Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [2]
And by Macdonald, who published, in that issue, the last article in a three-part series on the demise of Soviet cinema under Stalin. Movies were always an interest of Macdonald’s. His father, a lawyer, had served on the boards of several film companies, and had once lectured at Yale on the movie business. In the 1920s, some of the most innovative films in the world came out of the Soviet Union. “One went to the ‘little’ movie houses which showed Russian films as one might visit a celebrated cathedral or museum,” as Macdonald described it. “In the darkened auditorium of the theatre, one came into a deep and dynamic contact with twentieth century life.” By the late 1930s, though, the cinema avant-garde had been killed off by official demands for a doctrinaire product and official hostility to experimentation. Soviet film under Stalin, Macdonald wrote, had become “something that more and more closely approaches the output of Hollywood,” which he thought was also committed to uncritical, generic entertainment, and his articles undertook to analyze the causes of this decline. The magazine received, in response, a letter to the editor from Clement Greenberg.
Greenberg was a thirty-year-old aspiring poet and literary critic with a job in the United States Customs Service. Macdonald had been introduced to him by two Partisan Review contributors, Harold Rosenberg and Lionel Abel, sometime in 1938. In his letter, Greenberg took issue with a few of Macdonald’s points, and accused him of performing an insufficiently rigorous Marxist analysis. Macdonald, delighted as always to have stimulated an antagonist, thought the letter brilliant, and encouraged Greenberg to expand it into an essay. Greenberg was naturally pleased to do so, but he was not a gifted writer, and he found the business of being edited by Macdonald, who was, something of an ordeal. The essay they managed to produce is to some extent, therefore, a collaboration. (Macdonald later claimed he had “invented” Clement Greenberg.) That essay is, of course, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” which appeared in the Fall 1939 issue of Partisan Review, and became one of the most influential critical essays of the century. It was only the second piece of criticism Greenberg had published.
Except for an important twist, “Avant-garde and Kitsch” is an orthodox Marxist analysis. The Marxist part goes like this: Avant-garde art and kitsch (that is, popular, or commercial, culture) are both products of the Industrial Revolution. Avant-gardism arises when the artist can no longer represent, because he no longer believes in, what society takes to be art’s natural subject matter, that is, its own values and notion of the way things ought to be. The consequence is a turn inward on the part of the serious artist, and the emergence of art for art’s sake—in the case of painting, a turn from representations of the world to abstraction. Kitsch—the word means “trash” or, as Greenberg put it in his letter to Macdonald, “crap”—was also a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution made universal literacy possible, and this produced a mass audience looking for entertainment and diversion. The new technology of mechanical reproduction permitted an ersatz culture to be manufactured cheaply for, and distributed to, that audience. The success of this manufactured culture killed off folk art, which had been a genuine popular culture.
This much was standard Marxian analysis: industrial capitalism is responsible for both an elite culture of formalism and aestheticism and a mass culture of commodification and commercialism. The Marxist ordinarily went on to condemn both, but this is where Greenberg introduced his twist.