardhats of the 1970′s  I guess.)

Greenburg’s position is about as absolute as they come: He knows art, and so he knows what kitsch is. It’s the opposite of art.  Why did he get to decide on what is art?  Tom Wolfe asked the same question in The Painted Word written during the 70′s.  It’s a silly book, and Wolfe seems to think that whatever Greenburg wouldn’t have liked must be great art – a sort of anti-avant-gardism – so it really doesn’t clarify things.  Greenburg’s view leads to conceptualism in many ways, although he was foreshadowed by Marcel Duchamp who uttered the remark in the early 20th century that “retinal art” was on the way out.  (Was it he who said that the history of art was that of postage stamps?)

Sure, craft is important, I think, but that doesn’t mean that  someone who can draw well is a great artist anymore than a calligrapher is a great author.  Which leads me to my point, sort of…Why argue about what is ART and what isn’t?  Let’s just agree that art is what artists make, and artists are those whom society regards as makers of art.  Nicely circular – we’re not talking mathematics here.  The question to ask is, “Is this art interesting in any way?”  Thus, when I hear people in museums guffaw in front of stark white canvases and say, “This is art?” I think, “Yes, dear people, it is art, but it is very, very, boring art and I don’t blame you a bit for not wasting another second on it…”

Which leads us back to kitsch, which would never evoke that response.  It always seems to be art.  I would say, it is art, but not very good art.  Why seek to cast it from the select club of Art – is it insecurity about the membership of those things we secretly admire?  (This is what some call “guilty pleasures” , I think.)  The critics of mass-cult from the 50′s and 60′s, e.g. Dwight McDonald seem to be simultaneously elitist snobs, weak-kneed inhabitants of the citadel of culture under siege by barbarians, and fanatic partisans issuing a frantic call to arms.  To agree with them is to feel a member of a noble but doomed fighting band of brothers, bound to go down fighting the armies kitsch.

Of course, this sort of highfalutin criticism pertains only to work that is shown in fancy galleries and museums. Nobody seems to entertain much doubt about works like this  masterpiece on velvet.  We all love to sneer at them.  Of course, if your seven year old child said he or she wanted it in their room would you tell them, “No, no, dear, nice people don’t have such things on their walls!”  “But Daddy,  I LIKE it..! “  (Ah yes, “doesn’t know much about art, but knows what she likes”…Why is that taken as the acme of philistinism?  Isn’t the first step in appreciating art to know what you like?)  Another course would be to sigh and say yes, and hope that eventually the child’s tastes will develop and change.  And if they don’t, is there a moral stigma associated with it?  For avant-gardists, there is always.

This moralism in aesthetics of the anti-kitsch avant garde comes through in many ways.  Often it is deeply connected to sociological ideologies, such as the Marxist “false consciousness.”  How does one have false consciousness?  Isn’t one simply conscious…we hope?  One can be in error, but false consciousness implies a sort of drugged state of deception in which simple-minded people or superficially educated ones are lulled into averting their eyes from the nasty realities of economic exploitation by cultural manipulation.  There IS exploitation to be sure, but I’m not sure that people have a false consciousness about it as opposed to simply feeling that they can’t change it and therefore have no interest in the question…The highbrow avant-garde point of view is actually a variant on the eternal conspiracy theory mode of explanation, otherwise, of course, wouldn’t everyone just agree with us critics who see through it all?

And really, it’s hard for me to look at these classic pieces of kitsch and get all worked up about capitalist hegemony, culture of the dominant discourse, and the society of the spectacle.

I mean, it’s pretty harmless, and stupid at bottom, isn’t it?  And do we really care how people decorate their living rooms?  Must the personal always be political?  Maybe David Hume was right, taste is just a matter of experience and education.  We don’t have to pretend it doesn’t exist; we don’t have to surrender and say that everyone’s opinion is equal, but it is all relative in the end.  People who just don’t care about aesthetic sophistication just don’t care – let them like what they like and let’s not get snooty about it.  The world won’t end!

As for this sort of academic art,  this piece by the curator of the Dahesh museum in NYC quite nicely   punctures the pretensions of the oh-so-pure critics of academic kitsch.  The discourse of kitsch critics is filled with assertions that kitsch does not present “real ideas,” or “genuine sentiments,” and that it is false, sentimental, too easy, too eager to please, too dependent on consumerism or the market, etc.  These vague criticisms simply reveal the prejudices of the writers and just about all of them could be leveled against revered works of art in all or part.  We paint with a pretty broad brush when we take this approach.

With the wall between art and mass-culture reduced to rubble long before the Berlin Wall, some people took umbrage against the puritan intellectualism, the cult of art, preached by the Greenburg-ites and his crew at The Partisan Review. Susan Sontag is among them, and her Notes on Camp was one of the early salvos in the internecine culture war of the intellectuals.  She has been followed by the avalanche of material culture studies. Let me go on the record:  I dislike Sontag, and I think her Notes is a piece of self-indulgent drivel.  There, I said it.  I am a snob as well as a kitschman!

Having trouble figuring out what I really think?  This kitsch business opens up so many cans of worms!  Let state it simply:

• I believe we create rational hierarchies of values based on our ideas of value, but these hierarchies are relative.  If you reject my values, you reject my judgments.
• There is no way around this.  The problem of taste and value is, at bottom, one variant on the question, “What is knowledge.”  I do not believe that absolute definitions exist, but neither do I think astrology is as good as astronomy!
• The only way forward is to discuss, exchange ideas, argue, and test our ideas against one another’s.  To say, “Well, that’s just my taste,” is to end the discussion.  To assert that there is no way to build a bridge of common values between two differing critical systems.  Most of the time, this is just bunk.  On the other hand, in extreme cases, it may be just so.
• Cross-genre judgments are hazardous.  Arguing that Goya is brilliant while Batman is junk is just stupid.  The aesthetic arenas within which these two exist are different.  First try and agree on whether or not Goya is a good painter, and Batman is a good comic.  Then evaluate the aims of comics vs. Romantic painting.  You may find out that it is pointless to try and compare the two.
• Intellectuals and normal people should be open minded enough to enjoy “good” work from all sorts of genres.  Some call this “no-brow.”  To me it’s just the mark of an educated and liberal-minded person.

My rant is done…for now.

Art by the numbers…

Today, in the New York Times, there was an article about an economist who has reordered the canon of art history by using market statistics and counts of the appearance of works in standard texts.  After his quantitative ranking is done, what will know about art?  That is, will it deepen or alter our appreciation of the works?  I think not, though it may have some interest as cultural history.  As Arthur Danto pointed out succinctly,

“I don’t see the method as anything except circular. The frequency of an illustration doesn’t seem to me to really explain what makes an idea good.

“Somewhere along the line you’ve got to find answers to why it’s so interesting.”

If you’re interested in art, that is…

Unmentioned in this article, is the fact that it seems to reverse Marx’s comment on history playing out twice:  first as tragedy, then as farce.  This economist is engaging in a travesty of thought, a tragedy of …well, maybe it’s just farce all around, but the farce certainly came before him.  Has he not heard of Komar & Melamid?  These two tricksters did extensive polling – market research – to discover what art people want and then they gave it to them!  That’s art by the numbers!!