Avant-Garde and Kitsch" in the 21st Century: Socialism, Modernism, Elitism

Undergraduate / Graduate

The course is a thoroughgoing study of American art critic Clement Greenberg's seminal "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Published in 1939, Greenberg's essay is not only a passionate defense of the superiority of so-called "formal," "elevated," or "highbrow" culture relative to the "rudimentary," "popular," or "lowbrow" forms abounding within modern industrial society; the text is also a subtle argument for what art is and why it matters, one indebted to a Marxist theory of history and grounded in a belief in the possibly imminent realization of global socialism. For Greenberg, it was not bourgeois elitism but popular entertainment that most gravely threatened humanity's full cultural flourishing-in short: socialism demanded modernism in the arts. But by his death in 1994, having earned a reputation as a conservative aesthete, Greenberg had long since abandoned his leftist commitments. Was this shift in Greenberg's political sensibility inevitable? How are socialism and modernism related historically? Is elitism in art necessarily incompatible with socialism in politics? These will be some of our core questions. Ultimately, the course is a quarter-length rumination on the contemporary relevance of the rather enigmatic final lines of Greenberg's famous essay: "Today we no longer look toward 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 now."