Avant-garde art and American pop culture have had an intriguing relationship from the time of the art form's inception in America to the current day. The art form, which began in the early half of the nineteenth century in Europe, started to rise slowly in America under the guise of Dadaism in 1915. While originally formed under a group of artists in New York City who wanted to counter pop culture with their art, music, and literature the art form began to grow into prominence with American pop culture due to a variety of factors between the 1940s to the 1970s. However, from many factors that arose in the late 1970s, avant-garde began to both lessen in prominence and began to blend with the pop culture to the point in which most art critics considered the art form extinct.
Avant Garde and Kitsch
Though his first published essays dealt mainly with literature and theatre, art still held a powerful attraction for Clement Greenberg, so in 1939, he made a sudden name as a visual art writer with possibly his most well-known and oft-quoted essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", first published in the journal Partisan Review. In this Marxist-influenced essay, Greenberg claimed that true avant-garde art is a product of the Enlightenment's revolution of critical thinking, and as such resists and recoils from the degradation of culture in both mainstream capitalist and communist society, while acknowledging the paradox that, at the same time, the artist, dependent on the market or the state, remains inexorably attached "by an umbilical cord of gold". Kitsch, on the other hand, was the product of industrialization and the urbanization of the working class, a filler made for the consumption of the working class: a populace hungry for culture, but without the resources and education to enjoy cutting edge avant garde culture. Greenberg writes,
"Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time."
For Greenberg, avant garde art was too "innocent" to be effectively used as propaganda or bent to a cause, while kitsch was ideal for stirring up false sentiment.
Greenberg appropriated the German word "kitsch" to describe this low, concocted form of "culture", though its connotations have since been recast to a more affirmative acceptance of nostalgic materials of capitalist/communist culture. "Avant Garde and Kitsch" is clearly a politically motivated essay, in part a response to the destruction and repression of Modernist Art in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and represents a denouncement of the growing totalitarian threat in Europe and the "retrogression" of fascism.
Further definition
Avant-garde, as sociologist Diana Crane states, "was an art-form that had started in Europe that had started in the early nineteenth century." While the art form has survived for this long, she states that the concept of the art form is "highly ambiguous" and it has been through many phases throughout its existence, including Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and pop art. Socially, however, each form of avant-garde is united with the idea that it is part of the definition of high culture, although this in itself is defined in a variety of fashions.
Ways to determine avant-garde
Due to the ambiguity of the term, Crane gives a few considerations on what could be considered avant-garde and what is not. She states that avant-garde can be determined in its approach to the aesthetic, through the social content of the artwork, and through the production and distribution of the artwork.
Aesthetics
Through aesthetic, a piece of artwork can be determined avant-garde if it does any of the following: If the artwork redefines artistic conventions. If it utilizes new artistic tools and techniques. And if it redefines the nature of the art objects.