Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939)

To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.

Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations.

MassArt student Stephen Bareford comments on "genuine culture:"

Greenberg's concept of "genuine culture" is based on the self-isolated rich elite's patronage of art for art's sake [and expresses their] lack of connection to the larger public. Abstract art, [they maintain], cannot be judged by anything but its own inherent rules--isolated (like its patrons) by its own inclinations and existence.

Not only is Greenberg malicious in his systematic dismantling of both the avant garde abstract & kitsch, he also isolates himself [into membership in] a new elite, a fatalistic and miserable "intelligentsia." Greenberg's essay [expresses] both a "Marxist class order=objective reality" viewpoint as well as an obnoxious self admiration.

Anytime one person tells another person how things actually work, the teller automatically forfeits his integrity in favor of ostentatious "opinionism."

[People's] subjective experience cannot be pushed to the wayside. If a person feels a connection to what another deems "kitsch," what keeps that "kitsch" object from being high art?