Kitsch… is so hurtful, if not Evil: Part 3

What is the function of kitsch in relation to cultural formation?

With all of the preceding in mind, the central question returns: is kitsch evil? However, this begs a more fundamental question: how do Seerveld and Broch distinguish between kitsch and true art? For Seerveld, true art is aesthetically obedient art, the result of an aesthetic life: the Christian’s faithful response to God’s creational ordinance of allusivity. This allusivity is the central tenant in Seerveld’s aesthetic program and is variously described as the quality of referential interplay between action and enjoyment, playful ambiguity, and “oblique, metaphorical constituency.” If these descriptors are less than clear, it would seem to be that Seerveld strived for intentionally vague language when defining his central tenant of good aesthetic formation:

“To posit that symbolic objectification must be law-abiding allusive is to affirm that it must be heightened by a playful, suggestion-rich ambiguity, its internal thematic convergence and consistency must make aesthetic sense by bearing a characteristically oblique, metaphorical constituency”

This is to say that the qualifying function of artistic (aesthetic) activity is its allusivity and that this allusivity is the embodiment of meaning in an meaningful-object that is most similar to the way that symbols allude to their referents in rich and complex ways. While all aspects of life manifest allusiveness, true art, by contrast, is qualified by allusivity and manifests allusive traits to a greater degree. The benefit of this insight for the question of the relationship of kitsch to true art is that this allusive functionality distinguishes art from kitsch.

Kitsch, then—while allusive—is not richly, complexly, metaphorically meaningful, causing Seerveld to argue that it is immature, superficial, slick, and not enlarging experience. Precisely the opposite of true art, but instead “canonizing immaturity.” By this Seerveld seems to argue that kitsch retains sufficient allusivity, despite its “denatured” status, to allow its audience to believe that a Terry Redlin print on the wall is true art—or at least true-enough art.5 Seerveld argues that kitsch is a “block” to the development of a “joyful, deep, and normatively obedient aesthetic life,6 and so is, to return to the original quote, so hurtful, if not evil.

To comment further is, perhaps, to enter into speculation, but it can be further argued that kitsch for Seerveld is kitsch precisely because it is not true art. Thus, while true art 1) unfolds creation, 2) in obedient submission to the rule of Jesus Christ, and 3) acknowledges its referent in God; kitsch 1) advances nothing, returning to nostalgic, sentimental re-imaginings of existing creation, 2) rejects the culturally formative command implicit in the rule of Christ, and 3) denies its divine-referential responsibility. For those who hold Seerveld’s perspective, kitsch is art in as much as adultery is still marital union and idolatry is still worship. That is to say, kitsch remains an aesthetic activity or even aesthetic life, but is a degenerate, corrupted form of the same that fails to recognize the normative mandates established in creation for its own outworking (unfolding). Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Seerveld is unable to finally call kitsch “evil” because to do so would be to, in some sense, diminish the creational structure in which art—even bad art—participates. Put another way, if kitsch relies on the repetition of established formulas and artistic convention, lacking genuine creativity and originality present in true art, it still repeats formulas and convention that were, in their first expressions, original and creative. For example, to call a painting of a rose “kitsch” because it reproduces a hackneyed convention is to deny that a rose, well painted and originally represented (re-presented) on canvas had been, in its first instance, an aesthetically obedient act. In effect, this would be suggesting that the rose-subject has transmuted, by process of repetition, from good to evil—a feat equal to that of turning gold to lead. Thus, it would seem that Seerveld is cautious in his evaluation of kitsch because he recognizes, as an art historian, that today’s art has the potential to become tomorrow’s kitsch and his delineation of the two has more to do with means of production and originality than content, though he touches on both.
As to a final verdict on good art verses evil art, true art verses kitsch, Seerveld himself seems conflicted in the midst of his own definitions. Good art is to be allusive, symbolic, metaphorical, richly ambiguos, while maintaining thematic consistency that is itself suggestive. Yet, good art must also demonstrate obedient submission to the rule of Jesus Christ. Is this obedience to be consciously maintained so that only Christians can produce true art? If obedience to the rule of Christ is merely to reflect the natural order as it exists as a result of creational mandates without conscious recognition of the Creator, then true art is far more inclusive of the work of secular artists, but do these artists truly find the ultimate referent of their work in God? Seerveld’s intellectual categories are binary, either a work is aesthetically obedient or it is not, either it is true art or it is kitsch. Yet, in application his definitions seem to yield a maddeningly ambiguos gray area between kitsch as poor art, but art none the less, and secular art as true art, but somehow less than art produced in full obedience to God.

