DEAD CIVILIZATION
1 Culture, civilization, kitsch
First culture, then civilization, now kitsch. First myth, then poetry and prose, now cliché. At first tradition, next reason and imagination, now ingenuity and images. First the tribe, after that the state, last the borderless and atomizing market. A culture is soon crushed by a civilization, and a civilization is soon consumed by kitsch.
For primitive peoples life drums a rhythm, for the civilized it sounds a melody, but for us it makes mere noise. And all we want is to make it more and more raucous. We have declined through the ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron, and have at last reached the age of plastic, cheap, mass-made, characterless and toxic. ‘Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome.’
A culture is a whole form of life. But a civilization is precious for a few great works made by rare minds in which it concentrates its creative force. It is not a unified form of life. It is the sacrifice of life for the sake of the things that will outlast its own death.
2 Kitsch and the death of civilization
Civilization is extinct. It died out midway through the twentieth century. But its embalmed corpse is still laid out respectfully in museums and concert halls, or is gaudily rouged and lit up to amuse the crowd. ‘It is,’ as Connolly wrote, ‘closing time in the gardens of the west.’ There has been no great novel since Céline and Faulkner, no great poem since Yeats, nor painting since Matisse or Pollock, nor sculpture since Brancusi, nor building since Mies and Le Corbusier, nor science since Einstein and Heisenberg.
Civilization will prove to have been the most short-lived venture of the most short-lived species.
In five hundred years the americas have hurtled through all the phases of history. In old times there were the rich cultures of its first peoples. Then came the civilization which beat them down. And now we see the reign of the barren and mercenary kitsch which has hollowed it out.
We rip from native peoples their rich culture, and leave them with nothing but indigenous kitsch to assert their lost identity.
3 Waiting for the barbarians
Too little civilization, and art won’t germinate. Too much, and it goes to seed. Art is at length killed by the same conditions that give it nourishment. Emerson forewarned that our race would die of sophistication. And, as the Goncourts said, it needs a jolt of barbarism from time to time to bring it back to life. But now that global kitsch blankets the earth, where will the scythians come from, to reinvigorate it with their untamed sap and sinew? There are no more barbarians. We are all just avid consumers. ‘If mankind does not perish through passion,’ Nietzsche says, ‘it will perish through debility.’
4 The death of the soul
We are gilded flies which buzz and blow on the offal of a necrotic culture. How cheerfully we live on, having killed the things of the spirit. ‘Is it with such insects as this,’ Cioran asked, ‘that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end?’ Twelve thousand years of patient cultural ripening will soon be sucked dry by twelve billion frantic parasites. Yet when we have emptied it of its own beauty, and crammed it with our own ugliness, it will seem to us more lovely than ever. So when the human race soon wipes itself out, it will be finishing off a body which long ago lost its soul. The twentieth century made an end of culture. And the twenty-first will make an end of nature.
5 Kitsch is degenerating
We are past the stage of the conquest of art by kitsch. Now kitsch itself is degenerating. Year by year what is cheaper, brassier, more crass, boorish, seductive and juvenile drives out what had been a bit less so. We are a long way beyond the age of mere decadence.
Each year kitsch lowers its standards and broadens its appeal. It began by imitating art. Now it imitates itself. Having begun in the academy, it soon moved into advertising. It started as a technical expertise. Now it is no more than the slick tricks that fool the crowd.
A new movement in art used to be a rigorous exploration of the possibilities of a medium. But a new form of kitsch is just a cheap exploitation of its commercial opportunities.
The world got rid of art, not by making it hard, but by making it so easy. It has never been easier for anyone to be an artist, now that it is beyond anyone to make real art. And though we don’t so much as know what art is, each one of us, we are told, is a born artist.
Now that there is no such thing as bad art, there is no real art at all.
Bestsellers are not what they used to be, now that all we read is bestsellers. They are written for adolescents or for those whose taste was formed in adolescence.
6 We take in everything as kitsch
Kitsch is the aesthetic of juvenile consumer capitalism. It is the mode both of all that it makes and of how it takes in all that it meets with. People have ceased to touch the world save through a greasy synthetic gauze. Even if what they experience is not kitsch, their experience of it is. But how could they discern that this is what it is? Not only is kitsch all that they see, it is the eyes that they use to look at it all. Their viewing turns art itself into kitsch.
Kitsch is not a style of art. It is the one style in which everything comes to us now that art is dead.
Kitsch began as a backward style of art. Now art is no more than a backward form of kitsch.
Kitsch, which promiscuously makes use of all styles, is now the one style that all of us embrace.
7 The idols of kitsch
Kitsch is an imitation of an imitation. Every place on earth has now been imaged so many times, that it has waned to a hollow image of what it once so gloriously was.
We have emptied the world of real imagination, and clotted it with hyperreal images. The saturation of likenesses has bleached both life and art, which are too thin and pale to match the bright spectres projected by our devices. And these have devoured our dreams and memories, desires and vision.
Mass society has turned art to a sham and the virginal earth to a wilderness of death. Good riddance to nature and to art. They had nothing in them to amuse us. We will swap the earth and our dear-bought civilization to grab one hour more of mindless fun.
The world is now full to the brim with kitsch, as the seas will soon be overflowing with glutinous blobs of fluorescent jellyfish. The superb predators, which once awed the forest and savannah, will soon live on as trademarks to sell luxury junk.
CAPITALISM’S STYLE
8 The aesthetic of capitalism
In all systems the economic base helps to shape the cultural superstructure. But in capitalism it swallows it whole and spews out kitsch. Every aspect of life is now culture, because culture serves the needs of capital. And where culture colours all sides of life, it’s clear that it must be dead. It is the gloss that makes all commodities shine.
