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"'Avant-Garde and Kitsch' is one of the most muscular pieces of criticism ever written. Greenberg essentially ripped modernism—the work of Picasso, Kandinsky, Joyce, Eliot, Gide, Stevens, Hart Crane, and so on—out of the context in which it was created, and redefined it as art about art, as work that meditated on the nature of its own medium. Thus abstract painting could be understood as an exploration of the possibilities of figure and ground, paint and canvas. Greenberg thought that painters no longer attempted to imitate objects for the same reason that Horkheimer and Adorno offered: because realism had been co-opted by the culture industries of the modern state. It wasn't that he enjoyed abstract painting more than representational painting, he said. It was that under current historical conditions abstract painting was the only genuine painting possible—just as, for Adorno, atonal music was the only form for genuine music to take."
"The avant-garde's opposite number, in Greenberg's scheme, is kitsch, 'ersatz culture'—art for capitalism's new man (who turns out to be no different from Fascism's or Communism's new man). Greenberg's description of this culture is the Frankfurt School description: Kitsch 'is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations,' and so on. In Greenberg's analysis of contemporary culture, there is no third term: art is either avant-garde or kitsch. And kitsch is by no means restricted to the working classes; The New Yorker, for instance, is 'high-class kitsch for the luxury trade'—it waters down avant-garde art and peddles it as a commodity."
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