Hight Low Folk Kitsch — Larry Shiner

1999 “Hight, Low, Folk, Outsider, Kitsch”

This paper is presented in its rough, uncorrected state, nor have I attempted to update it (at the least I would have to incorporate ideas from Carroll’s A Philosophy of Mass Art), but I thought some readers interested in the interrelation of these art categories might find some useful ideas in this 30 year old piece. It was originally meant to follow a discussion of so-called “Primitive Art” and “Tourist Art” which became part of The Invention of Art, Chapter 15, 270-274

HIGH, LOW, FOLK, OUTSIDER, KITSCH

Writing in 1958 Hugo Munsterberg claimed that "the discovery of the unique aesthetic values of folk art, the art of children, and that of primitive peoples is one of the peculiar achievements of our age."[1] Had he included "popular art" we could take Munsterberg's statement as a prescient assertion of the expansion of the domain of Art by the 1990s. That this achievement is indeed "peculiar" and hardly one of unquestioned benefit, as almost everyone assumes, is the theme of the present chapter. I have already traced the "achievement" of incorporating so-called "Primitive Art" into the Euro-American Fine Art system. By the 1960s, as we have seen, even the studio crafts began to enter the domain of Fine Art further eroding the Art vs craft polarity. In fact, many mid-twentieth century critics and historians did not follow Collingwood or Dewey in contrasting Fine Art to a general category of "craft" or "useful arts," but defined Fine or High Art by its difference from both Folk Art and Popular Art. Even so, the changed terminology actually embraced a similar set of criteria: High Art was complex, intellectual and serious, whereas popular art was primarily simplistic entertainment or utilitarian advertisement and propaganda. But the new terminology had the advantage of focusing attention not on media (sculpture vs pottery, symphonies vs marching bands) but cut across media and genres, including recently assimilated ones (Art film vs movies, jazz vs bebop). Of course, boundaries were not rigid and there was considerable crossing over and borrowing as there had been in the nineteenth century. Out of this vast territory of distinction, exchange and appropriation, I will briefly examine four categories that are particularly revealing for the way the modern system of Art perpetuates its dominant ideas and institutions -- Folk Art, Outsider Art, Popular Art -- and close with a brief look at the one apparently unassimilable

Folk Art

There has been a veritable boom in exhibiting, collecting and writing about Folk Art from the late 1970s to the present (1990). No doubt the bicentennial celebration of 1976 contributed to the fashion for American Folk Art, but it cannot account for the sustained and constantly expanding interest over the past two decades. In 1975 there was just one magazine devoted to Folk Art; in the 1980s five new ones began to appear, including Folk Art Finder aimed at identifying hitherto unknown Folk Artists.[2] By the mid-1980s, as the craze for "Outsider Art" reinforced the Folk Art boom, isolated carvers, weavers, chair makers, or traditional singers who had once had only a local reputation found troops of scholars, collectors, dealers, journalists, and the merely curious camping on their door steps. Naturally a few Art critics began to worry about money intruding into the pure precincts of Art as eager prospectors scoured the back roads with trucks, sometimes buying up the entire output of individual carvers or painters for a few hundred dollars and selling it a piece at a time back in New York or Houston for thousands. Scholars of folklore began to lament that craft people were giving up home grown materials and old patterns for synthetics and the motifs and bright colors demanded by their ever more numerous customers.[3] As scholars worried over the erosion of tradition and skeptics decried financial exploitation, one deceased folk painter's relatives sued his long time Alabama patron and a New York gallery hoping to get their share of the loot.[4] The only thing surprising about this interweaving of the monetary and aesthetic interests is that anyone was surprised. More interesting in terms of the fortunes of the modern system of Art is the debate among collectors, curators, critics, Art historians and academic folklorists over the idea of Folk Art and its role in shaping exhibition, collecting and writing.

Although the concept of Folk Art is as highly contested as that of Primitive Art, the term "folk" has more positive connotations than "primitive" and has yet to be abandoned as politically incorrect. The idea of the "folk," or the "common people" as the bearers of a purer and more wholesome version of ethnic or national character goes back to the period of early Romanticism when a number of European writers began collecting folk ballads and tales. In its diluted twentieth century form, the popular definition of "Folk Art" continues the Romantic idealization of the "folk," but with an emphasis on anything homemade, quaint, or crude and is often used interchangeably with such terms as "naive," "grass-roots," or "vernacular." As one Folk Art scholar has put it, "folk art for public consumption is generally folk art by fiat."[5]

The popular view of Folk Art has, of course, developed through interaction with the concept of Folk Art prevalent in the Art world of critics, curators, collectors and dealers. In the United States, the dominant Art world idea of Folk Art goes back to the "discovery" of Folk Art by a number of modernist painters such as Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth who collected and exhibited naive paintings and sculpture in the 1920s as a kind of home grown counterpart to the European modernist's "discovery" of Primitive Art. Yet the full articulation of the case for folk artifacts as Folk Art did not come until Holger Cahill mounted a major show of Folk Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 and wrote a catalogue essay which set the tone of Folk Art collection, exhibition and appreciation down to 1980. Cahill emphasized naive painting and sculpture, stressed its uniquely American character and praised formal aesthetic qualities over either craftsmanship, context or original intention. Although more craft oriented models for exhibiting folk artifacts existed, Art museums and galleries until recent decades have continued to follow Cahill's Fine Art model and purchased or exhibited only those chairs or chests or sleds that had painted or carved decoration and avoided plain utilitarian objects with the exception of Shaker furniture which could be assimilated to modernist design.[6] Indeed, most of the pieces that have been presented as Folk Art in American museums and galleries have been exhibited as anonymous individual creations with little concern for the original social context of their production and use.[7]

It is just such an emphasis on communal context that characterizes the other major approach to Folk Art, that of anthropologists and folklorists. The academic discipline known as folklore combines the approaches of literary and art history with elements of anthropology and sociology to study folk communities and their cultural production. Whereas the Art world is dominated by a kind of "object fetishism," focusing on the individual "work of Art," the folklore scholar in interested in the entire context of production and use.[8] Thus, handmade ladder back chairs from rural Kentucky were seldom collected and exhibited as Folk Art in the past since they were too plain and plentiful.[9] Even when folklorists study an individual object, however, they are not looking for the unusual or innovative, so much as the average or normal piece. The Art world is interested in the individual Artist expressing a personal vision; the folklore scholars are interested in how individuals negotiate their relation to a community and its traditions.[10] For most folklorists the idea of a "folk outsider" is an oxymoron. The anthropologists and folklorists, of course, differ among themselves on the definition of folk communities, but have generally regarded them as small, relatively poor and homogeneous groups which have been somewhat isolated from mass culture influences.[11] By contrast, the Art world often pays attention to the community only to imagine "the folk" as a wholesome and naive lot whose Art is simple, fresh and spontaneous compared to the sophisticated and self-conscious productions of the academically trained.

