Avant-garde and kitsch are contrasting concepts of art. These two concepts prevailed in the art world during a trivial time in history for artist. During this time there was no single religion, tradition, or authority that flourished nor wouldn’t be questioned of validity. This made trying times for artists of this era because artists rely on these exact subjects to construct art appealing to a particular audience. For the first time in decades would the idea of what acceptable art was would be questioned.
The lack of unity in the artist’s audience left the artist with the strenuous task of creating an artifact that would be acceptable to his audience. With this newly discovered ambiguousness of culture, avant-garde surface. Avant-garde best illustrates this era of ambiguity because it is the search of a new original. Avant-garde is the practice of imitating the imitation; imitating the process by which techniques are formed rather than the technique itself. It is an attempt to illustrate the unconscious.
Avant-garde became known as abstract art. To the naked eye, abstract art, such as Jason Pollock’s “Number 31,” seems much less formed than the art people had considered as art for so many centuries. People see Pollock’s work as a shower of misplaced and splatted paint; ignorant to the infinite control Pollock had of his “splattered” paint. Pollock’s work wouldn’t be avant-garde if he did not use controlled methods to create his artifact. Avant-garde does not consist of accidental beauty but beauty in control of the incontrollable. The art must be true to itself; content must be true and whole.
Because the art demanded a different strategy for interpretation, the validity of it being a true form of art was questioned. However, to the trained and learned eye, interpretation and validity is found in this complex form of art. The only social class that has time to dedicate leisure time to training the eye to recognize tis concept of art is the bourgeois — laborers lacked leisure time. Therefore, avant-garde is associated with and funded by the bourgeois. Avant-garde continues to have obscurity in who its exact audience is because of its subjects’s abstraction and variety. Because of this it has problems being funded at times because even the middle-class has trouble identifying which is true avant-garde and what is fallacious.
Perfectly contrasting the concept of avant-garde is the concept of kitsch. Kitsch is associated with the proletariate (lower-class) and consequently urbanized — manufacturer workers lived in the city to be close to their jobs. Kitsch’s audience is distinguished from avant-garde’s audience. Kitsch’s audience consisted of people who weren’t intellectuals of art but thirsted for some sort of diversion that only culture could provide; a medium for a culture. Failure to recognize and understand the genuine culture kitsch became an academicized simulacra of genuine culture. This welcomed and cultivated insensibility to the origin of art — opposite of avant-garde.
Whereas avant-garde is the imitation of the imitating, kitsch s mechanical and operates by formulas.If avant-garde illustrates the unconscious, kitsch illustrates the conscious. It is effortless to understand kitsch because its subject matter is evident to all who see look at it. Artists such as Ilya Yefimovich Repin’s artifacts are concise in depth; they leave not room for personal interpretation or imagination — it doesn’t force oneself to think but to relate from experience of similar scenes. If avant-garde imitates the process of art, kitsch imitates the effect of art. If avant-garde is purposeful beauty, kitsch is accidental beauty.
Because kitsch’s audience is the general mass — the proletariat — governments used this concept as the staple of the culture to help control the masses. Though officials were naturally compelled to defend the validity and esteem of avant-garde, the sacrifice of losing the attention of the majority was subservient in significance.
Photo credits to:
nnc07, flickr.com “Number 31,” Jason Pollock
Tschäff, flickr.com “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581,” Repin
This is really cool, i didn’t know you were into art. Art to me is like a universal language because regardless of where you’re from and what language you speak, when you look at a piece of art it portrays a message that might be a little difficult to find but its always there. Im learning about art during the 16th and 17th century and what I found really cool is that during that time it represented what the people were going through. It was a message to the masses about a specific event or person during that time. Really cool stuff.