Page 48 - Studio International - October 1970

Clement Greenberg Clement Greenberg's early essay, 'Avant Garde
and Kitsch', dated 1939, is an interesting study
and the idea of the avant garde in contradictions, which are perhaps most clearly

revealed in its last two sentences : 'Today we no
Andrew Higgens longer look forward to socialism for a new
culture—as inevitably as one will appear, once we
do have socialism. Today we look to socialism
simply for the preservation of whatever living
culture we have right now." Having claimed in
the previous sentence that in the question of
culture 'as in every other question today, it
becomes necessary to quote Marx word for
word' 2 it is surprising to find Greenberg looking
to socialism as a force for the conservation of
existing culture. As often in his writing, it seems
likely that this is because of a real confusion
about what culture means.
The starting-point of the essay asks how it is
possible for 'a single cultural tradition'3 to
produce both Fine Art and Kitsch. To find the
answer, broad descriptions of earlier and
contemporary culture are brought in, in which
`avant-garde' culture is singled out as a new
response to a recurring situation in the arts —the
situation that occurs when 'A society, as it
becomes less and less able, in the course of its
development, to justify the inevitability of its
particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions
upon which artists and writers must depend in
large part for communication with their
audiences'.4 In the past, Greenberg suggests,
this situation has led to academicism and fixed
forms 'in which the really important issues are
left untouched because they involve
controversy... all larger questions being decided
by the precedent of the old masters'.5 Avant-
garde art, by contrast, makes it possible to keep
culture moving rather than crystallizing into
static forms or developing mere virtuosity. He
describes avant-garde art as developing in
reaction against industralized society in the early
nineteenth century in concert with radical
political activity. However it soon retired from
the political and ideological struggle, and 'the
avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the
high level of his art by both narrowing and
raising it to the expression of an absolute in
which all relativities and contradictions would be
either resolved or beside the point ... subject-
matter or content becomes something to be
avoided like the plague.'6 However, 'The
nonrepresentational or "abstract", if it is to have
aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary or
accidental, but must stem from obedience to
some worthy constraint or original. This
constraint, once the world of common
extraverted experience has been renounced,
can only be found in the very processes or
disciplines by which art and literature have
already imitated the former. These themselves
become the subject matter of art and literature.'?
However this specializing process has estranged,
according to Greenberg, the traditionally
cultivated audience for Fine Art, the 'elite
among the ruling class' 8 which is now 'rapidly
shrinking'.9 This is leading to a situation in
which the 'survival in the near future of culture
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