Andrew Hewkin, The French Kiss, 2015 [Online] Available from: http://andrewhewkin.com/index.php/2015-3/#group-10 [Accessed 06/08/18]
Alex Chernigin, Last day of summer, 2015 oil on canvas, 70 x 90 cm. [Online] Available from: http://alex-chernigin.ru/en/gallery/composition/ [Accessed 06/08/18]
Nikolay Blokhin, Eastern music [Online] Available from: http://nikolay-blokhin.com/eng/galleryeng/zhivopiseng/genreeng/ [Accessed 06/08/18]
Jack Vettriano Yesterday’s Dreams [Online] Available from: https://www.instagram.com/official_jack_vettriano/?ref=badge [Accessed 06/08/18]
In 2016 the first time I read Clement Greenberg’s work “Modernist paintings” and then “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”. Since this moment I do know what was irritating me so much in some artworks. I was so angry at my University in Moscow that they didn’t include (so to say they didn’t have any modern literature about the theory of art) this work in the educational plan. But later I realised that it is rather a problem with a whole political system in my Country. Nevertheless, my unconscious addiction by abstract expressionism got support in words of Greenberg.
As soon as I began to distinguish the birch from the spruce I started to suspected that in Russian art too many trees. In other words, why all respected artists tried to represent Russian melancholy with trees, is there really no different way to show this and why do we really need to compete with photography (why Russian art so academic)? But at that time I was too small to say that the Black square of Malevich inspires me more than painting by Shishkin. I recognized that trees in Russia objectively the most widely spread object but why every respected artist tries to imitate these trees? Copying them one to one? Now I can say that the culprit of such a forestry culture is a Kitsch.
Ivan Shishkin and Konstantin Savitsky 1889 Oil on canvas, Morning in a Pine Forest, 139 cm × 213 cm Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow [Online] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_in_a_Pine_Forest [Accessed 06/08/18]
Dictionary of Cambridge define Kitsch as showy art or cheap, decorative objects that are attractive to people who are thought to lack any appreciation of style or beauty
Oxford Dictionary: Kitsch – art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way.
Greenberg described in his essay several important features of the Kitsch:
1. “is vicarious experience and faked sensations.”
2. “changes according to style, but remains always the same.”
3. “is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.
4. “pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money.”
5. should be “close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition…”
6. “is academic”
7. mostly loved by the countryside
8. In Kitsch “there is no discontinuity between art and life”
9. “Result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values … has already been included in the picture, ready for the spectator’s unreflective enjoyment.”
So, to define if the above works are worth to be called the avant-garde works, we need to define how many of the Kitsch’s features we can find in them. I want you (reader) to be aware that this reasoning is subjective. I put a tick in front of each item for all the presented works.
And in order to double-check, if I was correct, I will list the opposite – features of avant-garde works:
1. “function of the avant-garde was… to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving”
2. “Art for art’s sake”
3. No “subject matter or content”, “abstract or nonobjective”
4. “imitating … the disciplines and processes of art”
5. Subject matter is in the very processes
6. Not academic
7. Popular in the cities
8. “the plastic values… are not immediately or externally present”.
The result is presented in the table below:
As we just learned we can’t just put food in someone else mouth. For sophisticated taste in art you need to first, to buy products (collect information about art), then cook it (analyze, discuss, etc.) and only after that you can start your dinner (enjoy the plastic values and open the effects of art).
Bibliography and references
1. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture critical essays, p. 3, 1961, Beacon press Boston
2. Dictionary Cambridge [Online] Available from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/kitsch [Accessed 06/08/18]
3. Oxford Dictionaries [Online] Available from: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/kitsch [Accessed 06/08/18]