Returning to Herman Broch for an alternative to Seerveld’s ambiguity, we find a far clearer critique of kitsch as it relates to cultural formation. Since culture formation is, by Broch’s definition, the positive value on his general value scale, true art is any art that contributes positively to cultural formation. The negative value in Broch’s system is death, so that art that does not participate in cultural advancement is not in rebellion against death and, therefore, is evil. Further, art, as a value system is to be autonomous, not co-opted under another value system. For example artistic cultural formation is not to in the service of political, religious, or economic concerns, and it is in fact, when these other systems invade the sovereign territory of art that they are established by their dogmatism as evil. Further, the character of this conflict between the artistic value system and the rival system must have the character of opposition so that what is good in art must be evil in the rival system and visa versa.

Broch’s arguments immediately require further clarification because examples of true art that are also tendentious (tendenziös) are so ready to hand. For example the art of medieval Europe is championed by Seerveld for exactly this reason: it reflected a Christian perspective. This example demonstrates that in medieval Europe the value system of art had been co-opted by a religious value system. Broch responds by suggesting that art, of all the value systems, has the greatest tolerance to invasion by oppositional value systems because it has no theme of its own; art’s theme is representation and so endlessly plays host to “alien value-systems.” Indeed, Broch argues that autonomous art’s only criterion is his expanded naturalism: universal truth grounded in reality.

Therefore, Broch does not call tendentious art, kitsch. Instead, he argues that the true essence of kitsch is in “the confusion of ethical and aesthetic categories.” That is, kitsch wishes to produce not that which is good, but that which is beautiful. Therefore, while employing the instrumentality of the world as it really is what kitsch actually seeks is the world as one wishes or fears it to be. That is one uses naturalistic methods to bring about a reactionary effect. Kitsch is that which relies solely on this effect, beauty, only using the good in an instrumental fashion. Broch uses as the example of opera in which the structure of the work is dictated entirely according to its intended effect rather than any artistic good that could otherwise limit the audience’s response.

Therefore, pulling together the tendentious and the affective, art becomes kitsch when its whole value system, (expanded naturalism), is overthrown or subverted by a rival system, (effectiveness). In the case of the medieval period, with its religious overtones, its art remains art because its primary value system is still culturally formative and aesthetic value grounded in expanded naturalism, (aesthetic sphere sovereignty). Opera, however, is kitsch precisely because it jettisons aesthetic’s expanded naturalism, and even rationality, in favor of dramatic effect. Thus, kitsch represents evil in the value system of art in that it overturns and supplants arts own native value system in favor of another.

For Broch, kitsch is undeniably historically determined. This determination takes the form of imitation of existing artistic movements at the expense of forms that are genuinely culturally formative. Thus, what makes kitsch evil is the degree to which it undermines the culturally creative aspect of true art by rendering it impotent by repetition, imitation, and subversion. Thus, where true art is creative, kitsch plunders creative art, imitating its formulas even as it negates their efficacy. By rendering true art’s nature merely a set of conventions, kitsch produces a totalization of those conventions. Therefore, for Broch, kitsch is not the same as bad art, (art that missed its calling in the positive value), but it establishes a formal value system all its own.

True art is focused on a target value (wertziel) of increasing knowledge and perception of the universe; art has an ethical purpose and an aesthetic effect. Kitsch, or anti-art, deals in what is already known, cannot increase knowledge, and has aesthetic effect as its only goal. Therefore, kitsch is neither bad nor failed art, but is art of the same sort—of similar essence—aimed at an opposite value goal from true art. That is all to say that kitsch is art, but art that seeks the beautiful, rather than the good.