The conflict between Art world and folklorist notions of Folk Art came to a head at a 1977 conference at the Wintertur Museum where folklorist Kenneth Ames described the dominant Art world idea of Folk Art as a fiction which cobbled together romantic notions of the folk with the Fine Art concept of non-utilitarian objects and performances.[12] As Ames and other scholars like John Michael Vlach have shown, most of the "naive" paintings that have been collected and exhibited as Folk Art in the United States were in fact the work of aspiring professionals or other members of the dominant, urbanized middle classes.[13] Some quilts that are admired as works of Folk Art, for example, were also made by urban middle class women based on patterns in popular magazines.[14] But Ames' critique of the Folk Art "myths" went far beyond exposing the catch-all nature of the Art world's categories. Ames also argued that using the concept of Art completely distorted the utilitarian and repetitive nature of folk rituals, performances and artifacts. The activities of such groups could perhaps be designated as "art" in the old sense of any skilled performance or production, but they were certainly not made, performed or experienced as "Art" in the modern sense. It would be better, Ames said, to use the more neutral designation "material culture" for folk artifacts since most of these societies would not have divided their objects and activities into Art vs craft according to the modern system of the Arts.[15] Ames' presentation at the Wintertur conference and his subsequent book touched off a controversy whose echoes could still be heard in the early 1990s. The field of "material culture" studies continues to flourish, offering an opportunity to avoid the arbitrary process of deciding which artifacts of a culture will be singled out as Art. Like those who recognize that the reasons for rejecting the term "Primitive" in "Primitive Art" also imply the rejection of "Art," many proponents of material culture studies believe that the dignity and worth of a societies' performances and artifacts is not meaningfully enhanced by calling them "Art."

Although most folklorists and anthropologists have joined Ames in criticizing the Art world's Folk Art myths, they have not joined him in rejecting the classification of these artifacts and performances as Art. In fact, many folklorists, perhaps because they have come to the field from Literature or Art history backgrounds, seem determined to make sure that "authentic" Folk Art be given a place within the Fine Art world. John Michael Vlach is typical of those who are indignant at the negative connotations clinging to the notion of "folk," e.g. simple minded, naive, crude. Although such terms are often used in a context of praise for the spontaneity and freedom of folk works, Vlach correctly senses an undercurrent of patronizing depreciation not unlike that clinging to the notion of the "primitive." Yet, like many of the critics of the idea of the "primitive," Vlach sees no problem with the idea of "Art" and insists that we regard the works of folk societies as "the equal of fine art, not its weak and imperfect echo." We should not view quilts as "crafted items" but as "works of art" whose colors and textures "go far beyond the requirements of pragmatic need."[16] What I find striking here is that Vlach, like most other folklorists, is insistent that not only folk activities conventionally considered art genres such as painting and sculpture but also such folk crafts as quilting, pottery, dress making, and furniture making, be classified as Art.

Vlach's position is shared by two of the leading contemporary theorists of Folk Art, Michael Owen Jones and Henry Glassie. Glassie candidly admits that since "Art is such an exalted term among us calling the best in every culture "art" makes rhetorical sense."[17] Although Glassie is congenial to the notion of material culture so long as one sees "Art" as designating "its noblest province," Jones rejects the material cultural approach because he believes the material culturalist cannot distinguish the aesthetically valuable from mere kitsch.[18] Jones defines the aesthetic as pleasurable response to form and he is especially critical of the Art world for collecting only painted or sculpted works rather than classifying all useful objects and activities as Art when looked at from the point of view of form.[19] Consistent with his formalism, Jones' idea of Folk Art embraces everything from holding a block party, putting up Christmas decorations, and arranging one's trash cans at the curb to common work place rituals.[20] In such passages Jones comes close to restoring the old meaning of "art" as any human making or performance, were he not committed to the formalist version of the modern idea of Art and the Aesthetic.[21]

Henry Glassie, on the other hand, is more aware of the negative aspects of imperial claims for the idea of Art. Although "craft" is clearly not a sufficiently "exalted term" for Glassie any more than it is for Jones, Glassie recognizes that the "craft" aspect of Folk Art is considered by most people in "folk" cultures the crucial aspect: "artisans from widely different cultures with whom I have talked have stressed technical virtuosity -- more than form or ornament -- as the key to their effort."[22] Yet for Glassie "Art" and "Aesthetic" remain indispensable terms. If it is true that "all art is craft," he writes, it is equally true that "all craft contains the potential to rise toward art."[23] Here Glassie also comes close to breaking with the assumptions of the modern system of Art but at the last minute he accepts the fundamental Art/craft polarity and seeks to extricate folk artifacts from being classified as craft. Yet Glassie is also aware as are few other folklorists of the cultural imperialism ingredient in the Euro-America idea of Art. He speaks of the "the colonial impulse (hidden in our definition of art in terms of media in which we chance to excel) ... rising to the surface" in Euro-American contact with other peoples and points out that textiles and ceramics are more nearly universal art forms than painting and sculpture.[24] Like many of those who have attacked the notion of "Primitive Art," Glassie writes that "our assumptions should be upset on contact."[25] But rather than attempting to challenge or rethink the most basic assumptions (e.g. the Art vs craffft polarity), he feels compelled to place folk performances and artifacts under them.

One of the few contemporary folklorists to have developed a clear eye for the imperial gestures of an Art world avid to embrace the artifacts of the "other" is Eugene Metcalf. In a remarkable article on "Black Folk Art and the Politics of Art" he shows how a well meaning exhibition of "Black Folk Art in America" at the Corcoran in 1980 used Art world definitions in a way that unintentionally disparaged the contributions of African-Americans. The exhibition not only featured atypical painting and carving rather than utilitarian craft works, it offered the usual backhand compliment about "the beauty which inheres in intentional crudeness...an aesthetic of compassionate ugliness and honesty."[26] Exhibiting individually conceived works by black artists as Folk Art, Metcalf claimed, "preserves the status and power of the leisure class" by collapsing the work of a minority culture into the category of the "crude but honest." And although genuine (utilitarian) black folk art which reflected the communal norms and struggles of the African-American community was neglected, Metcalf was quite aware of the colonial dynamics involved when the Art world does "elevate" utilitarian folk objects to Art status.

A more subtle -- or insidious -- course is to redefine them as aesthetic pieces, to consider them art. Gravestones, for example become sculpture ... For it is the leisure class that deems the utilitarian objects art, thereby suggesting that the black makers and the original black consumer lacked the sophistication and aesthetic skills properly to value the pieces in the first place.[27]

In the years that have elapsed since the "Black Folk Art in America" show, the Art world has continued to "elevate" the works of "others" in the belief that it is doing them a favor. In 1992 the curator of show of Latin American Folk Art described how he bought a brightly painted shoe shine box from a boy on the streets of Bogota to exhibit as Folk Art, but resolutely turned down anyone who claimed to make Folk Art.[28] But if a self-taught Columbian painter or carver decides to call his productions "Folk Art" in order to sell his works, he or she is only using terms outsiders have set up as markers of value. A similarly cavilier attitude toward cultures that do not share our idea of Art as an autonomous domain was manifested in the dismissive reaction of an American record producer to Nusrat Ali Kahn's worry that his chants of sacred praise to Allah were somehow diminished by being performed in a commercial context. As in the case of the quest for "authentic Primitive Art," it always turns out to be "we" who decide what is "Art" or "Folk Art" not "them" since we are, after all, the owners (actually "owned by") the Euro-American discourse of Art.

