![]() Painting, for example, would have to forego the three-dimensional sculptural illusionism that so easily lends itself to realistic imitation and “literary” narrative in kitsch art, and rather “stress the ineluctable flatness of the support that remained most fundamental in the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism” ( Greenberg 1960, p. To counter kitsch, the different disciplines of art would have to determine what qualities of form pertained to their field alone. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money-not even their time” ( Greenberg 1939, pp. He rails: kitsch “is vicarious experience and faked sensations … Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. He names examples of kitsch: “popular, commercial art and literature with their chromotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc.”. In his 1939 essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch” Clement Greenberg, who advanced the influential definition of avant-garde to which Kuspit subscribes, explains how the burgeoning mass culture in the 1930s dictated the necessity for an “avant-garde” art to come into being if art per se was to survive. ![]() Did he thereby pretend to be other than he was? No doubt, Pollock welcomed the attention given to his work, attention that promised then much-needed sales. What fueled it was a private spiritual quest for meaning. As I will show, public expectations had no great impact on the evolution of Pollock’s art. I disagree with Kuspit on two points: I disagree, not with his appropriation of Winnicott’s distinction, but with his construction of Pollock’s true self as “a true avant-garde believer” and with the claim that Pollock came to surrender his creativity to what the public expected or demanded, allowing his art to degenerate into kitsch. By permitting himself to become “a public ‘personality’” in the 8 August 1949 Life magazine article, “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”, Pollock invites, Kuspit suggests, the kitchification of his art that we witness in Beaton’s treatment of Autumn Rhythm. For Kuspit, Pollock’s true self is “a true avant-garde believer, a certified member of the cult of the avant-garde, the belief that being an outsider was the one and only true way of becoming creative and original”. To achieve success, the false self conforms with society: to gain access to a mass audience the artist pretends to be other than he or she is, the art thereby becoming kitsch. ![]() Following Donald Winnicott, Kuspit distinguishes between an artist’s “True Self” and his or her “False Self” ( Winnicott 1960).
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