Kitsch is the artificial style best adapted to profit from our innately bad taste.
Kitsch, like the capitalism that spawned it, is indestructible, since it can stay what it is while incorporating the most irreconcilable tendencies, rural nostalgia or citified chic, the sincere and the inauthentic, the morbid or the manic, pretty or punk, levity or schmaltz, the homespun or the exotic, the folksy or the bombastic. And what can’t be killed is sure to eat up all that is too good for it and more frail.
Capitalism and kitsch have reduced the world to a factory and a funhouse.
Art was a vocation. Kitsch is big business.
The function of kitsch is to stimulate demand for all the products of capitalism.
9 Consumer kitsch
An age can make nothing but kitsch, when consumers and not creators set its taste. And in art the consumer is always wrong.
Art gave us nothing that we wanted. Kitsch gives us all that we crave so as to goad us to keep on craving.
We have lost the capacity to create. All we can do is consume. And what we consume are the second-hand copies of second-rate originals.
We run mad with our frenzy of consumption, and we feel that we are inspired by the fire of creation. All that we now have the strength for is a pacified levelling sterility or the huckster’s frantic hurry, which buys and sells but can’t create.
An age of decline is marked not by exhaustion and stagnation but by manic activity and innovation.
A piece of kitsch tells us far more about the society that made it than a work of art, since it springs straight from its economic base. The spirit of the age shows up more in its advertisements than in its art. And foreign countries are now known more by their consumer brands than by their culture, which is marketed as one of their deluxe consumer brands.
These days it’s not beauty but advertisements that are the promise of happiness.
10 The memory of money
Money has no memory, and leaves none. It is the solvent of time. It scorns the past as a dead force which would trammel its desires. And since it has no stake in the future, it feels no remorse for the rich heritage that it’s squandering. Why should it mind if the game will be broken up the minute it has raked its own winnings off the table? And why would it care to bequeath a slow and exacting work to live on in our remembrance? Our world and its predatory scheming will soon be consigned to the oblivion which is all that it deserves. The world that we hand on will prove how much we craved and how little we mattered. What we leave for our heirs will be not a lavish civilization but a meagre economy.
How could capitalism make anything that lasts, when it puts no value on work that is not for immediate gain?
Greed is the voracious now labouring to fill the future with its sieve of gold.
11 The solvent of civilization
Money acts like an Archimedes lever, which has wrenched the world from its rightful station. And nothing now could put it back in its proper place.
When we are rich enough to get all that we want, we will grow used to choosing the worst that is on offer.
Money cheapens everything. And now we have so much money, it all gets cheaper by the day.
Our age has left off aspiring to the best. And so all we can do is try to grab hold of the most. And thus we will soon hack our way to the worst. ‘It will rob and plunder and accumulate into one place,’ as Blake says, ‘but not make.’
For art and thought to thrive, there must be a vertical discontinuity of class and a temporal continuity of tradition. But capital has dissolved class distinctions, and severed the ties that join one age to its past and to the next.
Capitalism has an accelerator but no steering-wheel. It keeps us zooming so fast, that we can’t change our course. And if it were forced to put on the brake, it would crash.
Why strive to make a thing that might last for the ages, when this world won’t last more than a century or two?
12 The suburbs eat the city
Civilization was born in the city, and has died in the suburbs.
Kitsch is the style of suburban happiness.
Most architecture is kitsch. It can’t copy nature, and so it naturally copies its own past. Most of the old world is not old enough, and most of the new world is not new enough. The old world imitates an older world, and the young world imitates these imitations and its own facsimiles of them. London or Paris are copies of old cities. And New York or Shanghai are copies of modern ones or of themselves.
The cities that were once the cultural capitals of the world have shrunk to be the centres of kitsch, finance, fashion and advertising.
13 Global kitsch
In the world market all styles are available for use, and all are mutations of kitsch.
Art never grew to be universal or even cosmopolitan. But kitsch has fanned out all round the globe. It has turned out to be the one worldwide style.
Art takes no thought for the details of time and place. But kitsch is at once topical and eclectic, localized and globalized.
We aren’t stay-at-home bumpkins anymore. Now we are all cosmopolitan philistines, globe-trotting suburban provincials.
We are proud to be provincial replicas of spectral junk made in Los Angeles.
America took its place as the cultural capital of the world when its brand of capitalism ate up culture.
Our hunger for travelling to exotic spots will soon make all of them identical. Each place will soon look the same as all the rest, and nothing like itself.
In the past there was temporal continuity from age to age, but diversity from one place to the next. Now there has been a total rupture from all previous epochs, but a homogenization of locales.
14 Kitsch high and low
High and low culture are now just various grades of kitsch.
These days in order to make the rich works of the past palatable, we have to cheapen and vulgarize them so much, that they are not worth preserving. One of the chief tasks of galleries, orchestras and theatres is to give us permission to enjoy art as if it were kitsch, and to revere kitsch as if it were art. We praise as benefactors those who drag down the high standards that have been set up in any field.
People like going to look at art more than the art itself.
High culture has ceased to spurn low culture. It now apes its winning ways to cadge some of its leavings.
15 Kitsch and class
The elite used to prefer bad art to good. Now, like the rest of the public, it prefers kitsch to any art at all.
In the past a few in the upper class aspired to the love of art, which none in the lower class had means to know. Now all alike love only kitsch, whether they call it art or entertainment.
