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

Criticism, Spring, 1999 by Matthew Gumpert

By all of the above criteria, Guss Venus is a kitsch-idol: (i) it makes two Venus de Milos; there can be only one; (ii) it is a product, something you can buy and sell; (iii) it is an industrial forgery, not the "real" object wrought by the hand of an artist; (iv) it is animated and anthropomorphized as I recognize it;(23) (v) it belongs in a museum, not a restaurant. In fact, the museum is there in order to shelter the "real" Venus from places like Gus's.

Early Kitsch

Is there such a thing as ancient kitsch? I would argue, for example, that the Hellenistic era is an Age of Kitsch par excellence.(24) Nostalgia for the past; new technologies of reproduction; the commercialization of a "classical" canon;(25) these trends, central to Hellenism, point ahead to postmodernity. The Venus de Milo would appear to be part of the Hellenistic marketing of the classical past. Although celebrated after its rediscovery in 1820 as an original classical work by the hand, for example, of Praxiteles himself,(26) the statue is, in fact (it is generally agreed), a Hellenistic copy of a late classical copy of a still earlier classical model, which, we can assume, was a copy of a still earlier, now lost "original." Art historians have gone as far as calling it a "plagiarism" of Praxiteles' Knidian Aphrodite (Venus as postmodern pastiche).(27) Kitsch, Calinescu argues, implies that "there is no substantive difference between itself and original beauty,"(28) but with classical statuary, substantive difference between copy and original is not always meaningful.(29)

Kitsch sculpture is always a form of "realism"--by which we mean the art of manufacturing the "real"(30) The kitsch object, in this sense, is too real: too lifelike, too dramatic, too big, too little; a good description of Hellenistic sculpture, with its tendency towards verisimilitude, melodrama, and pathos.(31) Hellenistic sculpture is a moving art: art, in other words, that seems to move, and seeks to move us. Gisela Richter points out a "tension" in the Venus typical, she asserts, of Hellenistic art; the Venus' "statuesque pose" is contradicted by a "feeling of movement" conveyed "through the different directions of torso and limbs and the variegated folds of her drapery"(32) The aesthetics of Hellenism--anthropomorphizing, bringing art "to life"(33)--are those of Pygmalion. A program for fetishism. Indeed Aimee Rankin describes kitsch as art over-invested with affect;(34) but affect has always been attached, even to "high art," even in the Classical period. Pliny on Praxiteles' Knidian Aphrodite: "They say that a certain man was once overcome with love for the statue and ... embraced the statue and that there is a stain on it as an indication of his lust."(35) It would appear that whatever aura the Knidia possessed was not sufficient to prevent its desecration. Nor is it just a work of art that has been defiled, but a cult object. And a tourist attraction.

The marketing of "antiquity" is as pervasive a feature of Rome as of Alexandria. Pliny notes that, in his own era, "[m]any People are so charmed with the statuettes which they call `Corinthian,' that they carry them around with them."(36) He decries the commercialization of art, the degenerating workmanship, and the mania for reproductions under the Empire, complaints that, to a twentieth-century ear, sound all too familiar.(37) But few of the objects referred to in the documents collected by J. J. Pollitt on Roman art can be called "art"; most are idols, like the statue of the son of Germanicus and Agrippina which Augustus, acording to Suetonius, "used to kiss ... fondly every day."(38) Can such an object, caught in such a relation with its admirer, be called "art"? Surely the term is here an anachronism, and fails to do justice to the tension, in Augustus' kiss, between reverence and desire.(39) Dio Cassus' account of Claudius' prohibition of cult statues in his name offers a picture of Rome as a vast warehouse overrun with idols: "the public buildings were so filled with statues and votives that he said he would give some thought to the problem of what was to be done with them."(40) Here the process of kitsch-commodification has run its course; the work of art, once transcendent idol, is now an inconvenience, an object that takes up space and gathers dust.