"The point from which Clement Greenberg's critical work was
launched, as stated in his first published text, "Avant-Garde and
Kitsch" (1939), was the dialectical opposition of modernism and
kitsch, the latter defined somewhat mildly as an "ersatz culture"
generated by the industrial revolution. Kitsch is thus a commercial
substitute produced by capitalism in order to fill the void left
by the marginalization of aristocratic culture and the destruction
pure and simple of artisanal local traditions by urbanization and
mandatory literacy. Fully sharing in the type of universality proper
to the commodity form, kitsch's spread is infinite. ln the face of •
this rapaciousness, the role of the modernist avant-garde is one of
pure resistance: even though the avant-garde constantly runs in the
face of tradition, it keeps that tradition alive by ceaselessly reconfiguring
it through a genealogical throwback (Manet by recalling
Goya, Picasso by recasting Cézanne, and so on) and by wrenching
it loose from the tentacle-like grip of deadening commodification.
For Greenberg, the avant-garde is not a mole undermining the
foundations of high culture; it is an an gel come to rescue this same
culture from its kitsch temptation at the very moment when the
bourgeoisie for which it was destined is in the process of disappearing
as a class (to be replaced by the shapeless, transient mass of
the petit-bourgeoisie)."