You can now tell the taste of one stratum of society from the next by how dear they pay for their kitsch. All that most of us aspire to is a more select class of it, be it the hushed urbanity of the boutique, or the flashy tat of the mall. When it costs a lot, we call it stylishness and elegance.
When all are rich enough to get as much beauty as they want, even the elite will have a taste for nothing but kitsch.
16 Cool, elegance, sublimity
Real cool used to be the style of demotic nobility. But teenage kitsch now takes the place of cool, as middle-aged kitsch takes the place of elegance. Pop songs epitomize the tawdry dreams of adolescence. They are knowing but callow, up-to-date but outworn, frothy, arousing, disposable, faddish, immediately desirable and narcissistic.
Elegance is kitsch in a lounge suit. Cool is kitsch in a tee-shirt.
Fashion keeps such a hold over us because our tastes are so pliant and our vanity is so constant.
Young people confuse style with the latest vogue. And old people confuse style with the vogue that held sway when they were young.
The sublime is now just the high style of kitsch. It’s a sham which moves us far more than the real thing.
We never had eyes to see the true sublime of nature. But from now on a perverted version of it will be on show everywhere in the colossal and terrible chaos wrought by our control of it.
The most inspiriting orators, such as Lincoln, Kennedy or King, dealt from a thin pack of majestic and vacuous platitudes. And a piece of oratory can now soar only by cadging a few gaudy feathers from the great speechmakers of the past.
Sober and prosaic America, as Tocqueville showed, is drunk on its own grandiloquence and tears. Its writers, though wedded to the colloquial, still lust for the sublime.
17 Kitsch and technology
Civilization added technology to culture. And we have now subtracted civilization from technology. Our appliances have electrocuted the muses. ‘The machine,’ as Rilke wrote, ‘is a threat to all achievement.’ Our doltish fantasies and smart devices have devoured imagination. As civilization’s sun goes down, an imbecile neon twinkle fills our sky with its dazzle. And in our wondrous age of kitsch there will be no end of dazzlement, but a dearth of real wonder.
We have lit up the wasteland of western culture, and packed it with shows, games, attractions and amusements, and opened it to all comers.
We love the lucrative magic of technology but not the hard truths of science. And we wallow in the sickly sentiments of kitsch, but we spurn the exacting formality of art.
It used to be our ethereal creeds that distanced us from the real world. Now it’s our mundane devices.
We laud as civilization the mass affluence which has drowned it. ‘The telephone is his test of civilization,’ Wilde wrote of the middle-class philistine, ‘and his wildest dreams of utopia do not rise beyond elevated railways and electric bells.’
We are not all artists, in spite of what maudlin people say. But our devices make each of us a curator of kitsch.
18 Political kitsch
The public realm has always been theatrics. But each age fears that it is uniquely stagy, because it is irked by the tawdriness of its own histrionic style. Each kind of regime has prinked up its own style of prancing kitsch. Fascism made it colossal and belligerent, absolute kingship triumphal and ostentatious, and democracy syrupy and snivelling.
Flags are patriotic kitsch. They are hoisted everywhere when the old conception of a country has been pulled down, while anthems sound a rousing requiem over its bones. We bow down to the empty symbol even as we do dirt on what it stands for.
Fallen states used to be survived by the art that they made. Now they are survived by their kitsch.
Revolutionary movements borrow the style of their kitsch from the capitalism that they aim to bring down. And when they fizzle out, that’s all the glow they leave behind.
19 The style of democracy
Democracy, which we hail as the zenith of civilization, has marked its demise. Our unstoppable material and moral progress has put a stand to it. An age that is sure it’s progressing can turn out nothing but kitsch.
The modern state hands over the things that are most worth caring about to those who don’t care about them.
Civilization was for the few and for the long age. Kitsch, like democracy, is for the many and the jittering now. No wonder there is so much money to be made from it.
Where art is for all, there will be no more art, and kitsch will take its place. Art isn’t even for the few. It is for a few of the few.
Civilization was the oppression of the many by the few. And as soon as the many won their rights, it was goodnight to civilization. And what has followed it is the oppression of the earth by all of us, and we won’t loose our stranglehold on it till we have killed it and ourselves.
Art daunts us with its cold demanding dullness. Kitsch indulges us with a cosy democratic largesse.
Kitsch is the sole contribution that democracy has made to culture.
20 Conservative kitsch
Conservatism is now mere kitsch. It purports to preserve the inheritance of the past in a society which has sloughed off all its old forms.
A country that has turned its back on its traditions is obliged to stage a constant round of noisy commemorative extravaganzas, with brass bands, bunting, tolling bells and tear-jerking orations.
It’s no longer the case that things happen twice, first as tragedy and then as farce. They are farce the first time they take place, and this is then repeated in ever more coarse and gaudy forms.
Our atavisms are not a recrudescence of age-old tribal lore. They are the prejudices that were current a decade or two ago, brought back to life and spread by the most up-to-date devices.
21 Hunger for stories
We love stories. We want them to whisk us from one episode to the next with no need to think, expecting to be surprised by some new twist. And we want to live in the same way.
We delight in anecdotes, but we have lost the relish for art.
All of us love stories, but few of us care for literature. We are all spellbound by images, but few care for paintings. And all of us love a tune, but few have an ear for real music.
These days we consume the whole world through story, and stories urge us on to keep consuming. If you want to spruik anything, you have to package it as a narrative. Bourgeois individualism fills the world with billions of proliferating stories of progress, personal growth, obstacles overcome, and final triumph.
22 Performance
Every work now is made to be staged as a performance. And every performance must spark its instantaneous effect.
Kitsch turns each event into a facetious or poignant story to be performed for mass amusement.
