Kitsch versus the avant-garde — Part 4
The Kitsch Moment and Disinterested Judgments
Alongside Marx’s materialism and Nietzsche’s relativism, Kant’s ideas about judgment became a powerful theme for the 20th Century avant-garde. Kant said that experiences of beauty are judged, and can only be experienced through “disinterested interest”. What he means by that is that we can only make a judgment of whether or not something is beautiful by approaching it intellectually — by considering its merits. When you go to an art gallery and read all those labels describing the work, the artist, the artist’s intentions and so forth, you are being provided with information that is intended to help you make that disinterested decision about whether it is beautiful or not. Kant’s influence has made it possible for artists to take anything and offer it up in gallery spaces for the appreciation of its aesthetic merits alone. This is why Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” — an upside-down urinal — has been the center of discussion for a century, making it the most consistently interesting toilet in the history of the world.
To Kant, pleasure comes as a result of aesthetic judgment. According to Kant we are pleased by an image because it satisfies us intellectually, not because of sentimental appeal. But here’s the problem with Kant.
When you look at this image, didn’t you immediately think of your own experience with children, recalling the love you feel for your children, or your desire to have children, or your hopes for them, or your fear of the danger they might face — didn’t you want to protect them in their vulnerability? Did you really make an intellectual assessment of this picture first? Did you consider the shape, arrangement, rhythm of the image, or did you immediately made sentimental associations with the birth of your own children? Of course, the photo immediately pulls any parent back into the moment of birth and pushes any aspiring parent forward into the anticipated future. We follow that pleasure with aesthetic judgment, but the sentimental response comes first.
When you enjoyed the sentimental experience that the image brought to mind, you were experiencing a kitsch moment. Was it unpleasant? Of course not. Did you have to intellectually assess the content, aesthetic value or technical mastery of the photo before you enjoyed it? We find pleasure in sentiment. We thrive on it. And when we look at art that captures moments that resonate with us we love it and hold such works of art closely to our hearts.
We may arrive at an acceptance of Kantian disinterest through education, by being trained that disinterest is the only appropriate way to appreciate art — and in the twentieth century this approach dominated art and made possible such things as Dada, reductionist minimalism, concept art, and so forth — but is disinterested interest — the aesthetic experience — ever a full and complete experience of art? Just for the sake of argument let’s imagine it is possible to look at a work of art with complete disengagement from emotional response, and that somehow we can make the subject of works of art irrelevant to our enjoyment of them. To do this we must abandon all ideas of galleries and art and imagine that we are invited to view a thing and somehow arrive at the work prepared only to approach it with disinterested interest. We must disengage from emotion except perhaps for the satisfaction that might come from analytical consideration, ignoring the pleasure that might come from empathy with the subject of the image, or from sentiment, or from the warmth of nostalgia. When we come to the work, with all our normal human sensory experience of perception fully tempered by the complete intellectual engagement that now fills our disinterested mind, we must find that beauty is irrelevant to our experience, because beauty, as an emergent quality, could not emerge if we were capable of separating our sensory experience of things from our intellect. If beauty is lacking when we attempt to disengage emotional response from the experience of a work, or a person, or a landscape, then we must conclude that our emotional response to a thing is necessary for the experience of beauty. The experience of beauty depends upon both the evolutionary mind and sensory experience. And this idea is defended by contemporary neuroscience, for the experience of beauty stimulates different parts of the brain than those that are excited by problem-solving.
Even when we attempt to behold a work of art with disinterest, there is always a moment in which we decide whether we like it or not because it completes a category of mind; it fulfills our expectation of what an ideal work of art should be. Even Nietzsche understood that our first response to beauty is not intellectual — he described our rapid judgments of beauty as instinctual decisions which always precede intellectual engagement: “Judgments concerning beauty and ugliness are shortsighted ( — they are always opposed by the understanding — ) but persuasive in the highest degree; they appeal to our instincts where they decide most quickly and pronounce their Yes and No before the understanding can speak.”
Beauty does not withstand intellection dissection well; analyzing it is like talking about humor — a deconstructed joke isn’t funny anymore. But a well-balanced marriage of sense and intellect allows for the experience of beauty and an intellectual appreciation of skill and idea to merge, similar to the appreciation of a clever joke enjoyed for both its witty dexterity and for its unexpectedness. Like a joke, art must share an idea. Without the completion of the transference of an idea from the artist’s mind to the beholder’s mind, an unshared work of art would simply be self-indulgent, like an untold joke. If the experience of excellent art is like having great sex, an un-shared work of art is like masturbation. The emergent fulfillment of expectation is what art is for. It is the moment of conception.
Because the disengagement from emotional interaction derived from Kant’s disinterested interest negates sensory pleasure in favor of intellectual pleasure, thereby setting aside an enormous and important part of human perception, we should consider carefully if Kant’s path is one we wish to take if we hope to become more complete in our experience. The excesses of artists fascinated with disinterested interest led to the embarrassing spectacles of the 20th century, in which ideas were expressed in galleries without discrimination for their place in the loose hierarchy of quality. Yes, both hierarchy and quality still exist in the emergent world after the supposed death of god.
