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Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas.

Clement Greenberg

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Clement Greenberg
Age: 85 †
Born: 1909
Born: January 16
Died: 1994
Died: May 7
Art Collector
Art Critic
Art Historian
Art Theorist
Essayist
Journalist
The Bronx
New York City
K. Hardesh
Formulas
Kitsch
Operates
Mechanical

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Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough.
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The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms.
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Art is a matter strictly of experience, not of principles and what counts first and last in art is quality, all other things are secondary.
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A poor life is lived by any one who doesn't regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from what is gazed at, listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon.
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The superior artist is the one who knows how to be influenced.
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Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.
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It has become apparent that art can have a startling impact without really being or saying anything startling — or new. The character itself of being startling, spectacular, or upsetting has become conventionalized, part of safe good taste.
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The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.
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Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.
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Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.
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I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.
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The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility.
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Complete honesty has nothing to do with 'purity' or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.
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It's as though aesthetic value, quality, could be preserved only by concentrating on 'absolute' or 'autonomous' art: thus on visual art... that held and moved and stirred the beholder as sheer decoration could not.
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The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.
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