Performers are doted on now that art has ceased to be made. There are no more great playwrights, composers or painters. So we lionize entertainers, mimics, piano-players, divas, crooners, fiddlers, baton-twiddlers, directors, conservators and impresarios as if they were creators.
Celebrity is a plastic fame, inane, broadcast, lucrative and anecdotal. It is the triumph of the life over the work, of media over art, of the mass over the elite, of personality over character, of publicity over privacy, of vulgarity over tact, and of commerce over creativity. Stardom is a kind of conspicuous insignificance.
EFFECTS OF KITSCH
23 The immediacy of kitsch
Art is too strange for us to see, kitsch meets with instant recognition. ‘We fail to grasp at once truly rare works of art,’ as Proust points out. People spot and fall in love with the blatant charms of kitsch straight off. But it takes time to make out the rigorous beauty of a work of art. And then they are as apt to resent it as they are to revere it.
Art is for the long ages, kitsch is for the crowded now. ‘Farewell, you infinitely slow works,’ as Valéry said in his adieu to the past.
The art that appeals to us at once must be kitsch. We love what we can grasp or what grips us at first sight. Art must run in the channels of form to reach imagination. Kitsch keeps to the smooth paths of fashion to go straight to our hearts.
Kitsch is as instant as life. Art is patient as the grave.
As Valéry remarked, all the world reads what all the world could write. We have Shakespeare, and we just scroll through newspapers. But we’ll make do with gold if we have to, when we can’t get our hands on dross. We have ceased to write holy books, but we churn out magazines and blogs.
24 Kitsch is on the side of life
Kitsch is on the side of life. Art, like truth, is on its own side. And life is always on the side of bad taste. How else could it feel so at home in this world? Art may be affirmative, as Nietzsche claimed, but what it affirms is not life but art.
All the stimulants of kitsch exist for the sake of life. And yet kitsch has reduced life to simulation, fantasy and sham.
If you want to learn about art, you have to seek out works of art to teach you. But all the world is a school of kitsch in which each of us learns to mimic its cheap tricks.
We used to need art so that we might not perish from the truth, as Nietzsche said. But now that we are immune to truth, all we need is kitsch.
In kitsch story trumps thought, emotion trumps imagination, sentiment trumps form, personality trumps tradition, sincerity trumps honesty, fantasy trumps reality, and reality trumps truth.
25 Kitsch makes it whole
Art and irony disintegrate the personality, kitsch and good faith make it whole. Kitsch is sincere, art is self-aware.
Kitsch connects us to each other and binds us as one. Art leaves us on our own.
Kitsch is coherent, art is at odds with itself, with its maker, and with the world. Art is dissonance, kitsch is harmony. When artists try to make it whole, they make it kitsch, as Eliot did in Four Quartets.
26 Kitsch fills the heart
Kitsch is so congenial to us, because it works on the same lines as our unconscious.
Art wells up from the depths of hell. Kitsch springs straight from the soul, which craves crass fun and thrills, but can flourish with no help from truth or beauty. When the heart was freed to ask for what it yearned for, kitsch was born. ‘All bad poetry,’ Wilde wrote, ‘springs from genuine feeling.’ The inmost stirrings of the heart speak in the honeyed kitsch of cheap religion, cheap amusement or cheap romance.
Kitsch is feeling and sincerity, art is form and artifice.
The songs that heal our hearts are sure to be treacly, and the truths that warm them are sure to be lies.
By long cultivation we may learn to see the worth of what is real and great. But by some natural affinity we still choose what is saccharine, confected, phony, garish, slick and impermanent.
Kitsch is the froth and effervescence of humanity drunk on its own power and fine intentions.
27 We love kitsch and are indifferent to art
Art was a luxury, kitsch is a necessity. Kitsch is irresistible and indispensable. But art is unwanted and superfluous. Kitsch gives you what you think you want. Art gives you what it thinks you need.
Art is excessive. Kitsch is economical. It is necessary. It expends the least effort for the most return, rousing the most intense effects by the least exercise of skill. And it functions as part of the system of consumerism.
Art doesn’t care for us, and we don’t care for it. But we are so pleased with kitsch, because it makes us so pleased with ourselves. In spite of what Rilke wrote, the archaic torso of Apollo says nothing to us, and doesn’t give a damn whether or not we change our life. That’s why it is worth our reverence.
Most people now would be bored and sickened to be served up anything but kitsch.
28 Art against pleasure
Kitsch yields us far more pleasure than art. Our famished hearts, which would be wearied by a poem, lap up the syrup of a pop lyric, and are moved to unseal their deepest moods in crude and trite scribblings. They brim with stale images, jellied sentimentalism and panting phantasms. So how could they be touched by anything but kitsch? Like Madame Bovary, we swoon at sensations more than art, from which we have to squeeze some use of our own. We welcome only those works that thrill us or amuse us or tell us how fine we are.
29 Kitsch is vivid, art is cold
Art exists to make objects of the mind. Kitsch exists to rouse subjective feelings.
Art is cold and affectless. But kitsch is eager to please.
How bland and unaffecting a piece of art looks, when set alongside the blare and sensationalism of kitsch.
Kitsch fills each minute of our lives and lights up all four corners of the earth, as art and religion never did.
We now taste life in so many artificial flavours, that if we were to come across a thing in its natural form, it would seem to us as bland and unpalatable as cardboard.
Art to most people seemed like a dim shadow of life. Kitsch is brighter, more iridescent and more glamorous than life.
All we desired from art was that it should adorn and flatter life. And now we have found that kitsch does this far more lavishly and cheaply.
Cultural life has never seemed more vibrant as now when we make nothing but moribund kitsch.
