Living in an Andy Warholian World

By Wendy Jane Bantam

I am a deeply superficial person.
~Andy Warhol

I am always trying to create work that doesn’t make viewers feel they’re being spoken down to, so that they feel open to participate.
~Jeff Koons



2.
Andy Warhol once said, “Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist….making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” He also once said, “Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.” The art critic Clement Greenberg might have added to this statement by saying if one is an artist this is also like being sold into slavery.
In Clement Greenberg's opening statement from his article, The Avant-Garde and Kitsch, he states, "One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest- what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other?"
Inspired by Aristotle, Greenberg goes on to claim the "genesis" of the avant-garde artist is to "imitate...the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves." In so doing, the artist "turning his attention away from subject-matter or common experience...turns it in upon the medium of his own craft."
"Kitsch," Greenberg writes, "is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses...and established what is called universal literacy." He clarifies this later by stating, "The pre-condition for kitsch...is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition...It borrows from devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system and discards the rest."
From Greenberg's analysis he uses Aristotle to deduce, "if all art and literature are imitation, then what we have here is the imitation of imitating.” And,” the danger and downfall of true culture lies in the artists of the avant-garde succumbing to the pressure of the profit of kitsch." Greenberg believed socialism would help save the true artist from going the way of kitsch.
3.
This is the crux of the argument, as the intent of the artist is to communicate. And the other intent is to protect the ability to continue to make art. It is only natural for the artist to devise ways to communicate to their audience. Even for the avant-garde to communicate they did not want the adulation of the public was a message.
In our culture we are embroiled in mass communication. The manner in which people receive information now is through new media. If the artist Jeff Koons is, as Lisa Phillips writes in the article Art and Media Culture, "the hyper realization of the contradictions of our age".
What is Thomas Kincade? If Jeff Koons is to high art as Thomas Kinkade is to mass culture, what is the difference between the two? Jeff Koons has stated he believes in "advertisement and media completely." He goes on to say, "…my art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising. I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It’s a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics and that's taking place in the art gallery."
If avant-garde is to high art as kitsch is to mass culture, what makes it so? Thomas Kinkade, an artist who franchised his name and employs specialists to highlight prints of his paintings in Thomas Kinkade galleries around the country, is considered by art critics to be kitsch. In an interview from the New Yorker magazine he says, "The No.1 quote critics give me is 'Thom, your work is irrelevant.' Now, that's a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this micro culture, of modern art. But here's the point: My art is relevant because it's relevant to ten million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I'm relevant to real people."
Greenberg believed socialism would make everything equal and quench the temptation of the artist to make work that appealed to the mass culture. The artist might then be able to be true his art and not have to struggle. There is a core problem here, that artists are a conduit for culture. We do not live in a socialist country. Greenberg might have made strides to follow politics rather than be an art critic~ because he warns of the danger of the inevitable progression of the movement of art, rather than embracing it as a natural progression of the art in this society.
4.
Greenberg might have been a socialist, but he was also an elitist. Somehow the two perspectives don't blend. If he wanted socialism, he would have been for the people. And, in being for the people, he would be for an art of the people. Greenberg discussed the ruling class and implied high art is reserved for them. "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." I would ask Greenberg to notice that his perspective of artists is also exploitive, controlling, and limiting. Naturally there would come a day when the artists would go back to the streets~ the view from the top, where the ruling class resides with specialized and limiting views of what art can be, might have seemed isolating.
It is obvious Clement Greenberg believed he was the overseer to true art and felt it was his duty to protect high art and defend the ruling class who- in its limiting way supported the few pet artists they deemed worthy of their attention. Needless to say, they are also buying this work based on the value Greenberg placed on it. This, in a way, is no different from buying stock in Thomas Kinkade.
Greenberg writes, "Kitsch's enormous profits are a source of temptation in the avant-garde... ambitious writers and artists will modify their work and then those puzzling border-line cases appear....the net result is always to the detriment of true culture...."
Jeff Koons might be considered borderline. Maybe Andy Warhol, Kieth Haring, and Claus Oldenberg even. Surely Thomas Kinkade is not even considered border-line, but off the charts in the direction of Eddie Guest, the Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker magazine.
Greenberg gives an example of an "ignorant Russian peasant" doing a taste test of art like it was a test between Coca-cola and Pepsi, making a satire of the peasant’s ignorant life. The poor man, blindfolded by his own ignorance, does not truly after all know what good art is. He needs someone to educate him and Clement Greenberg steps in.
"Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin pre-digests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art."
5.
With the exclusivity of galleries, the elitism of museums, and the disdain the artists of the avant-garde showed an ignorant public by exhibiting work they weren’t meant to derive pleasure from, it seems only a natural by-product artists would have to revisit this approach and begin speak to the people through the people's medium. Television, advertising, video, bus stations, telephone poles, graffiti, mass production and disguise themselves through kitsch. Is it any wonder artists now bring the work to mass culture? Not merely "reformulating powerful messages of the media", as Lisa Phillips states, but a new method of survival.
If elitist thinking for so long treats the public as uneducated idiots, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor widens, there are fewer viewers to hear the voice of the new work. In reality, the poor are not always uneducated. In fact, many artists are poor. Artists see the public has an inability to access art. So what we see are artists, not succumbing to the lucrative kitsch model, but using the materials and philosophy their audience understands. Perhaps a simple statement defining the difference of high art to kitsch is this; it is a matter of having to think harder to get to the place where you are going.
For all his theorizing, Clement Greenberg contradicts himself and reveals a base truth when he once said, "I don't get into "becauses". When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go to the one I like most. If you start to say "because" you get into art jargon."
Perhaps this is also the base truth of the poor Russian peasant. And why is it so wrong? Greenberg writes condescendingly, "...it is lucky the peasant is protected from the products of American capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell." Greenberg has acknowledged this is what the peasant might have had access to. Artists such as Andy Warhol, the Guerilla Girls, Jeff Koons and Thomas Kinkade alike understood this, and most likely learned from Greenberg. For even if our country was a socialist country, there would still be good and bad art. This judgment is always contingent on the beholder.