The Word for Art That Isn’t Trying
Clement Greenberg—“Kitsch”
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unich. The 1860s. In the city’s art markets, dealers had a word for the paintings nobody serious wanted. Cheap. Quick. Sold to tourists by the dozen. That word outlived every one of those paintings. |
Nobody agrees exactly where “kitsch” came from. Some trace it to a German dialect verb, kitschen, meaning to smear or dash off a sketch. Others think it started as a garbled version of the English word “sketch,” mispronounced by German dealers. What everyone agrees on is what it meant: cheap, sentimental, mass-market paintings for buyers with money but no training in what serious art was supposed to look like.
The word crossed into English by the 1920s, still meaning roughly the same thing: gaudy, sentimental trash. It took an American critic, writing in 1939, to give it real intellectual teeth.
This is about as textbook an example of kitsch as anyone ever painted.
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| Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, “A Friend in Need,” 1903. |
Seven bulldogs sit around a card table, one slipping an ace under the felt. Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1844–1934), an American painter, made this and fifteen more like it for a Minnesota advertising firm starting in 1903, printed by the millions as calendars for cigar companies. You have almost certainly seen a copy hanging in a bar or a garage.
In 1939, the critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) published an essay in a small New York magazine called Partisan Review, titled “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” He argued that kitsch was “ersatz culture,” a fake substitute for the real thing, built to deliver an easy emotional payoff without asking the viewer to work for it.
Greenberg blamed industrialization for creating this problem in the first place. Cities filled with newly literate workers who had money to spend… and no training in what earlier centuries had called good taste. Kitsch, he argued, existed to sell them a feeling of culture without the difficulty of the real thing.
I used to think of kitsch as simply meaning “tacky.” Reading Greenberg, I realized the word was originally an argument, not just a description: a claim about who art is made for, and what it’s allowed to ask of them.
Greenberg went further, and more controversially, claiming that difficult, abstract avant-garde art existed specifically to outrun kitsch, to stay one deliberate step ahead of anything easy to copy or mass-produce. He later softened that argument. The essay itself never lost its bite.
The word has drifted a long way since 1939. Postmodern and camp culture eventually made a virtue of loving kitsch openly, on purpose, rather than getting caught enjoying it by accident.
Seven bulldogs, one hidden ace… and an entire theory of twentieth-century taste, all riding on the same card table.
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