AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH
39
responsible for the danger it finds itself in? Or is that only a dan–
gerous liability? Are there other, and perhaps more important,
factors involved?
II.
Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear–
guard. True enough-simultaneously with the entrance of the
avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the
industrial West: that thing to which the Germans give the wonder–
ful name of
Kitsch:
popular, commercial art and literature with
their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and
pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood
movies, etc., etc. For some reason this gigantic apparition has
always been taken for granted. It is time we looked into its whys
and where£ores.
Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urban–
ized the masses of Western Europe and America and established
what is called universal literacy.
Previous to this the only market for formal culture, as dis–
tinguished from folk culture, had been among those who in addi–
tion to being able to read and write could command the leisure and
comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivatioJ! of some
sort. This until then had been inextricably associated with literacy.
But with the introduction of universal literacy, the ability to read
and write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, and it no
longer served to distinguish an individual's cultural inclinations,
since it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes.
The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bour–
geois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they
did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of
the city's traditional culture. Losing; nevertheless, their taste for
the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and dis–
covering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new
urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a
kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of
the new market a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture,
kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine
culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture
of some sort can provide.