The folklorists and art critics who are so intent on gaining Art status for folk activities, not only overlook the patronizing and imperial gestures of such a move, they also overlook the ways in which quilts, chairs and religious paintings are falsified by their incorporation into the terms and institutions of the Art world. Appreciated as mere Art, for their "form" "vitality," "directness," "simplicity," or whatever criteria the Art world favors at the moment, their connection to a community of purposes and uses is devalued, if not disregarded. Like other works of human craft, the strength of folk arts is their connection to a social context of bodily and spiritual needs and their availability to the physical act of touch and use. To borrow John Perreault's quip about the elevation of studio crafts to Fine Art status, the folk crafts are not just as good as Art, they are better. To treat them as Art works and appreciate them from the aesthetic distance instituted by the gallery and museum is not to raise but diminish them. As Lucy Lippard has put it "instead of seeing "folk art" as potential high art and separating it from its uncommon ground, why not see its deep roots as something that can be emulated (rather than ripped off) by high art?"[29]

Although Lippard is aware of the distorting effects of such appropriation, like Glassie or like Sally Prince and others who write on "Primitive Art," she finally back off from her courageous statement, afraid that rejecting the terms Art, Artist or Aesthetic would deny equality and dignity to the makers and their works. Lippard yearns for the day when we will get along without categories and labels, when we will treat all arts as equal, a time when "naming from above" will not "overcome direct experience."[30] I share her desire for a rebirth of something like the older idea of art as works and activities embedded in everyday social contexts. But I believe that the regulative polarities, values and institutions of the modern system of Art stand in the way of a more "direct experience." Of course, there is no such thing as a "direct experience" in the sense of a completely neutral eye or ear; all experience is mediated by culture. But that does not mean we have to remain prisoners of the Euro-American system of Fine Art and the Aesthetic. The problem today is not to get people to admit that homemade Kentucky chairs and quilts are really Art, but to critically examine the assumptions and effects of such "naming from above."

Outsider Art

No kind of art or artist has been more enthusiastically ushered into the Art world than the "Outsider." The term "Outsider Artist" is even vaguer and less well defined than Folk Artist, and has become the equivalent in popular usage for any kind of untrained "loner," the successor to older terms like "naive" artist. Roger Manley has described the stereotypical "folk outsider" dear to popular collectors as a penniless, tooth-less eccentric, living in a shack at the end of a rural lane, and given to visionary seizures that result in crude otherworldly paintings or carvings.[31] The reality of these people's lives is quite different, particularly after they are "discovered." Many of those who have been taken up by the Art world turn their homes into something like a sweatshop, employing friends and relatives in the struggle to fill hundreds of orders from dealers, collectors and curators around the country.[32] Of course, reality has never matched the broad, amorphous notion of the Outsider as the unspoiled creator of visionary works. This becomes especially clear when we consider the disparate individuals the term has covered: the retired railroad worker who takes up painting as a hobby and produces pictures reminiscent of the modernist works he has seen in magazines, the solitary basket maker who still splits her own oak rods and stubbornly sticks to traditional forms, the religious visionary who believes his paintings are inspired by God, the obsessional who spends a lifetime building a monumental sculptural environment in the backyard, the prison inmate who has taken a few art classes, the asylum inmate who writes or draws in secret or has been given paints by an art therapist. Even a relatively sophisticated exhibition like Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art at Los Angeles in 1993, mixed together works of folk visionaries like Howard Finster, obsessional builders like Simon Rhodia and asylum inmates like Martin Ramirez.[33]

The one thing all these people supposedly have in common is a lack of formal training and no connection to the established Art world. Yet not even this generalization holds since few "Outsider Artists" have been totally insulated from a knowledge of classical or modern Art and, of course, as soon as they are "discovered" many of them are rapidly integrated into the Art world and often adapt to market demands by repeating over and over the motifs for which they are known or modify them at dealers or collectors's suggestions.[34] Moreover, many "outsider artists" are quite aware of the key terms in the modern discourse of Art and the Aesthetic. One self-taught "outsider" who makes sculptural and pictorial objects from urban debris, for example, has named himself "Mr. Imagination" and now has a Chicago dealer and has been the subject of gallery and museum shows. With the best known of the "Outsiders" fending off European and Japanese dealers, appearing on TV talk shows, receiving NEA grants, having one-person exhibitions in galleries and museums, it is hard not to wonder whether the term "outsider" still makes any sense.

I believe the fascination with Outsider Art tells us more about Art world assumptions and values today than about the works or those who make them. As Joanne Cubbs has suggested, one reason that "outsider" has caught on is that it resonates with the post-Romantic notion of the Artist as the misunderstood and marginalized visionary and non-conformist.[35] Michael Hall has pointed out that the term picks up both the modernist enthusiasm for the "domestic" outsiders like ex-customs officer and painter, Henri Rousseau, and the paradigmatically "exotic" outsider like ex-accountant and painter, Paul Gauguin.[36] Hall traces the self-chosen "outsider" position adopted by a number of twentieth century Artists in such dissimilar phenomena as American Regionalism of the 1930s or Andy Warhol's folk/pop gestures and even in Joseph Beuy's more politically oriented exoticism. By the 1980s "outsider" gestures from inside the Art world had become so tired they ceased to be convincing, and there was an explosion of enthusiasm not only for "Folk Art" loners but also for the ultimate "outsiders" of the prison and mental hospital.[37]

The "Outsiders" who have seemed the farthest outside are the mentally ill who in the past were confined to asylums. In fact the current popularity of the term "Outsider" is usually traced to Roger Cardinal's choice of it in 1972 as the translation of Jean Dubuffet's term Art Brut (literally "Raw Art").[38] The twentieth century fascination with madness as a source of creative power has been shaped by a mixture of notions, mostly derived from romanticism and psychoanalysis. In the popular version of these ideas, the poetry or painting of the insane are supposed to be a spontaneous expression of unconscious creativity. Since the asylum dweller is assumed to be both untrained and cut off from the world, their compulsive outpourings can be regarded from the romanic-pop-Freudian viewpoint as the purest form of Art, Art untainted by Art world ambitions or fashions. Here we supposedly encounter the unadulterated springs of creativity, the universal Art impulse in its raw (brut) form. Art critic James Yood puts it:

Free from hypocrisy, free from greed and envy, free from cruelty and lust, free from the ego, it is they who are natural, direct and authentic: their actions spring from need not ambition, and from a mind which is conscious and unconscious at the same moment.[39]