The sophistry of the mythical pure gaze in which the viewer looks upon an object with disinterested interest makes possible a worldview in which anything may be art if it’s brought into a gallery. But let’s be pragmatic. Let’s be honest. The obvious truth is that there is absolutely no difference between an object inside a gallery or outside a gallery. There is no special art-magic that transforms that object into something else. Art curators and artists are not magicians, although some may melodramatically cast themselves in that role in some fantasy played for themselves and a small, gullible and willing audience. The idea that the context of the gallery transforms a thing into a work of art is purely based upon an intellectual game — it is only through a pedantic acceptance of the idea of disinterested interest that an art gallery becomes a place of privileged transformation — the gallery environment signals to the indoctrinated aesthete that this is the place to switch off his natural experience of sensual reality and to appreciate objects with a “pure gaze”. But in reality, there is no pure gaze. Claims to have achieved such a pure state of contemplation are only pretension because the human mind simply does not experience reality in this way. The success of galleries in which everything is art depends upon their visitors’ belief in the superiority of disinterested interest as an approach to works of art — a suspension of their true experience of the real world with all its emotions, senses, dreams and intellectual judgements, in favor of placing devotional faith in the doctrines of postmodern art. But belief is not truth. And galleries are not churches. The absurd mystique that clouds around galleries like special effects smoke in a theatrical fantasy sequence is just a cover for the truth about the simple role that galleries really play, which is that commercial art galleries are shops which retail the stuff that we value for sharing ideas. Big galleries that are open to the public are treasure houses which store things that are highly valued for the ideas they share.
Because anything can be art if the aesthetic is disinterested, then naturally artists experiment with the boundaries — if a toilet can be art, can a giant butt plug be art? Yes, it can. Paul McCarthy made an inflatable sculpture of one and erected it in the Place Vendome in 2015. Can a can of artist’s shit be art? Why, yes, it can, Piero Manzoni sold a limited edition in 1961. Can a machine that manufactures shit be art? Of course it can. Wim Delvoye exhibited his in 2006. Perhaps you’ll notice a theme developing. All of these things have been in art galleries or art festivals. I hope I didn’t spoil your meal. The French didn’t think much of McCarthy’s giant butt plug. Someone beat up the artist, and cut holes in his inflatable, and all of its flatulence rushed out of it, and that was the end of it.
Thanks to a mixture of Kant’s disinterested interest and a superficial understanding of Nietzsche’s nihilistic relativism, postmodern artists claim that all ideas are subjective, and therefore cannot be judged. Defenders of avant-garde shock art have claimed that artists who present things like the machine that makes shit, or rotting animals, or the debris remaining from a three-week bender in bed — all to be found in contemporary galleries — deserve attention because these are artists’ attempts to express themselves. According to the doctrines of avant-gardism, this self-abandonment to complete open-mindedness is supposed to be good. But isn’t this passive abandonment to the expression of childish potty-level ideas a willful naivety and desertion of reasonable process? If Kantian conceptual art offers an entrance into philosophical reflection, doesn’t this interaction begin with invitations to think, to make evaluations, to consider the ideas on offer? If the ideas on offer are at the level of a petulant child, or an irrational adult, or a nihilistic libertine, isn’t the appropriate response to such objects to find them irritating, or juvenile, or to pity the afflicted whose consciousness is so poorly developed? Because an artist expresses an idea doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. As good parents, we listen to the words of a child having a tantrum, but then we make adult judgments of the content of the child’s words. Adults regard juvenile art in the same way one might listen to an oppositional child.
The traditional excuse for such childishness in art-making is to point to the naïve innocence of Vincent Van Gogh, or Picasso’s / Braque’s statement that he wanted to paint like a child, and to admire the fresh quality of simple mark-making. Yes — children make spontaneous works of art. Yes, child-like creativity is wonderful. But creativity is only a part of the whole domain of making a work of art. Adults are not children. Adult minds are far more evolved and sophisticated than those of children; that’s why adults are the parents. Dwelling upon juvenile ideas leaves us hungry for more sophisticated, more mature expressions of creativity. Naïve postmodern relativist artists don’t discriminate between those ideas that are basic and fundamental to the human mind and those that express the evolved mind that has passed forward in time from the simple expressions of childhood. Adults shouldn’t be led by petulance. The invitation to “everything is art” is to approach art with a juvenile mind.
Marx says that everything is based on materialism, Kant says that aesthetic judgments are the only way to appreciate beauty, and the skeptical Nietzsche says that everything is relative — so their avant-garde followers encourage art that deliberately excludes any emotional response, because with the exception of anger, appealing to emotion is inappropriate in avant-garde art. Kitsch art — by which I mean art that appeals to sentiment, to emotional responses — appeals to idealism, which is the opposite of materialism; to emotion, which is the antithesis of intellectual aesthetic judgment; to empathy, which opposes solipsism. Because of anger’s close association with the Marxist necessity for violent revolution in order to create a utopia, it gets a pass in the avant-garde. Evidently, to avant-gardists, the concept of badness only exists in those things that are made in opposition to their value system — and they claim “there is no greater evil in art than kitsch.”