30 Kitsch the enemy of form
Kitsch is naive in its form, but calculating in its effects. We take in art half-heartedly, but flock to kitsch in fads and crazes.
Kitsch has no deep form, and so it is free to fashion a sleek surface.
Kitsch is emotionally callow but technically sophisticated. Why else would it be such a perfect fit for us?
Our greed for sensations is far greater than our taste for form.
Kitsch is formula without form, sentimentality empty of real feeling, and images void of imagination.
Confusion of forms is one of the corruptions of kitsch. To overlay one art with the features that belong to another may add to its effects, but it corrodes its integrity. So why do people fete one form of art for doing imperfectly what some other does so much better? Why praise a book for appearing cinematic, or a statue because it seems to move, or a building as if it were readable, or prose for being poetical, or a tune as if it could recount a tale? ‘The attempt to stir astonishment by means that form no part of the art in question,’ Baudelaire said, ‘is the great resource of those who are not born artists.’
Some artists turn out the slick kitsch of another’s style, as Cocteau did Picasso’s. And some, such as Hemingway or T. S. Eliot, end by turning out the smug kitsch of their own.
31 Art against beauty
Kitsch makes things that are alluring and familiar as representations but repulsive as art. Modern artists made things that are brutal and unfaithful as representations but beautiful as art. In the same way modern scientists have uncovered a world of bewildering asymmetry and uncertainty. But they have charted it in simple, precise and beautiful formulas.
Picturesque scenes catch the eye of bad painters, as poetic emotions win the hearts of bad poets. ‘One never paints a portrait of the Parthenon,’ as Picasso said. ‘One makes paintings with a village of the midi or an old chair.’
Artists are now loath to go to bed with beauty, for fear that they’ll wake up with kitsch.
The real enemy of art is not ugliness but banality, as the real enemy of truth is not ignorance but conviction and common sense.
In merely good paintings, such as Renoir’s, you have to squint to see the art for the prettiness. And in a figurative painting you have to look hard to discern the deep form behind the trite content. The content of a picture is the idol which we adore. Its form is the god which we cannot see. Artists may open our eyes to the form either by making the content nondescript, as Cézanne did, or by making it ugly, as Picasso or de Kooning did, or by dissolving it in abstraction.
Rainbows and sunsets are tokens of God’s lack of taste.
32 The ugliness of beauty
Kitsch is not ugliness but a sad aspiration to beauty. And the world is in love with kitsch, since it tells the world how lovely it is. We colour the grey vapidity of life with the glamorous vapidity of its depictions. Industry has made the world so hideous by overstuffing it with functional things, that we try to beautify our lives by ornamenting them with fancy trash. How ugly we make the world by seeking to overlay our cheap squalor with a more squalid opulence. And if, as Lawrence says, ‘the human soul needs beauty more than bread,’ why have we made the world and our own souls so ugly, just to cram ourselves with more bread?
People who lead such ugly lives hope to prove how beautiful they are by consuming the most costly delicacies. But all they do is make themselves even uglier.
33 The audience of kitsch
The audience corrupts everything. It clamours to be fed pap and then to be flattered for its fine taste. And it bows down to those who know how to court it most cloyingly. And the most corrupt audience of all may well be our own self.
A work of art is shaped by the formal demands of its medium, a piece of kitsch meets the crowd’s demand to be amused.
A crowd might be a good judge of what is served up to it. But where the crowd is judge, all that is served up to it will be dreck.
Preachers are more liable to be corrupted by the crowd than the crowd is to be saved by them.
Each age has its own style of spectating as well as of creating. And the style of this age is at once hysterically fawning and yet mawkishly self-flattering. We learn at second-hand how to respond to a performance from the sort of responses that we have seen others make. The crowd must be trained how to clap, yell, whoop and whistle on cue.
Those who aim to affect others must first act as their own audience. So stirred are they by their own playing that they form a persuasive model for their real audience to copy. They intoxicate it by their own self-intoxication.
An audience is electrified more by its own applause than by the skill of the performance. The roar of its own ovation bears it aloft.
NOVELTY AND NOSTALGIA
34 The modernist rearguard
After the rigorous experiments of modern art, kitsch has restored story to literature, figuration to painting, tonality to music, and reference to architecture. Is it any wonder then that the mass of people love kitsch and don’t care for what is modern?
Art has at all times run more swiftly than beauty, as Cocteau said. But in the twentieth century it had to speed up so much to keep in the fore of kitsch, that it came to look graceless and unshapely. It is now kitsch that sets the pace of beauty.
Kitsch is candied romanticism. It is a confection made to please the sweet tooth of the masses.
The victorian age was the vanguard of encroaching kitsch. And modern art was a doomed rearguard campaign against it. It was not a crisis of representation. It was a last efflorescence of autonomous imagination, before consumerism turned the whole world to kitsch. But present day artists are in league with kitsch, and it pays them well for their collaboration.
It’s no marvel so many of the great modernists were reactionaries in politics, as modern art was an aesthetic reaction against the progress of kitsch. It was kitsch that was the avant-garde of modern times.
Modernism gave art a course of shock treatment which killed the patient.
35 Kitsch is up-to-date but not modern
Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that is not modern. And that is by far the most of it. All of us race to keep up-to-date, but no one knows how to be modern. Artists now have neither the discipline to keep to the old ways nor the daring to shape what is new.
Kitsch is the slick that was left coating the whole world when the wave of modernism went out.
Kitsch is the lurid corpse light given off by the mouldering cadaver of dead forms.