To anyone who knows something of the real lives of people suffering from severe mental difficulties, Yood's fantasy picture requires little comment. But I cite it as a not atypical effusion by Art world denizens and an illustration of the way the modern vocabulary of Fine Art and the Artist shapes perceptions. Equally striking is the parallel between the romanticization of the mentally ill "Outsider" and the now discredited idea of the "Primitive." Just as one of the guarantees of the "authenticity" of Primitive Art" was its supposedly spontaneous origin in powerful and unrestrained rites of blood and sex, so the "authenticity" of "Outsider Art" is guaranteed by its origin from powerful and uncontrolled visions of torment or bliss.[40] The celebrants of this kind of "Outsider Art" often ignore the pain of the mentally ill. As one critic puts it, "it is the work that is important. It is art. The lives of the artists are merely an outward manifestation of the obsession and inner struggle."[41] Another laments that as a result of anti-psychotic drugs and other therapies, most of the images made by the severely mentally ill are now "simply amateur art; mediocre, cliche-ridden and dull."[42] Julie Ardery has described how the habit of making peoples disabilities the source of their creativity often leads writers for one of the slick "Outsider Art" magazines, Raw Vision, "queasily close to glorifying human suffering."[43] The "works" themselves are distorted in the haste to "elevate" them to the status of Art. Shifting them from the asylum or home to the Art gallery and museum has meant that whatever the original context or intention of these works -- and many were the expression of a specific religious vision or conviction -- they are now treated almost exclusively in formal terms. Of course, critics and curators also employ a psychological vocabulary of "expression," "imagination," "vision," but these aestheticized terms reflect only a generalized idealization of the "intensity" (another favorite word) of inmates' vision, but little interest in their specific intentions or problems.

In the move from the home or asylum to the Art gallery and museum the makers' deeply religious intentions or their works' meaning in a communal context all but vanish.[44] No doubt the leisure class that frequents the galleries of Sunset Boulevard or SoHo gets an extra buzz out of Howard Finster's gospel visions -- they are even willing to pay $15,000 to $20,000 for their kicks. Where will they put Finster's big plywood cut out, Stranger From Another World, with its message: "I am the witness of the last days of Jesus ... I pastored churches 40 years trying to get the world to come together"? Right between their Josef Albers abstraction and their Tom Wesselman Pop Art nude? To call this appropriation into the Art world's aesthetic nexus an "elevation" makes sense only to those who place the modern insistence on the autonomy of the aesthetic at the pinnacle of all human values. As Joanne Cubbs has written "In the end, Outsider Art serves as a contemporary construct through which western culture can continue to exercise its belief in the mysterious, ineffable, and transcendent nature of art itself."[45]

But let an "Outsider" have the last word -- a sophisticated theater director to be sure, but one who spent time in the asylum and suffered repeated electroshocks and other indignities. He speaks here not of the theater but of his drawings:

cursed be he who considers them works of art, works of aesthetic stimulation. None is properly speaking a work. They are all ... staggering blows given in all the directions of change, possibility, hazard, or destiny.[46]

In his own way Antonin Artaud understood the colonizing power of the modern vocabulary of Art better than those who wield it in patronizing appropriation of the work of so many "Others."

Popular Art

In the second half of the twentieth century, some critics, philosophers and historians, have not only extended the norms of the modern system of Art over studio craft, folk and outsider arts, but have taken on the much more ambitious project of assimilating into High Art the entire set of genres identified as popular culture or the popular arts. Like some imperial ambitions of the past, swallowing something so large and unruly as popular culture could prove too much for the constitutive norms of the modern system of Art. Those who are the guardians of that vocabulary and its institutions might have to cede not a concept here, an ideal there, but might find the idea of Art itself transformed beyond recognition. Thus far, however, most those who want to grant certain aspects of popular culture or the popular arts the status of Fine Art, like those who want to incorporate Folk Art or Outsider Art believe their task is a simple one of "elevation" and continue to deploy the normative vocabulary of Art unaltered.

Of course, the people who actually "make" popular art, whether film directors, popular singers, cartoonists, couturiers or advertising designers already speak of themselves and their work in the normative terms of the modern discourse of Art, particularly that of the Artist as genius of the creative imagination who is devoted to Art as a spiritual vocation. Barry Manilow shows all the angst appropriate to the romantic-modernist ideal of the Artist in the following interview:

It had gotten to the point were it wasn't art, and it wasn't music -- it was business ... I had made it so big and so fast I lost my balance, and a lot of artists to whom that happens never find their way back home ... the art takes a beating."[47]

I mentioned in my introduction Madonna's defence of her stage erotics as Art. The special freedom and integrity of the Artist rather than mere first amendment rights was also invoked in the defense of the 2 Live Crew Rap group in a celebrated Florida obscenity case. Dennis Barrie who moved from running the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati at the time of the famous Mapplethorpe exhibition and obscenity trial to directing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has equated the two kinds of art work. "Both trials were based on the artistic expression of sex. The government was threatened by the art viewed in museums and by the art sold in record stores."[48] Rap, of course, has long since been elevated to one of the Fine Arts by some professional critics and academics and in at least one case has even received the blessing of philosophical aesthetics.[49]

One reason the status of popular art is so hard to pin down is that it has historically been the intersection for several political and cultural agendas, sometimes with surprising results. Thus, both conservative and Marxist critics in the past have agreed that "popular art" is mostly a form of commercial kitsch compared to the demanding qualities of Fine or High Art. Alan Bloom's complaints against popular music, if less discerning, were no more negative than those of Theodor Adorno even if their justifications were widely different. Many of those who have taken a negative view of popular art such as Adorno or the American literary critic Dwight Macdonald, have insisted that one really ought to speak of "mass culture" or "mass art" since they regard popular culture not as the culture of the "people" but as a culture constructed by those who control the mass media. Mass culture in this view is characterized by formulas, escapism, and passive consumption. Adorno and Horkheimer long ago set the tone for such analyses of "the culture industry" as compared to "serious art."[50] Even scholarly attempts to find some dimension of serious meaning in popular culture are threatening from this perspective. Art critic Harold Rosenberg once wrote that "every discovery of `significance' in Lil Abner or Mickey Spillane helps to destroy the distinction between kitsch and art ... If only Popular Culture were left to the populace."[51]

Many of the critics and historians who rejected the claims being made on behalf of popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s, however, used a tripartite model of Fine Art, popular art, folk art rather a simple High Art/Low Art polarity. Arnold Hauser offered a typical articulation of the triadic schema in his Philosophy of Art History:

"Serious, authentic, responsible art, which necessarily involves a wrestling with the problems of life and an effort to capture the meaning of human existence ... has little in common either with folk art, which is hardly often more than play and adornment, or with popular art, which is never more than entertainment and a means of passing the time. When one thinks of the creations of Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Bach or Beethoven, Flaubert or Baudelaire, one feels reluctant to reckon as art either the playful and clumsy ornaments and songs of peasants or the literature and music of the modern entertainment industry ... Anyone who has known the shattering experience of being involved with a real work of art...is very ready to maintain that there is only one art, indivisible and incapable of being diluted, and beside which all else is devoid of significance or value.”[52]

