Venus de Kitsch: Or, The Passion of the Venus de Milo

Criticism, Spring, 1999 by Matthew Gumpert

Greenburg's "simulacrum of genuine culture"; Benjamin's cultic object stripped of its "aura"; Olalquiaga's "irreverent recycling," all suggest that kitsch is an ontological and theological category, not just a technological and aesthetic one; all suggest that, despite the persistent efforts to tie kitsch to (post)modernity, the concept is implicit throughout the long history of mimesis--by which I refer to the Western faith in and fear of representation. Kitsch is the sin of representation; it is representation as sin; in other words: idolatry. To condemn kitsch is to return to the Hebrew rejection of the graven image, and to Plato's prosecution of imitation.(11) To distinguish between art and kitsch is to distinguish between truth and falsehood; between the true and the false god.(12) How to choose between the Venus in New York and Paris? Which is the "real" Venus? Which Venus "refers" to the other?

The story of the Venus de Milo and her reproductions forces us to confront idolatry much as Augustine did: as a question of referentiality. All signs but God refer, Augustine argues in De Doctrina Christiana 1.2; only God is referred to; God alone is to be enjoyed (frui); all other things are to be used (uti). The idolater denies the referentiality of the sign--he enjoys it, in and of itself. Idolatry is thus the fetishization of the sign.(13) But Augustine begs the obvious question: how to determine (and who determines) a referential origin (i.e., god)? Idolatry, Michael Camille points out, is always someone else's error. But to condemn the image of another is to acknowledge its power.(14) The difference between the "true" and the "false" image is always less clear than we might prefer; and every iconoclast would seem to be an idolater in disguise.

Camille's discussion of the medieval category of idolatry suggests a connection between postmodern criticism's love-hate relation with popular culture and the tension, central to the entire Western tradition, between iconolatry and iconoclasm.(15) The debate over kitsch simply plays out, all over again, the Platonic ambivalence towards mimesis which, as Derrida has suggested, is always "ordonnee a la verite: ou bien elle nuit au devoilement de la chose meme, en substitutant sa copie ou son double a l'etant; ou bien elle sert la verite par la ressemblance du double.... "(16) Kitsch is to art, then, as mimesis is to truth. The logic that governs both of these relations is what Derrida calls supplementarity; the kitsch-imitation is marked by the range of valences Derrida ascribes to the supplement, which can both extend or, more sinisterly, replace the life of the original.(17) It is the Platonic logic of supplementarity and the Augustinian logic of idolatry that have distinguished kitsch from art. The true god (art) is real; the idol (kitsch) is an imitation of and a surrogate for the real. This proposition, subtending the entire debate over kitsch, generates the following corollaries: (i) god is singular; the idol is plural;(18) (ii) god is original, without price or precedent; the idol is secondhand; a product designed to be distributed, exchanged, bought and sold;(19) (iii) god is natural; the idol is artificial;(20) (iv) god is immaterial, abstract; the idol is fetishistic;(21) (v) god is absolutely distant; the idol is intimately close; a portable deity.(22)