Photography memorializes the sadness of time in a medium that claims to prevail against it. In photography technology takes the place of artistic form, and sentiment and sensation take the place of artistic feeling. It paints the icons of our narcissism. The camera is the ever-open eye of our consumer cravings and the mirror of our self-infatuation.
The camera acted as the cannon of kitsch, which battered down the ramparts of art and raw experience. We now pose and perform our lives for its eye.
36 Novelty and nostalgia
Novelty and nostalgia, being the pulse of desire, form the rhythm of kitsch.
Culture has died at both ends. We pay no heed to the past, and we can make no work for the time to come. So we forge the kitsch that will fizzle for a day and go out.
These days fashion is the foe of what is new, and nostalgia is the vandal of the past.
Nostalgia is the style of an age that has to keep on reinventing everything and yet can’t make anything new.
We now dose ourselves with the stimulant of novelty and the soporific of nostalgia. We want to ride into the future cushioned by our cosy reveries and propelled by our rage for newness. So we look forward to a future engineered by our sleek machines and upholstered with a twee cottage handicraft.
Even as we junk the past, we wallow in nostalgia. And though there is no future now for us, we can’t wait to race towards it.
In kitsch’s hall of mirrors we divide our time between the latest fads and the hollowest nostalgia.
Nostalgia now recalls us not to a richer and more authentic past but to the images of technicolour kitsch.
People are mawkishly nostalgic in proportion to their rootless mobility.
People now are in thrall to a nostalgia leached of tradition, and they hunger for novelty devoid of newness. They want all things fresh and all familiar.
37 Juvenile and senile
Kitsch is the puerile style of a senile culture. We live and die swaddled in the kitsch of our second infancy.
Kitsch is restlessly innovating, ceaselessly obsolescing, yet never original.
The world has grown old, but it has not grown up. It has skipped straight from childishness to senility.
Kitsch knows how to play on all our childhood memories. And our memories of childhood make up an anthology of kitsch. The aroma of the same dead flowers will delight us for the rest of our lives.
Your tastes are fixed for life in early youth when you are most attuned to the hackneyed attractions of kitsch.
38 Kitsch memories
People are more stirred by truisms than by new concepts, and by revisiting one of their old haunts than by visiting a spot for the first time. They respond less to the thing as it is than to their own prior response to it. So they weep when they picture how they wept before. ‘We are moved,’ Pavese says, ‘because we were previously moved,’ or even because we were not, or because somebody else was.
I melt at reminders of objects whose originals would leave me cold.
A choice piece of kitsch marks each stage of your life. And you recall your milestones by their associations with it.
39 Consumerist nostalgia
Our consumer nostalgia tells us that our memories must be unique. But all we have now are the common memories of consumer nostalgia. As Lampedusa predicted, in the world that was coming no one would have any unusual recollections.
Your nostalgia makes you feel that you must be immortal. What other barque could lug this cargo of precious memories through till the end of time?
Our nostalgia is now just a hunger for the junk from the day before yesterday. Its date grows shorter and shorter in this accelerated and forgetful world, where all is preserved and nothing is remembered. Kitsch is personally nostalgic but culturally amnesic.
As our taste grows worse, fashion dates more quickly, and the recent past seems to us intolerably gauche, even as we’re on the point of reviving it.
40 The death of tradition
In our senescent age of forgetting, the old ways persist as an undead kitsch. They flatter us that we are preserving the past, while we are at work constructing our rootless and ruthless future. Having junked our age-old customs, we trump up fatuous replicas of our own and other cultures. So we cherish antiques, bibelots, christmas, dead ceremonies, re-enactments, anniversaries, souvenirs, museums, revivals, eclectic bric-a-brac, marzipan monarchies, and all the scraps of heritage.
We now refuse to be bound by tradition, but we act out a yearly round of small personal routines to solemnize our consuming.
Kitsch is the sickly sweet odour exuded by the corpse of a civilization which has been embalmed in sugar.
Virgil was the prissy kitsch of Homer, as Rome was the pious kitsch of Greece. The New Testament was a kitsch rewriting of the Old. Wagner was the kitsch of Beethoven. And post-modernism was the belated kitsch of modernism.
We can conserve only by creating, and we can renew only by preserving. A culture lives by what it hands on, but ours will die by what it eats up. It lacks the strength to build, but it is hungry enough to devour. ‘To carry on a tradition,’ Lawrence points out, ‘you must add something to the tradition.’
SENTIMENTALITY
41 Sentimentality
Mawkish people don’t claim to feel a real emotion, they really do feel a fake one.
Sentimentalists tell us that we are all conjoined as one. Realists know that each of us is on our own. Optimists trust that we can slip our isolation and affirm our connectedness. But the disconsolate see that our connectedness won’t save us.
Human victims touch us most poignantly when they are portrayed like animals, speechless, guiltless, bewildered, forgiving. But animals stir our tears most when they are shown to be like us, with an identity, a story and a name.
Sentimentalists, like sycophants, are sickened by any sentimentality that smells unlike their own. Each age must concoct a new style of mawkishness to set it off from its predecessor’s, so that it won’t see it for what it is and feel ashamed of it. In our day artists cook up an egalitarian schmaltz to cleanse their palate of the cloying schmaltz of their parents and grandparents.
42 Producing sentiment
It takes less skill to coax people to mimic what you feel than it does to move them by the real cause that made you feel. We weep not because we see the victims aching, but because we see the onlookers weeping. We are touched more by the tears of the bystanders than by the pangs of the sufferers.