I have cited Hauser at length since his is probably as eloquent a statement of the negative view of popular culture as one can find. Yet most critics and philosophers who worked with the tripartite model had a much deeper appreciation of folk art than Hauser's statement suggests. In fact one function of the tripartite model for many critics was to set up the art of the unspoiled folk who had made and enjoyed their own music, stories or artifacts as a foil for an even more negative positioning of popular art. In the usual triadic scheme popular art ranks lowest since it does not come from the "people" like folk art had but is made for them by a distant and exploitive culture industry.[53]

Not all those who have used the tripartite division into serious, popular and folk have done so with a polemical intention; there have be numerous sociological attempts to position various cultural strata in modern society. Most of these have been concerned with the distribution of cultural choices between high and popular culture along class lines. One of the obvious results of these studies is to show the degree of interpenetration of High and Low and the fact that there is a broad range of "intermediate" literature, music and visual art that appeals to a "middle brow" taste. The best known of these is Herbert Gan's book in which he was not only able to correlate Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow taste in art, cars, furniture and clothing with class distinctions, but suggest various grades in between each level.[54] In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated a similar correlation in French society between various markers of class and cultural preferences or behaviors such as museum attendance. Unlike many sociologists, Bourdieu is also aware of the fact that the modern idea of Fine Art is a construction of the eighteenth century and sees the snobbishness of Parisian High culture mandarins as a continuation of the court taste vs popular taste divisions of pre-Revolutionary society.[55] Such studies of the 1960s and 1970s both reflected and encouraged a tendency within the academic world to treat popular culture as worthy of aesthetic appreciation and study alongside the traditional Fine Art genres and canon.

By the late 1960s progressive Literature professors were already teaching courses on detective fiction, television sit-coms and the comics. At the same time the Pop Art movement within the Fine Art world was opening up serious collector's taste to the aesthetic possibilities of popular art objects and performances. By the 1970s many critics, curators, and collectors were beginning to interpret, exhibit, and promote some works of Popular Art with the same arguments and strategies as they did Fine Art. Art galleries and auction houses now sell framed Disney animation cells or blow ups of Herriman's Krazy Kat comic panels along with Roy Lichtenstein's High Art takeoffs on them. Admitting that works of Popular Art are not always on the same level of complexity as Dvorak or Kandinsky, advocates have pointed out that artists like Dvorak and Kandinsky themselves had celebrated the music and art of "the people" and incorporated its motifs in their own work. The traffic between "serious" or Art music and popular music which was evidenced in composers like Ives or Stravinsky has all but been institutionalized since Duke Ellington and the rise of the cross-over performer/composers like Winton Marsalus. The champions of Popular Art, like the Art world promoters of Folk Art, have also argued that what popular works might lack in complexity or existential thematics, they more than make up in spontaneity and directness.

Lawrence Levine's recent work attempts to collapse the categories Popular Art and Folk Art in a strategic move to counter the disparagement of Popular Art as a fabricated "mass" culture foisted on a passive public. Levine calls popular culture the "folklore of the industrial age."[56] Levine's earlier studies of rural African-American culture had shown him that the arrival of the radio and the phonograph did not simply wipe out folk music traditions but interacted with them, producing a hybrid music.[57] In a previous chapter we followed Levine's account of how early nineteenth century American culture was a similar mixture of high and low culture, a time when Shakespeare and farce, opera and popular song, played to a mixed audience. That cacophonous interpenetration of cultures and classes came apart by the beginning of the twentieth century as the leaders of opinion pushed for an Arnoldian sense of Culture as "the best that has been thought and known." As the great Fine Art Museums, Opera houses, Symphony halls, and "legitimate" Theaters were "purified" of their popular elements and became increasingly a place for the educated middle and upper classes, the mass of people turned their attention to the more accessible media of musical comedy, photography, comic strips, movies, and radio, which, in Levine's view, were often more "fresh, exciting, innovative, intellectually challenging, and highly imaginative."

If there is a tragedy in this development, it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them ... that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.[58]

On a very wide front since 1970, historians, sociologists, students of literature, and critics of art and culture have been exploding older academic myths about popular culture as they study it with the same critical and interpretive categories once reserved for the Fine Arts. In the process, most of these scholars and critics have become champions of popular culture's equal status with the Fine Arts.[59] Of course, there were those in the nineteenth century, like Tolstoy, who were also ready to reverse the positions of Fine Art and Popular Art. And there have been Marxist inspired versions of the view of that the common people are the bearers of authentic culture and the upper class elite culture is an instrument of oppression.[60] The more typical recent approach to elevating the popular arts to the status of Art, however, has been to challenge one by one the standard polarities which have been set up by those who dismiss popular art as "mass culture." Thus, it is argued that many works of popular culture are complex in their own way, often confront serious issues, often challenge our sensibilities and values even as they entertain us, etc.[61] Other writers are more willing to grant that popular art often has different aims and qualities, such as entertainment, sentimentalism, and an emphasis on sensual over cerebral pleasures, but suggest that these aims and qualities are also human and as worthy of admiration as the complexity, intellectuality and innovation supposed to characterize Fine Art.[62]

Perhaps the most important fruit of the historical and sociological research on popular arts, has been the detailed refutation of the idea that the "masses" are simply passive consumers. There are numerous studies of both past and present audience response to novels, radio, film and television which show that the supposedly undifferentiated "mass" is anything but passive. Ordinary people are quite capable of skepticism, disbelief, and disagreement with the content and style of the programs or films they consume and, even more important, they often interpret songs or stories in ways not intended by those who disseminate them. Jane Radaway, for example, has demonstrated that women's responses to the popular romance genre have been neither passive nor uniform.[63] Although this new thesis of popular resistance and transformation is now held by many academics, D. G. Robin Kelly warns against the celebratory tone of writers like Levine. Kelly points out that there is still plenty of evidence that mass culture successfully restricts availability of viewpoints, manipulates responses in some instances and, of course, serves to reinforce popular prejudices and stereotypes.[64] Even if we keep Kelly's caution in mind, however, not only are the audiences for popular arts more critically aware than many have pretended, but there is plenty of evidence of passive consumption on the part of the museum and symphony hall audience. One need only consider the organization and marketing of many of the "blockbuster" exhibitions and the hundreds of people walking about like zombies listening to the recorded commentaries on headsets. Moreover, in their desperation for "earned income," Art museums along with symphony, opera and ballet organizations have all been forced to appeal to a broader audience and even mix "popular" works into their repertoire.

