42
PARTISAN REVIEW
new art styles probably remains essentially dependent on the nature
of the education afforded them by their respective states." Mac·
donald goes on to say: "Why after all should ignorant peasants
prefer Repin (a leading exponent of Russian academic kitsch
in painting) to Picasso, whose abstract technique is at least as rele·
vant to their own primitive folk art as is the former's realistic
style? No, if the masses crowd into the Tretyakov (Moscow's
museum of contemporary Russian art: kitsch) it is largely because
they have been conditioned to shun 'formalism' and to admire
'socialist realism'."
In the first place it is not a question of a choice between
merely the old and merely the new, as London seems to think-but
of a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new.
The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch. In the
second place, neither in backward Russia nor in the advanced West
do the masses prefer kitsch simply because their governments con–
dition them towards it. Where state educatio.nal systems take the
trouble to mention art, we are told to respect the old masters, not
kitsch; and yet we go and hang Maxfield Parrish or his equivalent
on our walls, instead of Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Moreover,
as Macdonald himself points out, around 1925 when the Soviet
regime was encouraging avant-garde cinema, the Russian masses
continued to prefer Hollywood movies. No, "conditioning" does
not explain the potency of kitsch....
All values are human values, relative values, in art as well as
elsewhere. Yet there does seem to have been more or less of a gen-
, eral agreement among the cultivated of mankind over the ages as to
what is good art and what bad. Taste has varied, but not beyond
certain limits: contemporary connoisseurs agree with eighteenth
century Japanese that Hokusai was one of the greatest artists of his
time; we even agree with the ancient Egyptians that Third and
Fourth Dynasty art was the most worthy of being selected as their
paragon by those who came after. We may have come to prefer
Giotto to Raphael, but we still do not deny that Raphael was one of
the best painters of his
time.
There has been an agreement then,
and this agreement rests, I believe, on a fairly constant distinction
made between those values only to be found in art and the values
which can be found elsewhere. Kitsch, by virtue of rationalized
