Kitsch, Propaganda and the American Avant-Garde | An Interview with Michael Pearce
Michael Pearce is a writer, painter, teacher and curator, as well as the founder of The Representational Art Conference (TRAC). His book "Kitsch, Propaganda and the American Avant-Garde" uncovers one thing Lenin, Hitler and Roosevelt had in common:
A keen eye for art as state propaganda.
Avoiding the old-fashioned vs modern dichotomy, Pearce shows the cultural historical roots of employing both figurative and abstract painting to further political correctness.
Pearce traces it back to 19th century socialist thinking, and goes in-depth on the ideas of philosophers like Proudhon and Saint-Simon, as well as the protests of Emile Zola.
First and foremost, however, he shows how the the American government and a few wealthy families made Avant-garde art into the preferred art form of the 20th century, casting it as the antidote to the sentimentality of kitsch.
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Chapter markers:
00:00 Intro
01:32 Understanding Kitsch and the Avant-Garde
05:01 Who is Michael Pearce?
08:06 The proto-Communist Avant-Garde
12:47 Proudhon's authoritarian state art
16:22 Proudhon on Courbet and aesthetic ideals
22:02 Courbet, Repin, and Russian realism
23:25 The Bohemian Avant-Garde
26:00 Emile Zola's individualism vs Proudhon
29:59 Capturing the Zeitgeist
33:50 The battle between Avant-Gardes in Soviet Russia
41:49 An individualist Avant-Garde?
42:43 Socialist Realism in the USSR and the USSA
45:36 Nazi art vs Roosevelt's path
47:46 Socialism and the art of the enemy
50:20 Hitler's qualities as a painter
52:19 Degenerate Art and House of German Art
57:25 The sentimental art of the enemy
59:45 The propagandist Nelson Rockefeller
1:02:24 The figurative/kitsch/Hitler connection
1:06:37 Greenberg's essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch
1:11:37 Nazi art: kitsch or bona fide modernism?
1:20:11 Primitive American art as the mother of modernism
1:26:33 Roosevelt & the marriage of USSA and MoMA
1:30:04 The current situation in the art world
1:35:56 The American illustration tradition and escapism
1:38:37 Fergus Ryan: What is "Imaginative realism"?
1:40:37 Fergus Ryan:: What is "emergence" in painting?
1:43:59 Question: Is there a refuge for the human spirit?
This episode featured Michael Pearce & Jan-Ove Tuv and was filmed and edited by Bork Nerdrum.
The centerpiece was a reproduction of Courbets painting of Proudhon and his children.
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Пікірлер: 21
Excellent topic and presentation. TY Mahe Ohna ✌️ Favour ALL
Thank you for everyone's time and efforts, it's amazing to see how the channel has grown since episode 1
Thank you. So valuable. I never waste my time here.
I love so much your discussions and guests. Enjoy it so much!
I enjoyed your chat. I had dinner once with Clement Greenberg. What a wonderful critique.
Love this talk, thank you. Michael's positive take on the imaginative "magical realism" is very heartening.
It's wonderful to learn so much about the history here. I'd had no idea about all these connections. This is such a wonderful channel.
Great interview BUT the last 10 minutes is spectacular! I would hope to hear MPs take on Graphic Novels at some point.
Really interesting interview, what a deep dive!
This guest turns into a goof at the end. I was there with Fuchs in the chapel. I was there when the first draft of a manifesto of visionary art was handed out by its author. My studio was on top of The Temple in L.A. I argued with them about the meaning of the word visionary and was happily ostracized when I called out their Motte-and-Bailey fallacy. To them the term “visionary” means the systematized depiction of entheogenic(drug induced) hallucinations. Not a master who’s work transcends time, bringing to light that which all of humanity has always known, yet has up until that moment, not known how to articulate (Though they love to proclaim they are doing that very thing). The “visionary” art movement is the least sentimental and most dangerous. It reduces the spiritual to the collective mundane. The newest breed of “visionaries” are the worst. They’re a cult of monads radiating rainbow lasers. Just look at their work, it’s all the same “vision”.
🤯
All art is propaganda, Public art even more so. Just stroll around Washington D.C. and witness all of the 2nd and 3rd rate monuments, many of them extolling state violence, most of them utterly uninspiring, and ultimately depressing.
I did have a look at Roger Deans work. It is not the world I would like to live in. Nature is so important for the mental and physical health of life.Distorting nature in the way he does takes us further away from the real world which distorts our consciousness which is a major problem in our psyche in these times. Manipulating nature and how we view it can create a lots of issues about what is real and what is not.
What is the monkish garb that the interviewer is wearing?
Nothing to see here just a time stamp for me to remember, 34:10
he put the italian jews in an internment camp because they were italian, not because they were jews. to him they were jewish Italians, and Italians were bad.[even though he thought Mussolini was good]
waow
Stupendous balderdash on display here
Of course Lenin and Stalin appreciated film as an art form for propaganda, hence the Russian film movement of Eisenstein, and so on in the 20s and 30s.
Another narrative of victimhood, by those who are in fact popular, successful and doing well -- so tiresome :(