It is one thing to explode various negative myths about popular arts and popular culture, or to show that there are plenty of shallow, formulaic and banal oil paintings, symphonies and plays; it is another simply to fold the popular arts into the modern system and norms of Fine Art. I find particularly interesting the motivating arguments for the most recent efforts to elevate popular culture to Art status. Of course, there are still those who are inspired by the older religious or political ideal of championing the art of the "people" or of the "folk" against the elite pretension of Fine Art (some of this egalitarian spirit seems to be behind Levine's enthusiasm). The willingness of philosophers like Ted Cohen or Richard Schusterman to wrap popular culture in the mantle Art is a more generalized version of the egalitarian ideal. These philosophers' basic position, like that of folklorist Henry Glassie, is that "Art" is not so much a definable category as a reverential term which our society casts over the artifacts and performances it most highly values. It follows that if we highly value some aspect of popular culture, we must incorporate it into Art with a capital "A." There are, of course, nuances in the application of this view. Ted Cohen, for example, speaks of Art as what a particular community of people finds important and unifying. On this basis he believes we can make a non-invidious distinction between Fine Art and Popular Art. The various Fine Arts with their historical traditions and complex aesthetic criteria, create small communities of appreciators who are intensely linked to one another by shared norms. The Popular Arts, on the other hand, link us less intensely to a larger communities of interest. Thus, even though Cohen thinks it important to retain the distinction between Fine and Popular, both are entitled to the same elevated appellation, "Art."[65] Richard Schusterman has gone farther than either Cohen or Park, arguing that "such highly valued classificatory terms as `Art' and `Aesthetic'" should not be conceded "to high culture's exclusive possession."[66] The way around this for Schusterman is to modify the traditional notion of the Aesthetic as disinterested contemplation in the direction of a broader Deweyan "consummatory experience." He notes that much of the Popular Art world uses the traditional ideas of the Artist and the Aesthetic already and sees this a part of "recent developments in post-modern culture" which suggest the "implosion of the aesthetic into all areas of life."[67] Like Michael Owen Jones, who views all contemporary social forms as "Folk Art," Schusterman's pan-Aestheticism embraces not only all of Popular Art, but also what he calls the "art of living."

Yet Schusterman, like Glassie, recognizes that in folding so many new genres and activities into Art some of the norms of the modern discourse of Art and the Aesthetic must be stretched or even discarded, whether it is the modern emphasis on disinterested contemplation of form or the low value attached to craft skill. Nevertheless, both the folklorist and philosophical champions of folk and popular genres insist that they must be called Folk Art of Popular Art with the same status connotations that cling to the "Art" in Fine Art. Indeed some champions of popular culture as Art seem prepared to give up anything about the modern discourse of Art and the Aesthetic except the aura that still clings to these terms. Yet the aura depends in large part on maintaining some sense of Art as a distinct and superior realm of spiritual values. At the moment there seems little possibility of a return to the older meaning of "art" and "artist" as referring to ordinary making and performance in a context of social purpose. The word "art" with a small "a" has been so contaminated by the modern discourse of Art that simply letting more and more genres or media or performers into an ambiguously conceived "art," cannot soon cleanse it of two centuries of spiritualist hype. Just because anything and everything today can be Art or anyone and everyone can be an Artist does not mean we have returned to a more communal and functional idea of art and artist. The aura clings.

KITSCH

If a few intellectuals have wanted to assimilate aspects of folk, outsider and popular culture into high art, there is one category that might seem totally resistant: kitsch. Kitsch is a term of dismissal; a piece of kitsch is not even worthy of aesthetic discussion. Of course, kitsch items like Kewpie dolls or autographed basketballs have been incorporated into high Art works by people like Jeff Koons and fetch high prices, but within the context of the Art world the original kitsch image or musical motif becomes a comment on kitsch and popular culture and part of high Art. Some would argue that kitsch is not a category of Art at all. As the German writer, Hermann Broch, put it many years ago, "Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art."[68] Like so many other terms associated with art, however, "kitsch" is hard to pin down and critics have disagreed on its definition almost as often as they have over "art." Used of a piece of music or writing by a professional artist, the appelation "kitsch" is intended to wound or destroy. But the most interesting use of the idea of kitsch from the point of view of the present study, is that many critics dump all of popular culture into the category of kitsch -- not only car chase movies and country music, but even such "high-kitsch" items as The New Yorker magazine or TV adaptations of Jane Austen.[69] These polemical uses have led Irving Howe to suggest that "kitsch" is finally just a term for what we don't like, not a category of analysis.[70] Leaving aside snobby critics with an itchy finger on the kitsch trigger, there are a few common themes that keep returning in discussions of kitsch, suggesting the term may have some distinguishing criteria. If "kitsch" does not prove useful as a category of analysis, it may prove useful as a symptom of how we use the category of Art.

Thomas Kulka has recently formulated three themes as essential conditions for a definition of kitsch: 1) it appeals to the most conventional emotions (sentimentality, patriotism), 2) it uses immediately recognizable subject matter presented in an commonly accepted style (an impressionist painting of smiling children, a Sousa march played by a college band), and 3) reinforces established beliefs and institutions (family values, national pride). As Kulka admits, by themselves these three criteria do not explain fully why we reject kitsch as both aesthetically and artistically so deficient as to place it outside of Art altogether and so he adds two supporting criteria, one aesthetic, the other, art historical. A genuine Art work is opposed to kitsch by its greater aesthetic complexity, and, above all, by making or expanding on an innovative contribution to Art history.[71] Kulka, like many others, recognizes that there are not only levels of kitsch, but also that over time some things considered Art can become kitsch, either as a result of popularization (Vivaldi's Four Seasons), or by a change in values (the romantic-nationalist sentiments of Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" now make it seem like kitsch).[72]

But there is an even deeper historical issue at stake in these discussions of the definition of kitsch and the historical transformation of art into kitsch: is the very idea of kitsch not time specific? The term itself only dates from the late nineteenth century. One of the problems with the criteria which Kulka distilled from general usage is that by these criteria most of the painting, music and literature prior to the nineteenth centuiry could be classified as kitsch. To take only two obvious example, certainly many of Bach's cantatas and Raphael's Madonnas appeal to common emotions, in an easily recognizable style, aim a reinforcing established values, and did not aim at formal innovation. Consequently, many of those who have reflected on the subject of kitsch see it as a category that emerged only with the industrial revolution and the mass culture of the late nineteenth century. They see kitsch as the mechanized successor to genuine folk art, providing the deracinated urban masses with cheap and easily understood entertainment done in outmoded styles. As we saw earlier, there is in fact evidence that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the urban working class still participated in some of the same cultural activities as the upper classes, whether Shakespeare or the opera, but during the second half of the century the two began to be definitively separated. As Stanley Kauffmann puts it, a Dickens or Verdi were appreciated by both "the shoeblack and the most recondite mind," but by the early twentieth century "the world divides into those who appreciate fine art and those who want kitsch."[73]

Looked at from the perspective of the genealogy of Art that we have been reconstructing, it is striking that the category of kitsch seems to have emberged only after the modern system of Art was fully established; by the early twentieth century "kitsch" became one of its defining limits. This is one reason that recent attempts to appropriate aspects of "tribal," folk or outsider art are so deceptive. As in the case of the "crafts as Art" movement, folk, outsider and certain popular works or genres are assimilated by the Art world on fine art's terms with the rest consigned to the status of kitsch. From this perspective the idea of kitsch is not so much a new analytical category as an intensification of the more negative aspects of the traditional Art vs craft polarity. Far from overcoming the modern split between fine art and craft, or serious art and popular art or high art and folk art, most of the recent moves by the Art world to assimilate folk and outsider arts have continued to operate within regulative polarities established in the eighteenth century. The elite who define these cultural boundaries simply shift them in their own interests by selectively assimilating certain "lower" genres. Depending on the critic's or theorist's bent larger or narrower swaths of popular culture, folk or "tribal" arts can be inside or outside the exalted domain of Art proper.

