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"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" is the title of a 1939 essay byClement Greenberg, first published in thePartisan Review, in which he claimed thatavant-garde andmodernist art was a means to resist the "dumbing down" of culture caused byconsumerism.
The term "kitsch" came into use in the 1860s or 1870s in Germany's street markets, and referred to pictures that were cheap, popular, and marketable.[1] Greenberg considers kitsch to be "ersatz culture," asimulacrum ofhigh culture that adopts many of its exterior trappings but none of its subtleties.
Greenberg believed that the avant-garde arose in order to defendaesthetic standards from the decline oftaste perpetuated by the mass-production of consumer society, and saw kitsch and art as opposites.[2]
One of his more controversial claims was that kitsch was equivalent toAcademic art: "All kitsch is academic, and conversely, all that is academic is kitsch." He argued this based on the fact that Academic art, such as that in the 19th century, was heavily centered in rules and formulations that were taught and tried to make art into something learnable and easily expressible. He later came to withdraw from his position of equating the two, as it became heavily criticized.
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