People gaze on the anguish of others as a show to arouse their emotions. And then the spectacle of their sensibility melts their own hearts. They consume sentimentality in producing it, and produce it in consuming it. ‘The orator,’ Montaigne notes, ‘will be moved by the lilt of his own voice and by his feigned imagination. He will let himself be drawn in by the mood he is personating.’ His own excitement heats him, and this brings his flow of words to the boil.
We are fooled by our own feigned moods, and warmed by frigid images. ‘Nothing tempts my tears like tears,’ Montaigne says, ‘not just real ones but tears of any kind, in feint or paint.’
Sentimentalists are moved by the sight of how much their gestures of sentimentality have moved their dupes.
‘Tears in the reader only if there are tears in the writer,’ as Frost wrote. But they are both fake tears. They are each weeping for the poignant image of their own soft hearts being pierced by the pangs of others.
We are disgusted by the stench of others’ mawkishness as much as we love to sniff the heady bouquet of our own.
43 Loss
Mawkish people swoon at the small and understated, at blanks and absences, erasures and their sad traces, at fractured, maimed and unfinished things, the overlooked, exile and displacement, at what they’ve lost and what they’ve dredged from the wreckage, the melancholy of failed crossings and failed connections, intersections of hurt and splendour, brief respites of grace and small redemptions, the grandeur of transcendence and the poignancy of not attaining it, frail affirmations, gaps and silences, the forlorn poetry of dates, maps and lists, the sadness of fine intentions, since they all miss their aim.
People are in love with loss. They have lost others or they have lost their own selves. They’ve lost youthfulness and innocence. They have lost their roots. They’ve lost paradise. They have lost home or their faith and all the days that they have let slip away. Modernity is an elegy of loss and longing, and rupture is its pathos. And those who aim to seem modern try to pass off their nostalgia as a yearning for the new.
44 Cynical sentiment
Sentimentality is the winner pretending to be a loser, the brutal pretending to be bruised by their own fine feelings, the uncaring pretending to care, the actorly repressing itself as the reticent, the dry-eyed squeezing out tears for their own and their viewers’ delectation.
Cold-blooded creatures love to bask in the genial sun of sentimentality. Frigid hearts thaw out in tears, which veil their calculating and lure others to serve their behests. A callous sharper can, like Carroll’s walrus, weep thankful millstones for the nobleness of some sorry wretch whom he’s piously defrauding of half his life’s work. Hard hearts make their dinner on the sloppiest mush. A nice man may be a man of nasty ideas, as Swift said. But a nasty man is sure to be a man of mawkish ones.
We justify the harm that we do our foes by calumniating them. And we hide the harm that we do our friends by our praise of them. We act kindly towards some people, so that we can think cruelly of them. And we think fondly of others, so as to hush our qualms while we’re swindling them.
We are hard-hearted and softheaded.
Our maudlin and abject souls love underdogs, so long as they come out on top.
45 The swindle of sentimentality
Sentimentalists don’t have emotions that they don’t wish to pay for, as Wilde claimed, they have emotions in the hope that they will be paid for them. They whip up a specious effect by converting a fictive defeat to an affecting moral victory. So they gain power by feigning weakness, and milk a lost cause to make an unwarranted triumph of self-display. They are swindlers who take in their dupes by pretending to be at the mercy of their own sensibility.
These days you can garner a hoard of money or votes for your own use by assuring individualistic customers and electors that we are all in this together.
Maudlin writers make a show of conscripting art to fight for the good, but they just use a sham goodness to mock up a heart-warming tableau.
46 Mawkish irony
Some writers use cynicism as a jet plush to set off the paste beads of their sentimentality. And some build up a large balance of irony and scoffing so as to have a long line of tearful credit on which to draw. Mawkishness thrives in dry and harsh climates. It can flourish both in the blathering perplexity of Beckett’s plays and in Hemingway’s laconic tough guy self-pity.
Self-mockers pretend to have mastered their emotions, maudlin souls pretend to have been mastered by them. It’s hard to tell which of the two is the more deceived by their own pose.
Irony and sentimentality each work by indirection and disavowal. Sentimentalists are as arch and crafty as ironists, and ironists are as smug as sentimentalists. Sentimentality is a sugared irony, or irony is soured pathos. Mawkish people draw attention to their sighs by pretending to stifle them. But the sardonic use a sly hyperbole to deflate overblown fools.
47 Restraint
Sentimentalists pretend to feel less than they pretend to feel. The neophytes of pathos revel in excess, but its veterans revel in austerity and inarticulacy. They flaunt their tears most touchingly by their brave efforts to stem them, as David does in his threnody for Absalom. Our hearts melt at the sight of someone struggling courageously to get the better of a distress that they hardly feel. They seem to refuse to yield to a mood which they don’t quite feel, to lure you to feel it in their stead. But they are then touched by the response that they set off in you.
Maudlin and garrulous authors and eras resound with the babbling praise of silence. As Morley wrote of Carlyle’s clatter, ‘The whole of the golden Gospel of Silence is now effectively compressed in thirty-five volumes.’ Most of those who praise quietness mean other people’s.
CLICHÉS
48 Clichés
Words are a wilderness, which we make a home in with our clichés.
Some people’s stock opinions can be elicited as predictably as the saliva of Pavlov’s dogs. Speak the right words, and their lips will dribble the reflex formulas that you have heard each time before.
The trunk of language is now held up only by the clichés which are throttling it, and the sole fruit that it yields are catchphrases.
If language speaks us, as Heidegger wrote, is it any wonder that these days most of what it says are clichés, pat phrases, jargon, flattery and platitudes?
I trust that I have mastered a theme or a style when I can fluently improvise its overworked idioms.