This is nowhere clearer than in the atttempt to deal with the political and ethical aspects of kitsch. In a brilliant analysis of Nazi culture, Saul Friedlander has argued that we should sharply distinguish between what he calls "common" or "mass" kitsch (popular culture, a la Disney) and "uplifting" or "ideological" kitsch (official culture of the Nazi or Cummunist type). The nationalistic kitsch of the Nazis deployed easily understood images to elicit a quasi-religious emotional response. In the Nazi law governing the proper use of the swastika, they themselves used the term "kitsch" to characterize such things as putting a swastika on a candy wrapper.[74] Anyone who has watched Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will or listened to one of Hitler's radio performances, will understand the ingenious and powerful effect of Nazi symbols glorifying nation and race and calling for the supreme sacrifice. Official communist art forms, as Miland Kundera has suggested, used similar techniques with different themes, but with the same aim political end of mass mobilization. I am struck by the fact that although a few thinkers like Friedlander are willing to treat mass kitsch or popular culture as a relatively innocent form of entertainment, many art, music and literature critics still insist on seeing most popular culture as a kind of opiate of the masses which has replaced what was once authentic folk art in Europe and America and authentic native cultures around the world. I think we should be sceptical of the ease with which many writers slip into a language suggesting that high or avant-garde, or "cutting-edge" Art is on the side of the angels and only kitsch has been supported by fascists, totalitarians and capitalist exploiters. We should not forget that although Hitler and Stalin detested avant-garde Art, they did not do so in the name of craft or functionalism but in the name of nineteenth century representational styles of fine art. Nor should we forget that Mussolini embraced the Futurists and modernist architecture or that there were fascist writers, composers and painters in many European countries who worked in complex avant-garde styles. Friedlander's carefully delimited concept of kitsch illuminates Nazi cultural practice, but we should not let "Art" off the hook so easily, automatically putting High Art on the side of humane values and kitsch on the side of totalitarianism and genocide.

Susan Sontag has spoken of how writing about the films of Leni Reifenstahl awakened her to the "limits of the category of the aesthetic" and she agrees with Friedlander that once we recognize the problem of kitsch we are in the domain of the ethical.[75] By now I hope it will be evident why it is so difficult for most of us to recognize the ethical in the aesthetic -- the very construction of the ideals of Art, Artist and Aesthetic was from the beginning tied to the elimination of all of "use," including moralality, except by the indirect means of turning Art itself into a redemptive religion. The nineteenth century elevation of Art to an autonomous domain (sometimes justified as a metaphysical absolute) was the culmination of that fracturing movement whose first striings came in the Renaissance, but were not consumated until the early nineteenth century. Can we recover that lost unity and put back together what has been so deeply sundered? When Friedlander expresses a willingness to see positive value in the everyday pleasures of the popular arts, he suggests an openness to a third way that is neither high Art or craft.[76] Our choice is not, as Greenberg argued, "avant-garde or kitsch." Some people began trying to rejoin Art and craft, artist and craftsperson, beauty and use almost as soon as the modern system of Art was established. Part of the problem of overcoming the polarities of that system is not only our tendency to underestimate the difficulties, but also the pain of readjusting our belief in high Art, the artist as autonomous creator, and the aesthetic as redemptive experience. In order for Art and the artist to lose their "separate and contrasted existence" (Emerson), they cannot retain their autonomous and elevated status while adding a little ethics, politics or utility on the side. A deeper transformation is required.

NOTES

[1]. Hugo Munsterberg, The Folk Arts of Japan (Tuttle, Vermont: Tuttle Press, 1958), 19.

[2]. Julie Ardery, "The Designation of Difference," New Art Examiner (September 1991): 29-31.

[3]. For a sensitive discussion of the issues involved see Rosemary O. Joyce, "`Fame Don't Make the Sun Any Cooler':Folk Artists and the Marketplace" in John Michael Vlach and Simon J. Bronner, eds. Folk Art and Art Worlds. (Ann Arbor: U.M.I Research Press, 1986), 225-241.

[4]. Jonathan M. Moses, "Heirs of Folk Artist Seek Rights to Work." Wallstreet Journal, Monday, November 30, 1992, Section B, 8.

[5]. Vlach, Folk Art, 15.

[6]. The history I have reviewed here is what one might call the "official" view of the rise of Folk Art. Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr. has shown that,in fact there were exhibitions of folk art which did not assimilate it to Fine Art genres but treated it much more like craft, focusing on the utilitarian work of weavers, potters, joiners and leather workers as reflections of immigrant contributions. "The Politics of the Past in American Folk Art History." in Vlach, Folk Art, 27-50.

[7]. As Kenneth Ames has pointed out this is unlike the broader and more inclusive concept of folk culture in Europe. Beyond Necessity: Art in the Folk Tradition. (Winterthur: Winterthur Museum, 1977), 82.

[8]. Charles L. Briggs, "The Role of Mexicano Artists and the Anglo Elite in the Emergence of a Contemporary Folk Art." in Vlach, Folk Art, 218.

[9]. Once professional folklorists began to study such works and publish books about them, collectors, dealers and museum curators have beaten a path to their doors. Michael Owen Jones, The Hand Made Object and Its Maker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

[10]. Ames, Beyond Necessity, 25-26.

[11]. Ibid., 29.

[12]. The Substance of Ames' lectures is reproduced in Beyond Necessity in which he attacks what he calls "five myths" of the Art world about what it calls "Folk Art."

[13]. David Jaffee, "`A Correct Likeness': Culture and Commerce in Nineteenth Century Rural America." in Vlach, Folk Art, 53-84.

[14]. Ames,Beyond Necessity, 42.

[15]. Ibid., 18-19.

[16]. John Michael Vlach, "The Wrong Stuff." New Art Examiner (September, 1991):24.

[17]. Henry Glassie, The Spirit of Folk Art: The Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 42.

[18]. Michael Owen Jones, Exploring Folk Art: Twenty Years of Thought on Craft, Work, and Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1987), 60.

[19]. Michael Owen Jones, "How Do You Get Inside the Art of Outsiders?", in Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr. The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1994), 315.

[20]. Ibid., 87-88.

[21]. The contortions Jones goes through to get functional objects into the modern aesthetic discourse is especially apparent in his argument that in folk communities "whether a chair `sets good' and `rocks good' depends as much on aesthetic concerns, imagination in designing, and skill in construction as on utilitarian considerations." Ibid., 13. Since setting good and rocking good are utilitarian considerations and a central aspect of the idea of craft along with the emphasis on skill in construction, it is not clear why he things theses things must be called "aesthetic" except that it allows him to wrap the language of Art and Aesthetics around theses works as a compliment.

[22]. Glassie, The Spirit of Folk Art, 57.

[23]. Ibid., 87. Italics mine.

[24]. Ibid.,50.

