"Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.” - Clement Greenberg

Reminder! Exam 2 must be submitted by 11:59 PM tonight!

Ed and Nancy Kienholz, The Portable War Memorial, 1968.

Greenberg

• Modern art was a means of resisting the leveling of culture produced by capitalism

• Distinction between high and low art/ culture

• kitsch = mass produced, low quality, consumer culture

• Modern art was like philosophy in that it explored conditions under which we experience and understand the world

• Urged artists to break with traditional dominance of subject matter and narrative

• Art should not simply illustrate experience

• Used the fear of communism in support of abstraction and formalism

Hitler touring the Degenerate Art Exhibition, Munich, 1937

Alfred Baar Jr. torpedo diagram

Alfred Baar Jr. on the founding principles of MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum

• Borrowing from Kant's argument on philosophy, Greenberg asserts "purification"

• The arts should remain autonomous

• Art forms should avoid "confusion" with each other as they are stronger when they do not mix

Kenneth Noland, Tide, 1958.

• Argued that the avant-garde had not broken with tradition.

• Rather, that painters were moving towards greater emphasis on the flatness of the picture plane.

• Dialogue on flatness moved their art away from the Old Masters

• Artists had previously seen the flatness of the picture plane as a hurdle to overcome in the attempt to depict three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface

• Content is the effect of the work on the viewer

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952.

• Traced interest in the flatness of the picture plane back to the Impressionists

• Considered the history of the avant-garde as a continuous stripping away of subject matter, illusion and pictorial space

• Favored dialogue on unique, formal qualities of paint

• Concept of "mainstream" as a strictly linear progression of art history

• Each new style builds on its predecessors

• Only one style exists at any given time

• Ignored all other styles

• Concept of "mainstream" as a strictly linear progression of art history

• Each new style builds on its predecessors

• Only one relevant style exists at any given time

• Ignored all other styles

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538.

Claes Oldenburg, Pie a la Mode, 1962.

Claes Oldenburg, Floor Cake, 1962.
4' 10" X 9' 6" X 4' 10".

Claes Oldenburg, Soft Dormeyer Mixer, 1965.

Claes Oldenburg in The Store

Claes Oldenburg with soft Ice Cream sculpture

a.k.a. California Funk movement

funk = bad smelling

Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Birthday, 1964.

Bob Arneson, Typewriter, 1965.

Bob Arneson, Doggie Bob (Self Portrait), 1982.

Robert Arneson, George Muscone, 1981.