History Ofart 411 Fall of 2020: Kitsch is King

Before getting you teeth stuck into the meat of my opinions below, I'd suggest that anyone who is taking our class view the following video from the time counter 16:16 as teacher, author, illustrator and artists Pete Loveday eloquently covers the subject of both aura and Kitsch.

Celebrated designers strive to turn a mundane object into something that is pleasing to the eye, thus increasing its commercial viability. What the best designers intend for their creations be it for an example Corbussier’s architecture, Terrance Conran’s furniture or the high-tech gadgets designed by Johny Ive is not to make grandiose fine art, but something that is aesthetically pleasing to the paying public. Design school teaches its pupils to make what Clement Greenburg would describe as kitsch. Art that is not the result of the artist’s free expression, but commissioned for the sole purpose of using beauty, shape and color to sell more product. Thankfully society has since elevated kitsch to such a highly respected level that across the world there are now museums dedicated not to Fine Art, but its commercial cousin; Design. (Singapore’s Red Dot, the Bauhaus in Berlin and the Design Museum in London just to name a few)

Advertising is the epitome of Clement Greenbergs’ definition of kitsch; Being a commercial transaction made between the manufacturer of a product who wants to see a rise in the number of sales of their merchandise and a design team who has been paid by that manufacturer to make another product that has the sole purpose of persuading the public to purchase the manufacturer’s product. In order to be successful in any of the visual medias such as bill board posters, or television and film the advert has to be designed to elicit a direct response from the viewer by catching the eye of its target audience, the visual design and its message has to stand out from other competing adverts, it has to tell a convincing story be it true or false about the product that is has been commissioned to sell while bestowing certain characteristics upon the companies brand. If misused for a political purpose it can be seen as extremely similar to the fascist propaganda that Clement Greenberg wrote about. There is also very little to differentiate between modern capitalists commissioning advertising agents and the Christian authorities that have historically commissioned artists to install church art that had the sole purpose of selling the bible’s religious messages to their congregants. There is a distinctly beautiful irony that Brothers Charles and Maurice Saatchi have become King makers in the upper echelons of modern art, because for the last 50 years they have together been among Europe’s most successful advertisers. By selling their talent for creating Kitsch they have been able to acquire one of the world’s greatest private collections of fine art. Their combined purchasing power and influence has made famous the names of many emerging artists.

The Saatchi brothers own a number of websites, their premiere website is their advertising website: http://saatchi.com/en-us/ while their art gallery website is: https://www.saatchiart.com/

A Saatchi and Saatchi advert