High vs. Low, or Good vs. Bad
LAT art critic Christopher Knight recently published an excellent piece on the false dichotomy between "high art" and "kitsch," first posited by Clement Greenberg. I'm not a huge fan of Knight, but this piece is worth reading in its entirety to get the historical context. Here's an excerpt:
The only distinction that truly matters is the one between good art and bad art, accounting for all the shades of gray in between. Jackson Pollock's paintings are better than Robert Motherwell's. "The Ernie Kovacs Show" is better television than "The Adventures of Superman." Arguing the reasons sharpens perception.
By contrast, ranking a painting against a TV show is just dumb--not to mention undemocratic. The measure of moral and intellectual status does not derive from hereditary social station, as if painting is for princes and television is for scullery maids. I'd as soon look at a "Six Feet Under" episode as a Lucian Freud painting any day.
Speaking of Clark Kent, Pop art in the 1960s turned out to be Greenberg's Kryptonite. Edward Ruscha and Andy Warhol, Depression-era babies from Omaha and Pittsburgh, brought their hardscrabble pasts with them when they high-tailed it to opposite coasts as young men. Both knew something crucial: In American art's democratic lexicon, every avant-garde idea could be represented in kitsch terms of popular entertainment.
In a famous 1943 letter to the New York Times, budding Abstract Expressionist painters Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb wrote "only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless." For Greenberg's avant-garde, the tragic and the timeless meant abstract painting. In Warhol's hands it would mean the numinous mystery of Marilyn Monroe's shocking suicide and the national trauma of Jackie Kennedy's widowhood, chronicled in the tabloids.