AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH
41
are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.
Amagazine like the
New Yorker,
which is fundamentally high·
class kitsch for the luxury trade, converts and waters down a great
deal of avant-garde material for its own uses. Nor is every single
item of kitsch altogether worthless. Now and then it produces some–
thing of merit, something that has an authentic folk flavor; and
these accidental and isolated instances have fooled people who
should know better.
Kitsch's enormous profits are a source of temptation to the
avant-garde itself, and its members have not always resisted this
temptation. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their work
under the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely.
And then those puzzling border-line cases appear, such as the pop–
ular novelist, Simenon, in France, and Steinbeck in this country.
The net result is always to the detriment of true culture, in
any
case.
Kitsch has not been confined to the cities in which it was born,
but has flowed out over the countryside, wiping out folk culture.
Nor has it shown any regard for geographical and national-cultural
boundaries. Another mass product of Western industrialism, it has
gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing
native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is
now by way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal
culture ever beheld. Today the Chinaman, no less than the South
American Indian, the Hindu, no less than the Polynesian, have
come to prefer to the products of their native art magazine covers,
rotogravure sections .and calendar girls. How is this virulence of
kitsch, this irresistible attractiveness, to be explained? Naturally,
machine-made kitsch can undersell the native handmade article,
and the prestige of the West also helps, but why is kitsch a so much
more profitable export article than Rembrandt? One, after all, can
he
reproduced as cheaply as the other.
In his last article on the Soviet cinema in the
Partisan Review,
Dwight Macdonald points out that kitsch has in the last ten years
become the dominant culture in Soviet Russia. For this he blames
the political regime-not only for the fact that kitsch is the official
culture, but also that it is actually the dominant, most popular
culture; and he quotes the following from Kurt London's
The Seven
Soviet Arts:
". . .
the attitude of the masses both to the old and
