Trash, Art, and Critics

WHEN HE SPEAKS against kitsch he seems to be speaking from the point of view of art,” wrote Harold Rosenberg, describing the stance of a certain well-practiced critic of mass culture; but “when he speaks about art it is plain his ideas are kitsch.” The moralist declaiming against trash can be useful, up to a point, but it is his besetting fault to attract an audience that will not disagree with him—he flogs dead horses in the public trust. On the one hand, somebody must do the dirty work: if Arthur Miller is bad, then he must be weaned away from the hubris born of too many honorary degrees in Literature. There is nothing sadder to contemplate than kitsch that tries too hard, looking to become art, and we should be mildly grateful to those indefatigable souls who have made of this sadness a permanent occupation. Yet the man who dwells on this type of criticism is suspect. If he doesn’t like Miller, why not write about Ibsen? Does he care about Art (always capitalized), except as a wonderful dusky region from which to condescend? And hasn’t art itself been trivialized by its merely symbolic use to ward off intruding spirits?

Criticism in this vein was bound to seem a little airless, and before long it had exhausted its value as an instrument of cultural hegemony —i.e., a stick to beat the philistines with— giving way to a more cheerful acceptance of homogenized culture, well represented, I think, by Leslie Fiedler’s ideologica...