I loathe others’ jargon and verbiage as much as I love my own. And I label their views as platitudes if they sound foreign to my own. But I’m dazzled by any that deviates an inch from the standard ones and that damns them as cant.
People are not more commonplace on supreme occasions, as Butler claimed. The supreme occasion just shows up how commonplace they were the whole time, as Eichmann made clear at his execution. It gives us scope to be our real self, which is a bad actor admiring our own performance.
49 Political clichés
People will always think and speak in stale phrases. And so each kind of regime has to manufacture the artificial ambience of accepted claptrap which will sustain it. In a dictatorial state the public talk in the cant of dictatorship. And in a democracy they talk in the cant of democracy. A democratic leader who thought and spoke in any form but platitudes and clichés would be lost. A depraved state is maintained by its murderous lies, a good state by its mealy-mouthed ones. The propaganda of tyrants appals us because it is so vile, while the fables of egalitarianism are so well-meaning that we take them to be true.
A regime tries to make up for the banality of its concerns by the pomposity of its rhetoric.
50 Sloganeering
Though we shut our hearts to principles, we cling to a passionate faith in our slogans. For if we let these go, how could we grasp or recall what it is that we are to believe? ‘The crowd,’ as Tocqueville wrote, ‘relinquishes the ideas it has been given more readily than the words it has learned.’ They remind us of ideals which we don’t much care for, and help us to digest the creamy and savoury slop we make of them.
‘Man,’ as Stevenson said, ‘is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords.’ Our ideology does our thinking for us, and our slogans tell us what our ideology means. And now brand names mean even more to us than slogans.
Kitsch keeps up our faith in all the fine ideals that we know are not true. And, as Dostoyevsky points out, ‘people can’t do without grand words.’
Empty symbols fill our minds, even to the point where we will fight and kill for them, because we are as empty as they.
It’s those who have no feeling for language that are bewitched by pretentious titles, nomenclature, hackneyed tags, and doggerel. And it’s those who scorn mere words that turn out to be their most egregious dupes.
People mention the brand names of the things they own with the same smugness that they yap about their friends. Are their possessions like friends, or are their friends like possessions?
51 Only craft can save us from the clichés of the heart
All the commonplaces on a theme as commonplace as love are true. And all the truths on a theme as empty as death are commonplace. ‘All sensible talk about vitally important topics,’ Peirce says, ‘must be commonplace.’ A hit song has as much to teach you about love as one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Each of us feels that love makes us new, and yet love inspires no one with new insights.
Love and death are two topics that give a free pass to our bad taste.
The heart speaks in the language of clichés. And how snugly our roomiest emotions fit into the threadbare suit of our starched opinions. Our lustiest sensations talk in the weariest tropes. But the worked-up passions of poets find the most durable words to voice what we feel. Only those who are not in love are free to craft a fresh discourse of desire.
52 Clichés old and new
A traditional state is ballasted by its time-tried prejudices. But an innovative state is thrust on by its new-fangled prejudices, which it has to keep refurnishing and restocking. Conservatives and progressives differ primarily in the vintage of their fixed views.
The herd lives its hidebound truisms, but talks its new-minted ones. ‘Every generation,’ notes Thoreau, ‘laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.’ We keep venerable wizened clichés in place of wisdom, and voguish ones in place of wit. And we love old clichés for their elegance, and new ones for their cleverness.
We love fashion because it is a compilation of the most up-to-date clichés.
53 Accelerated clichés
In our age of accelerated banality we produce, distribute and discard our spicy clichés as rapidly as fast food. Our coinages turn to clichés the instant that we mint them. They sparkle like pop songs, trite yet effervescent, modish, flashing and saleable. They used to fetter our minds to the past. Now they fetter them to the forgetful present. We think in tired platitudes, and speak and write in set phrases. Our motley vernacular imparts to our thoughts a variegation that they have not earned. Our speech grows more miscellaneous as our vision shrinks and shrivels. Though our thoughts are barren, our words twitch promiscuously.
We all love to read the latest books, since they are patched up from current clichés to pander to the platitudes of the hour. As Burckhardt wrote, ‘the shams of today are addressed to us and are therefore amusing and intelligible.’
54 The proof of repetition
We are won over more by repetition than by reason. ‘Tell a lie once and it stays a lie,’ Goebbels said, ‘tell it a thousand times and it becomes a truth.’
We keep descanting on our views, in the hope of convincing others or at least of convincing ourselves. ‘By often repeating an untruth,’ Jefferson notes, ‘men come to believe it themselves.’ And our own iterations persuade us better than another’s.
When I trot out my readymade thoughts, far from blushing at how outworn they are, I gloat that I’ve proved them right once more.
55 The pride and pleasure of repetition
I stoop to pick up the opinions of others, and I take pride in reprising my own.
‘He that knows little,’ says the saw, ‘soon repeats it.’ Others have to keep reasserting their views, because they have such a dearth of them. But I feel entitled to reassert mine, since they make such rich sense of the world. Who would not choose to reutter their own ragged falsehoods rather than learn a new truth? ‘The creeds are believed,’ Wilde said, ‘not because they are rational, but because they are repeated.’ We take more pleasure in reaffirming our false notions than in excavating the facts.
My own refrains soothe and amuse me as much as those of others anger and irk me. My dry phrases sound to me as wise as proverbs and as witty as jokes. And I’m sure that they do so to others too. So I feel a duty to use them as often as I can.
People love to harp on their convictions, because they think so little about them and so much of themselves. They can’t keep off their hobbyhorse, not because they think so seriously about it, but because they think so trivially about everything.
We keep recapitulating our ideas, not because they contain so much matter, but because our heads contain so little.