Justin Chen
Phil. Modern Art
TA: Des Hogan

Kitschy Kitschy Ya Ya: Evil, or Just Poor Taste? (i)

In his essay entitled “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” Broch begins with a pointed disclaimer: “Do not expect any rigid and neat definitions” (49). (ii) He goes on to explain that the only way to answer all the questions that arise from a study of kitsch would be to publish a three-volume dissertation, “which I would rather not write anyway” (49). Broch’s hesitance to tackle his subject head-on is a good indication of the central problem inherent to a discussion of “postmodern art,” the avant-garde, and kitsch—that is, the difficulty of saying anything that is unqualified yet substantive on the subject.

Despite the difficulty of providing any hard and fast definitions of what exactly constitutes kitsch, however, it still seems valid to argue that the term “kitsch” can be used to define a particular body of art. After all, a certain scientific rigor is not necessary for the purposes of discussing the various movements and periods that make up the much more subjective and humanistic art world. To state that kitsch is the representation of evil in the value system of modern art is not to say that kitsch is always readily identifiable—if that were the case, there probably wouldn’t be so much of it around—but rather that certain works can be classified as belonging to the domain of kitsch rather than modern art, and those works represent a sort of evil. And indeed, I will attempt to prove that kitsch’s insistence on form and beauty above substance and transcendent purpose places it squarely in the realm of evil, in the sense that Heidegger’s totalitarian theories and the Nazi art that they supported can also be considered evil.

Of course, any invocation of such a heavy word as “evil” always already suggests the existence of its binary opposition, “good.” In Judeo-Christian terms, this is a simple matter to contend with: God is good, and enemies of God are evil. But as so many thinkers, from Nietzsche to Benn, have pointed out, this simple religious framework is no longer available to the modern world. “God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaims famously in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. “God remains dead. And we have killed him.” Without God, what “good” can possibly exist in the world? That is, what greater cause—implying something not present in objective reality—are we meant to strive for in our art?

Before discussing the modernist version of “God” and the way in which a transcendent deity has been supplanted in our current schema, it might be well to consider just what it means for something to be termed “evil art.” Certainly a distinction must be drawn between works that are “bad” or unskilled and those that are “evil.” Indeed, it seems that the term “evil” can only be applied to art of a more subversive, destructive nature.

One example of just such a concept might be the Nazi art decried by theorists such as Robert Jan van Pelt, who declared that Auschwitz represented the triumph of nihilism and a loss of trust in the world. Indeed, so strong was his (and others such as Theodore Adorno and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) reaction to the Nazi concentration camp that he also declared that the repetition of the Greek temple demanded by Heidegger was no longer possible—that indeed any world- or ideology-establishing architectural structure, such as the Greek temple or the Christian cathedral, must be rejected forevermore because of the abuses of Nazism. Adorno also declared, “Art is not possible after Auschwitz.”

Actually, it was precisely Heidegger’s theories of art that lent themselves so well to these sorts of hopeless conclusions expressed by post-World War II theorists. Heidegger’s belief in the value of an art that transports the viewer into another world contains a fundamental (though perhaps not immediately obvious) and insidious line of reasoning that elevates such world-establishing works almost to the status of deities—self-contained and unrelated to any transcendent feature that might seek to impose some sort of regulative hierarchy on the different worlds, or even relate them to one another in any substantial way. Unfortunately for Heidegger, the multitude of self-contained and independent interpretations of a work of art that results from his theory necessarily implies the very type of totalitarian art theory that van Pelt so vehemently rejects, for it uses art to dictate order without requiring any sort of justification other than inner coherence and perfection.

The totalizing nature of Nazi art as it relates to Heidegger’s world-establishing theory—and there were many Nazi projects that sought to fulfill just such a community-creating function—therefore seems to justify its being labeled “evil.” By advocating an art that creates insular worlds with no “windows”—i.e., no points of transcendence or access to any normative feature outside their particular spheres—Heidegger and Nazism demonstrated an appreciation for a totalitarian mold that bears a striking resemblance to what Karsten Harries refers to as the “house that science and rationality have built.” Indeed, Harries seems to believe that this structure, composed of planks made from inflexible scientific laws and nails of unbending empirical theory, is perhaps the greatest enemy facing modern art, or humanism in general, today.

Certainly the analogies between this sort of an imposing edifice of rationality and Heidegger’s theories of art are not difficult to arrive at—for just as the ever-voracious twin behemoths of science and technology have sought to expand into every aspect of the universe based on a particular paradigm and set of assumptions, so too does totalitarian art attempt to create a coherent whole based on a world-establishing art that can dictate every last feature of its attendant “community.” Art at some truer level represents in impulse away from this sort of theoretical arrogance.

Without God in the picture, however, one might well ask how meaningful it is to speak of some sort of “truer” level—can there be a normative claim to the existence of a “good” without the concept of a benevolent deity? In the search for a new God to fill the void left behind with Christianity’s death, a number of false idols have emerged—one of which was in fact Nazi art. But ultimately, as Harries put it, “The main task both the arts and the humanities face today is to open windows in the house objectifying reason has built: windows to transcendence.” Harries is quick to draw a distinction between aestheticizing art to cover up reality and the attempt to actually aestheticize reality, which he claims is far more dangerous, since the latter represents the project of Nazi art almost exactly—the attempt to apply an aesthetic that was fundamentally tied to the National Socialist’s political agenda to reality.

