All that Glitters Isn’t Gold: Kitsch, Bling-bling and Bullshit

In November 2009, the cover of the New York-based journal of art, politics and culture, The Brooklyn Rail, featured How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality (2009), a nowinfamous work by American artist William Powhida. It offered a scathing satire of the museum’s growing “cronyism,” and particularly its controversial decision to organize an ­exhibition of work from its trustee Dakis Joannou’s private collection. Dripping with sarcasm, this detailed pencil drawing is typical of Powhida’s creative practice, which frequently lampoons the contemporary art industry and its excesses, including its cult of celebrity, nepotism, and superficiality. In a recent article about Powhida’s work, Jeffrey Deitch, the well-known New York art dealer just named Director of LA MoCA, attributed these excesses to “the collapse between the avant-garde and mainstream pop culture.”1 1  - Jeffrey Deitch, quoted by Damien Cave, “Tweaking the Big-Money Art World on its Own Turf,” The New York Times, 9 December 2009. This statement, a pantomime of those made by modernists for the last 100 years, is ultimately inseparable from the very confused situation it seeks to describe — a sprawling, vapid scene coloured, in Powhida’s words, “by a deep sense of lack.”2 2  - Ibid.

Throughout the modern period, critical discourse concerning art that blurred the boundaries between high and low culture, art and life, was fraught with eschatology. For modernists, it signalled the end of good art (taste, morality), while for the avant-garde it promised the end of art altogether (sublation³ 3 - The word “sublation” is the English translation of “Aufheben,” a contradictory German term used by Hegel that means to both keep and abolish. It thus corresponds to the avant-garde project of ending art by ending its autonomy from everyday life, an elimination whose paradoxical goal is to make life more like art., revolution). The insinuation or outright ­inclusion of excess decoration, pop culture or kitsch within the framework of high modernism was, and in some ways continues to be, a tried and true strategy for bringing lofty aesthetic categories abruptly down to earth, often revealing deep-seated biases towards race, class, and gender in the process. In this context, kitsch and the decorative function as a kind shadow — a nebulous place containing everything modernism refuses to admit. For Austrian architect Adolf Loos, this shadow was fascist, an aspect he unwittingly revealed by linking ornamentation with moral degeneracy and tattooed murderers.⁴ 4 - Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in Bernie Miller and Melony Ward, eds., Crime and Ornament (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2002), 29. For Clement Greenberg, it was an impostor, a plague of “vicarious experience and faked sensations” — the embodiment of “all that is spurious in the life of our times.”⁵ 5 - Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 10. And for Harold Rosenberg, it was “weak mysticism” — the “easy painting” of artists who squeezed out predictable abstract “masterpieces,” creating what he called “apocalyptic wallpaper.”⁶ 6 - Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), 34.