I
might as well state my position up front. I’m a philistine and if the
description, offered by several authorities on the subject, is true I am thick,
passive and bone idle. Ironically, the
Philistines were technological and culturally advanced peoples. Be that as it may it is also true that I have
been a theatre practitioner for over forty years posing for half those years as
an academic teaching theatre practice. I
find all talk about aesthetics a huge bore.
Philosophers who write about aesthetics have fashioned one great straw
house with 100 empty rooms and when you find out what it is they are actually
trying to say you wonder why on earth they even bothered. It is clearly evident that those who go to
art museums, buy art or make art do not waste their time reading the
pontifications of our aesthetic shepherds who read each other and spend their
academic lives trying to get their colleagues to salute their most recent
opinion and forget their past indulgence in sophistry. Few, if any of these prestigious elite, have
lived for their art as I have done for over forty years and few have had the
passion to make art and suffer the consequence of public failure or experience
the life-renewing satisfaction of success.
Few philosophers know art from the inside but these bishops of aesthetic
pleasure unsheathe their language skills and concoct a potion that both the
artist and the layperson find difficult to stomach. Do I protest too much? If so it is because I have spent 21 years in
academia researching the philosophy of aesthetics and have come away parroting Barnett
Newman’s reputed statement that aesthetics
is for the artist what ornithology is for the birds. This is as true for viewers of art as it is
for artists.
Now that I have that off my chest let us
consider Kitsch. Kitsch is probably the
most ubiquitous cultural artefact in existence.
Kitsch is everywhere, in our homes, at work, on telly, on the internet,
in our shops, in our parks, our airports, in our elevators, in our theatres and
hidden in our gardens. We humans covet
kitsch with a passion unrivalled by our desire for sex, fast food or fast
cars. Even the most sophisticated of
persons harbours a stash of kitsch stored well away from prying eyes. It engages us; we can’t do without it. Our sense of well-being is confirmed by our
indulging in kitsch.
Tomáš Kulka writing in Kitsch and Art[i] goes out of his way to
show that kitsch is aesthetically worthless.
He is somewhat snobbish about it at one point arguing:
Whether or not trash
novels or schmaltz music should be properly regarded as kitsch one thing is
clear: They belong to the same category
of things that have considerable mass appeal, but are considered by the art-educated
elite to be of no real value. In other
words I shall be concerned with those popular works that a large section of the
population considers art, but which are viewed by others as a mere substitute
for art. (76)
Kulka obviously
considers himself to be one of the art-educated elite and he sets out the
conditions for identifying Kitsch:
First
Kitsch must be highly emotionally charged.
1.
Kitsch items… “are charged with stock emotions that
spontaneously trigger an unreflective emotional response.”
A classic example would be a work such as
this painted on black velvet.
Another example would be this greeting
card.
Kulka
argues that “The aim of kitsch is not to create new needs or expectations, but
to satisfy existing ones.”(15)
“The deciphering of the picture must be as effortless as possible.”(19) which leads us to Kulka’s second condition:
2. The object or themes depicted by kitsch
are instantly and effortlessly identifiable.
Such as:
and
Kulka has one more
condition that must be satisfied before we can identify kitsch.
3.
Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the
depicted object or themes.
Such as:
And
Kulka holds:
Condition 1. restricts the range of themes
that can be profitably exploited by kitsch while conditions 2 and 3 pertain to
the stylistic properties’ manner of presentation. Each of the three conditions is considered to
be necessary: if our artist violates any of them he will not produce
kitsch. Taken jointly, they are
considered sufficient: the artist who fulfils them is most likely to produce
kitsch. (26)
Kulka wants us to believe that Kitsch is
not merely bad art, rather it is no art at all.
Of course in order for Kulka to hold this view he must have a theory as
to what constitutes art. He concedes
that some kitsch works may demonstrate a high degree of artistic competence
consequently he must turn to aesthetic concerns to produce an argument:
“As it is clear that typical kitsch
paintings cannot be disqualified on the grounds of technical incompetence, we
must look for more subtle signs of defectiveness. Since we want to demonstrate the aesthetic
deficiency of kitsch, we should first single out the aesthetic properties that
make works of art in general good art, then show that kitsch fails to exhibit
them to a sufficient degree.” (34)
So Kulka overlooks artistic properties in
favour of aesthetic ones. More to the
point for Kulka it is aesthetic properties that define a work as art and these
aesthetic properties must (after Beardsley) demonstrate ‘unity, complexity and intensity’.
So this work by Norman Rockwell fails the
complexity condition and does not qualify as art:
American readers of the Saturday Evening
Post will certainly recognize this image of Thanksgiving dinner at grand ma’s
so the first and second conditions are satisfied. While we may become sentimental remembering
our own Thanksgiving dinners, the painting does not particularly enrich us. Nevertheless it is unequivocally a work of art
however commonplace it may be. It is not bad art nor is it inept though it is
unquestionably kitsch in Kulka’s terms.
Of
course much art nouveau qualifies as kitsch.
Take a look:
And
what about Lorenzo Lotto’s 16th century painting of Venus and Cupid?
It is
not hard to recognize that Venus is being sprayed with Cupid’s urine as part of
a fertility ritual. As a humorous work
it satisfies all three of Kulka conditions.
It is
my contention that Kulka’s argument fails because he does not recognize that
aesthetic concerns are merely contingent to some works of art. We do not determine the value or identity of
a work to be art as a result of being able to apply aesthetic descriptions to
it. Works of art must satisfy artistic
criteria, not aesthetic criteria (I will show this in an upcoming post titled
‘The Concept of Art’). When discussing
the value of a work Michael Findlay[i] argues:
“What many people who spend a lot of time
looking at art do agree on is what separates a successful work of art from one
that may be merely interesting or typical.
Mastery of the medium, clarity of execution and authority of expression
are vital criteria applicable to all works of art.” Digital edition Location
860 of4365
These
criteria fulfilled need not demonstrate so-called aesthetic properties within a
work.
Launt
Thompson
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=Launt+Thompson&url=search-alias%3Daps&x=16&y=9