So in a sense, the terms of debate have been laid out, bearing in mind Broch’s disclaimer about the difficulty of defining anything very completely given the nature of modern art. The forces of good—those things for which artists ought to strive in the modern context—involve opening up windows in a world that is defined by one strict worldview, that of science and rationality, which itself can only boast a foundation made up of assumptions. After all, science is completely dependent upon the notion that empirically repeatable phenomena are governed by some law, but such a system requires just as great a leap of faith as religion or art do—Coleridge referred to it as a “willing suspension of disbelief” when speaking about poetry. While modern art is subject to these same concerns, however, its task is different. Rather than seeking to master nature, as science does, and as Harries insists is an infinite task, art instead tries to find ways of encountering reality without ever encompassing it. It is only when art overreaches its bounds, as in the case of Nazi art, that it becomes evil.

So now that we have established that good and evil can exist in art, we can get down to the fundamental question of whether kitsch is evil. Again, what is kitsch? In his essay, Broch works around this question a great deal without ever providing a solid definition—an oversight that he of course provides for with his opening disclaimer. Broch does state unequivocally that “Kitsch is certainly not ‘bad art’; it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art, or which, if you prefer, appears alongside it” (62). That is, kitsch is not defined by a low quality of execution, but by a certain suggestion of intent—a more consciously subversive quality to evil.

We come closer to the heart of the matter with Broch’s statement, “Here again it is a question of imitation, of religions of imitation, which therefore carry within them the seeds of evil” (63). He goes on to say that “kitsch is also a system of imitation. It can resemble the system of art in every detail…but the element of imitation is still bound to show through. The kitsch system requires its followers to ‘work beautifully,’ while the art system issues the ethical order: ‘Work well.’” (63). This is the proof that Broch needs to declare that “kitsch is the element of evil in the value system of art” (63). Here we have a more direct handling of the definition of kitsch—it is primarily identifiable by a quality of imitation. All of the kitschy artist’s efforts are expended on this process of mimicry, to the extent that his or her art is dominated by an attempt at beauty rather than quality—at superficiality rather than substance. Again, “The goddess of beauty in art is the goddess kitsch” (59).

How can we now relate these descriptions of kitsch to a value system of good and evil in the realm of art? Does kitsch’s slavish worship of beauty justify its comparison to the Nazi art of more than half a century ago? And just what is so bad about the worship of beauty, anyway? Some of these questions might be addressed by Broch’s claim that “art is made up of intuitions about reality, and is superior to kitsch solely thanks to these intuitions” (61). That is, whereas “true art” has some fundamental relation to reality, kitsch corresponds to a beauty that Harries describes as “a mask put over a reality that seems increasingly void of meaning.”

And here we seem to have finally found a way to relate kitsch to the concept of evil discussed above. Much as Heidegger’s theory lends itself to a totalitarian art system that celebrates isolation and paves the way for exactly the sort of insular world-creation that is decried by van Pelt, Adorno, and others, kitsch is a way of elevating beauty to the role of a false-deity—of furnishing all the required formal imitative components while providing none of the substance required of true art, art that is made up of “intuitions about reality” and which seeks to “work well.”

Broch defines kitsch’s evil nature by discussing its effects. “Into what type of work of art, or rather artifice, does kitsch try to transform human life?,” he asks. “The answer is simple: into a neurotic work of art, i.e. one which imposes a completely unreal convention on reality, thus imprisoning it in a false schema… The neurotic…does not notice that he is continually confusing aesthetic and ethical categories, and is obeying false commandments” (64). Here Broch again presents us with strongly religious overtones that tie the notion of kitsch back into the framework of good and evil. The “universal neurosis” (65) toward which Broch feels humankind is trending involves an “imprisoning” that is evocatively reminiscent of the inflexible edifice of science and rationality posited by Harries, or the confiningly independent worlds created by Heidegger’s theory of the work of art. If we are to believe that evil manifests itself in the attempt to imprison true art, which by its very nature so insistently resists any attempts to contain reality, then kitsch as Broch understands it truly does deserve that heavy appellation of evil in modern art’s value system.

More generally, kitsch’s reliance on forms, along with its insistence on beauty and imitation above all other artistic concerns, make it an evil worshipper of a false idol. While good art does not have to pander to reality or even really represent it in any way, it does contain certain “intuitions about reality” that kitsch lacks. Kitsch, then, represents an art which continues to worship the superficialities of art despite the death of God and which does not bother to search for any higher transcendent purpose. In so doing, it establishes its own edifice (perhaps that of beauty) and seeks to aestheticize reality itself—a task which, as we have seen, necessarily ends in failure. Rather than opening windows to transcendence and finding ways to circumvent the walls of objective reality, kitsch attempts to confine art in a different way, and this task must ultimately be termed evil.

Broch was right to begin by observing that hard and fast definitions do not exist when the subject of art is at hand. Indeed, after all the speculation that has gone on in this essay, it is still impossible to provide a list of symptoms that definitively identify kitsch. However, as I have tried to point out, while we cannot necessarily come up with a definition, it is still possible to observe kitsch’s project, and subsequently to argue that it represents evil in the value system of modern art. In his essay entitled “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg suggests that “kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with the ‘soul’ of the people” (123). There is in fact something disturbingly totalitarian about a system that rejects reality and embraces imitation and beauty as its gods—and it is that disturbingly isolating quality which stirs in us memories of Auschwitz and the possibility for evil to exist in art.

Word Count: 2,319.

i) Note on the title: This is a (slightly modified) line from a very successful pop song, “Lady Marmalade,” which was remade for the soundtrack of the 2001 movie Moulin Rouge and performed by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Missy Elliot, Mya, and Pink. The original line reads, “Gitchy Gitchy ya ya / Mocha choca latta / Creole Lady Marmalade.” To my mind, this song exemplifies kitsch—insofar as pop music erects certain ideals that stand in opposition to the goal of true musical art, which is to “open windows to transcendence.”

ii) Citations are in terms of the page numbers of the original text as represented in the course packet, since the packet didn’t include bibliographical information about the actual books or journals in which they were printed.