AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH
49
industry corrode the very society under whose aegis they are made
possible. Here, as in every other question today, it becomes neces·
sary to quote Marx word for word. Today we no longer look
towards socialism for a new culture-as inevitably as one will
appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism
simply
for the preservation of whatever living culture we have
right uow.
NOTES
1
The
cxa1uvlc of UIU»ic,
which ha.!j lung Leeo
an
abttract
art,
and which avant·gardc
poclry
hu
tried
so much to emulate, ia interesting. Music, Ariatotle eaid curioualy enough,
h
the most
imituive
and
vivid of all the arts because
it
imitate• itt original-the alate of the eoul-with the greatest immediacy.
Today thia 1trikea
Ul
aa the exact oppoaite of the truth, becauee no art aeeme to ua to have lees refer·
eace to eomethlng outaide heel£ than muaic. However, atide from the fact that in a sense Aristotle may
ttill
he right,
it
must be explained that ancient Greek music
wu
closely auociated with poetry, and
depended upon ita character
u
an acce11ory to verse to make iu imitative meaninc clear. Plato, apealdo;:
of music, says: ..For when there are no worde, it ia very difficult to recocnize the meaning of the harmony
end rhythm, or to eee that any worthy object is imitated by them." As far as we know, all music origi·
Dally aerved tuch an acceuory function. Once, however, it was abandoned, music waa forced to withdraw
iDto itself to find a constraint or original. This it found in the various meana of ita own composition
nd performance.
1
1 owe this formulation to a remark made by Hans Hofmann,
tlu.~
art•tcacher, in one of his lectures.
from the point of view of this formulation surrealism in plastic art
is
a reactionary tendency which
i~
attempting to reetore uoutiidc., tubject matter. The chief concern of a painter like D3li is to
repie~cnt
the processes and concept• of hit consciousne!ll, not the processea of his medium.
1
See Valery'• remarks about his own poetry.
4
T. S. Eliot said tomething to the !atuc effect in nccountiu;; f,,r the shortcomingl:J of Eu,lish Roman–
tic poetry. Indeed the Romantics can be considered the original einuen whose guilt kitsch inherited.
They showed kitsch how. What does Keats write about mainly, if not the effect of poetry upon himself?
'It
will be objected that such art for th<>
manct aa folk art was developed under rudimentary condi–
tion• of production-and that a good deal of folk art
is
on a high level. Yes, it ie-but folk art
it
not
Athene, and it's Atbene whom l'l'e want: formal culture with its infinity of aspecta, its luxuriance, its
larre comprebenaion. Beeides, we are now told that mott of what we consider good in folk culture
h
the
1tatic aurvlval of dead formal, arietocratic, culture•. Our old English
ballad'~,
for instance, were not
created
by
the "folk," but by the poet·feudul equireuchy of the Englitth countryside, to survive in the
moutbe of the folk long after thoee for whom the ballade were composed had gone on to other forms
of literature.• . • Unfortunately, until the machine aa:e culture was the exclusive prerogative of a society
that lived by the labor of eerfs or
slave~.
They were the real aymbo)s of culture. For one man to spend
time and energy creating or lietening to poetry meant that another mao had to produce enough to keep
hirutelf alive and the former in comfort. In Africa toflay we find that the culture of slave-owning tribee
is 1enerally much superior to that of tl1e tribes
~·hich
posscss no slaves.
