High Art versus Popular Art: Redrawing the Aesthetic Hierarchy

Clement Greenberg's essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," published in Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939), drew a sharp evaluative line between the genuine, self-critical formal innovation of avant-garde modernist art and what he termed "kitsch" — mass-produced, formulaic, easily consumed popular culture, among which Greenberg explicitly named Hollywood movies, magazine illustration, and Tin Pan Alley music. Greenberg associated kitsch with an ersatz, unearned aesthetic satisfaction that requires no real interpretive effort from its audience, and, provocatively, linked its rise to the propagandistic aesthetics favored by the totalitarian regimes of his own era, which he saw as exploiting kitsch's manipulative accessibility for political ends.