[25]. Ibid.

[26]. Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr. "Black Folk Art and the Politics of Art." in Judith H. Balfe and Margaret Jane Wyszomirski, eds. Art, Ideology, and Politics. (New York: Praeger, 1984), 183.

[27]. Ibid., 189.

[28]. From an interview with Marion Oettinger concerning the show "Visiones del Pueblo" at the Museum of American Folk Art on the program "All Things Considered," National Public Radio, October 18, 1992. I don't want to be too hard on Oettinger whose attitudes as expressed in the interview seemed otherwise exemplary. After all he was concerned to chose objects which were genuine communal expressions and was quite aware of the loss of meaning which results from decontextualization in the Art museum. The point is not that people have wrong attitudes about Art which could be corrected by adopting better attitudes, but that the Euro-American discourse of Art forces us into these positions.

[29]. Lucy Lippard, "Crossing into Uncommon Grounds," in The Artist Outsider, 11.

[30]. Lippard, Crossing into Uncommon Grounds," 10.

[31]. Roger Manley, "Separating the Folk From Their Art." New Art Examiner. (September, 1991): 25.

[32]. Ibid.

[33]. Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel, eds. Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (Princeton: Princeton University, 1992). The authors justify their selection since their aim was to show the influences and parallels between the work of the "modern Western artists" and the work of compulsive visionaries in particular," 10.

[34]. Joyce, "Folk Artists in the Marketplace," in Vlach,?Folk Art, 237-40.

[35]. Joanne Cubbs, "Rebels, Mystics, and Outcasts: The Romantic Artist Outsider," in The Outsider Artist, 76-95.

[36]. Michael D. Hall, "The Mythic Outsider." New Art Examiner (september, 1991): 19.

[37]. Ibid., 21.

[38]. Roger Cardinal, Outsider Art (New York: Praeger, 1972). A letter from Cardinal explaining why he felt this the best of the many possible terms has been published in Parallel Visions, 11.

[39]. Tuchman and Eliel, Parallel Visions, 18.

[40]. These assumption about the mentally ill being in touch with the raw springs of human creativity have been central to the process of the assimilation of these works into the galleries and museums. See Sarah Wilson, "From the Asylum to the Museum," in Tuchman and Eliel, Parallel Visions, 121-126.

[41]. Sam Fabian as quoted in Eugene D. Metcalf, Jr. "From Domination to Desire: Insider and Outsider Art," in The Artist Outsider, 221.

[42]. John M. MacGregor quoted in Ibid., 119.

[43]. Julie Ardery, "Difference," New Art Examiner, 31.

[44]. Wilson, in Tuchman and Eliel, Parallel Visions, 142.

[45]. Cubbs, "Rebels, Mystics, and Outcasts," 90.

[46]. Ibid., 127.

[47]. From the "Arts and Leisure" section, New York Times (October 13, 1991).

[48]. Quoted in Roberto Santiago, "Dennis Barrie and the Art of Controversy, Oberlin Alumni Magazine Summer, 1995, 12.

[49]. Richard Schusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), chapter .

[50]. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), 120-167. Originally published in 1944 in German and reissued in 1969, it was not translated into English until 1972.

[51]. Cited in Lawrence Levine, "The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences." American Historical Review 97 (December, 1992): 1371.

[52]. Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1985) 281-82. First published in German and English in 1958.

[53]. For a discussion of various versions of the tripartite model see Sung-Bong Park, An Aesthetics of the Popular Arts (Stockholm, Uppsala University, 1993), 42-44.

[54]. Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

[55]. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1984). Originally published in French in 1979.

[56]. Levine, "The Folklore of Industrial Society," 1372-73.

[57]. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness:Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: , 1977).

[58]. Lawrence W. Levine, Hibrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1988), 232-33.

[59]. Some critics of Levine are concerned precisely with this mixture of the thesis that popular culture is important and worthy of serious analysis with the thesis that it is the equal of high culture. For Roger Chartier's general critique of the belief in a golden age of cultural interpenetration see Roger Chartier, "Popular Culture: A Concept Revisited," Intellectual History Newsletter 15 (1993):3-13.

[60]. Chartier includes in his critique of the nostalgia for a golden age, M. M. Bakhtin's view, popular with many literary critics, that a wonderfully free "carnavalesque" culture of the sixteenth century was repressed by authorities in the seventeenth.

[61]. Levine, "Folklore of Industrial Society," 1374-75. A more extensive critique may be found in Schusterman's Pragmatist Aesthetics, - .

[62]. Park, Aesthetics of the Popular Arts,54-66.

[63]. Jane Radaway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1984).

[64]. Robin D. G. Kelly, "Notes on Deconstructing `The Folk'." American Historical Review 97:5 (December, 1992): 1400=1426.

[65]. Ted Cohen, "High and Low Art," paper presented at the American Society for Aesthetics, Austin, Texas, October, 1991. Sung-Bong Park adopts a similar position in Aesthetics of the Popular Arts, 66.

[66]. Schusterman, Pragmatic Aesthetics, 204.

[67]. Ibid., 209.

[68]. Hermann Broch, "Notes on the Problem of Kitsch," in Gillo Dorfles, ed. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste (New York: Universe Books, 1969), 62.

[69]. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 11. On Masterpiece Theatre as kitsch see the comments of Robert Boyers in the symposium "On Kitsch" in Salmagundi, 85-86 (1990):297-98.

[70]. In his remarks during a symposium "On Kitsch," reproduced in Salmagundi Nol. 85-86, Winter-Spring, (1990): 305-309.

[71]. As Kulka admits, by themselves these three criteria do not explain fully why we reject kitsch as both aesthetically and artistically so deficient as to be outside the realm of Art altogether. He calim that to auxiliary criteria, one aesthetic, the other, art historical, must be called on to explain why Art and kitsch are totally opposed. As he points out, some modernist works such as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon are aesthetically less unified as compositions than many popular or academic works classified as kitsch. But the apparent compositional unity of kitsch works only masks their formal shallowness since almost any alteration in form could be made without affecting the stock emotional response, whereas the complexity of real works of Art like Les Demoiselles means such alterations would destroy their effects. Hence, genuine Art is aesthetically more successful than kitsch if we loook beyond superficial ideas of composition, etc. But Kulka's main move is his art histrical argument that whereas Picasso's experimental pointing was deficient as a finished work, and in fact misunderastood by some of his colleagues, it was a revolutionary breakthrough in the procession of Art historical styles. Kulka, Kitsch and Art, 25-37.

[72]. For an illuminating debate over whether Brook's world War I poem is "kitsch" or just "bad art" see "On Kitsch" symposium, 279-83.

[73]. "On Kitsch," 255.

[74]. These ideas were first developed in Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1993 [ original French version 1982]). Friedlander also discussed them in his opening remarks to the symposium "On Kitsch" reprinted in Salmagundi, 198-206.

[75]. Comments during the symposium "On Kitsch" in Salmagundi, 215-16.

[76]. This position seems also to be that of Robert Nozick in the "On Kitsch" symposium in Salmagundi, 221.