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

Criticism, Spring, 1999 by Matthew Gumpert

Why stop at Rome? Think of the importance of the relic in the Middle Ages.(41) During this period "[r]everence was paid" notes Germaine Bazin, "to no fewer than fifty-seven veils of the Virgin."(42) Folk art? Or an industry of idolatry?(43) More than any other event in medieval Europe, the Iconoclastic Controversy suggests the supplementary logic of idolatry, a logic consistent with Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum. The iconoclasts, Baudrillard argues, "accused of despising and denying images," in fact, "accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who were content to venerate God at one remove."(44) Baudrillard labors throughout Simulations to elaborate a history of the fall from Platonic mimesis in Western culture.(45) But his exposure of iconoclasm suspends that history, revealing what Derrida had already brought to light in his deconstruction of Plato: that mimesis has always already been superseded by simulation.

There is no culture, then, without kitsch. Consider Adorno on Veblen: "the metropolis of the nineteenth-century assembled a deceptive collection of pillars from Attic temples, Gothic cathedrals, and the ... palaces of Italian city-states. Veblen pays it back; for him the real temples, palaces, and cathedrals are already as false as the imitations. World history is the world's fair. Veblen explains culture in terms of kitsch, not vice-versa."(46) Veblen on culture is more cynical than Baudrillard on Disneyland. My point is that we do not have to wait for Disneyland to witness the triumph of kitsch over art.

Museum as Kitsch-Factory

We only have to pay a visit to the Louvre. The museum has always posed as a haven for culture;(47) its critics seek to expose it as a conspiracy against culture, not art's sanctuary, but its prison; if a temple, then one for false idols: "Mon pas se fait pieux. Ma voix change et s'etablit un peu plus haute qu'a l'eglise, mais un peu moins forte qu'elle ne sonne dans l'ordinaire de la vie. Bientot, je ne sais plus ce que je suis renu faire dans ces solitudes cirees, qui tiennent du temple et du salon"(48) Valery suffocates in the Louvre; not because museums take art too "seriously," but because he does.(49) The museum, realizing Valery's dream of the "sanctity of culture"(50) all too literally, is all the proof he needs that, inside as well as outside, the barbarians have triumphed. For Valery "there is nothing left," Adorno writes, in "Valery Proust Museum," "but to mourn for works as they turn into relics."(51) Adorno compares Valery's contempt for the museum with Proust's enthusiasm; for Proust is "an admiring consumer, an amateur,"(52) a Kitschmensch, less interested in art than in what art does to him (Proust's Recherche could be considered a hymn to kitsch).(53) Proust's museum, like Gus's Restaurant, is a place where art is consumed.

As early as 1815, Quatremere de Quincy, Secretary of the Academie des Beaux-Arts, calls the Louvre a marketplace. If the museum withdraws art from the realm of "commercial circulation," by the same token it deprives it of public utility and moral purpose.(54) A proto-Marxist argument against commodity fetishism; for the work in the museum is a fetish, an object without use-value. Quatremere might have appreciated Richard Serra's efforts, a century and a half later, to "liberate" art from the museum/marketplace. Douglas Crimp's discussion of Serra's "site-specific sculpture" begins by paraphrasing Serra's own dictum regarding the now infamous and dismantled Tilted Arc: "To Remove the Work is to Destroy the Work? The point here is Serra's protest against art's passive acquiescence in the conventional exhibition space: a "nowhere" which "univeralizes" the object, detaching it from production and reception alike.(56) To grant the work of art a permanent place within the museum is to forever displace it; to deem it "priceless" is to make it perpetually "price-able"; and to exalt it as a transcendent deity is to turn it into a kitsch idol. John Berger imagines a visitor at the National Gallery in front of Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks in a room which he compares to a chapel. "The drawing," Berger suggests, "has acquired a new kind of impressiveness. Not because ... of the meaning of its image" but "because of its market value." Whatever Berger means by "meaning" here, it has been compromised by commerce. Berger's museum is a temple to a false god, art "enveloped in an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity."(57)