44
PARTISAN REVIEW
instincts that send the cultivated spectator. But the ultimate values
which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at
a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate
impression left by the plastic values. It is only then that the recog·
nizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter. They are not
immediately or externally present in Picasso's painting, but must
be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react suf·
ficiently to plastic qualities. They belong to the "reflected" effect.
In Repin, on the other hand, the "reflected" effect has already been
included in the picture, ready for the spectator's unreflective enjoy·
ment.
4
Where Picasso paints
cause,
Repin paints
effect.
Repin pre·
digests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides himwith
a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily
difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.
The same point can be made with respect to kitsch literature:
it provides vicarious experience for the insensitive with far greater
immediacy than serious fiction can hope to do. And Eddie Guest
and the
Indian Love Lyrics
are more poetic than T. S. Eliot and
Shakespeare.
III.
If
the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch, we now
see, imitates its effects. The neatness of this antithesis is more then
contrived; it corresponds to and defines the tremendous interval
that separates from each other two such simultaneous cultural
phenomena as the avant-garde and kitsch. This interval, too great
to be closed by all the infinite gradations of popularized "modem–
ism" and "modernistic" kitsch, corresponds in turn to a social
interval, a social interval that has always existed in formal culture
as elsewhere in civilized society, and whose two termini converge
and diverge in fixed relation to the increasing or decreasing stabil·
ity of the given society. There has always been on one side the
minority of the powerful-and therefore the cultivated-and on
the other the great mass of the exploited and poor-and therefore
the ignorant. Formal culture has always belonged to the first, while
the last have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary
culture, or kitsch.
In a stable society which functions well enough to hold in
solution the contradictions between its classes the cultural dichot-
