ABSTRACT
In a 1984 interview, Dwight MacDonald, who claims to have coined the term ‘mass culture’, recounts his memory of the origins of Clement Greenberg’s famous 1939 essay ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’. The essay, he claims, began as a letter written in response to MacDonald’s own series of 1938 Partisan Review articles on the Soviet cinema, in which he had speculated that the postrevolutionary films were very popular with Russian peasants. In the interview, MacDonald recalls how he had praised other ‘primitives’ as well: ‘look at what wonderful things the Africans do’ (Trilling, 1985:319). According to MacDonald, Greenberg’s letter of reply pointed out that the ‘first thing these marvelous native tribesmen in Africa and Australia, who do such wonderful abstract work, demand of the explorer is not the works of Picasso but picture postcards, gaudy, horrible’. As it happened, this stunningly absurd observation (at least, as MacDonald recalls it) did not survive wholly intact in ‘Avant-garde and kitsch’. What is discussed there is the way in which an ‘ignorant Russian peasant [not
exactly a ‘marvelous’ native tribesman]…stands with hypothetical freedom of choice between a painting by Picasso and a painting by Repin’ (Greenberg, 1961: 14); the peasant is reminded, in the Picasso, of the quaint domestic formalism of the village icon, but plumps finally for the ‘kitsch’ identifications of the Repin because it spares him the effort of pure intellectual reflection and interpretation.
