Page 12 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 3
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It is in this manner, by asking about the place that the photographic
medium, to choose one kind of medium, will, as a novel venue for artistic
production, to choose one kind of production, occupy in the order of culture
that Stieglitz presages differential legitimacies that were addressed again,
almost two decades later in the galleys of an essay that itself became a
defining moment in art criticism. The article is, of course, Avant-Garde and
Kitsch, Clement Greenberg’s judgment and oppositional ideology pitting the
definably avant-garde, championed as guardian of a society’s aesthetic
standards, against the inescapably complement, in the category of kitsch,
decried as the unconditional response to impulses of consumer haste and
taste. Enumerating four expressive examples, a poem by T. S. Eliot, a Tin
Pan Alley song, a painting by Georges Braque and a Saturday Evening Post
cover, Greenberg assembles a cultural quartet whose individual elements are
“on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and
products of the same society.” In this broadside, etching as it does the
presumable boundaries of high art, he finds that, beyond their shared
contemporaneity, nothing of cultural consequence actually links them. To be
sure, they are expressive tokens from entirely non-contiguous strata of
culture, Greenberg’s critical fulcrum. But in these examples there is
something more specific to the question of medium and genre than the
context-free expression of cultural positions as arguably high or low. That a
modern poem, a parlour song, a Cubist painting, and a magazine illustration
identify how distinct genres tie to distinct media is what principally puts the
question, for us, in the postmodern frame, in a state of contemporary
suspense, and has repositioned Greenberg as something of an archaeo-
rhetorical relic, if a fiery one. For today, culture’s significant expressive
distinctions cut not across genres alone, but also across the specific media
that encapsulate them. And operating with special relevance on the plane of
the cybercultural, this synthesis is not so much framed as encoded. So while,
ironically, Greenberg’s criteria later came to hinge on a ready sense of
medium, it is there that challenges against him proved most withering to his
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undignified transformation from master critic to “worm-eaten colossus” . As
art discovered mechanisation, Greenberg’s contractile optical notions of
medium, seen against its new modes of actual execution, were overpowered
by new media frenetically co-fusing toward bastardisation and able to
account for the ubiquitous role of appropriation and remediation in art today
It is this persevering theme’s vital essence—reductive purity—that
divides modernist sensibility from its subsequent condition in the postmodern
encounter, and which Caroline Jones posits as Greenberg’s major ideological
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vector . Concern above all else with the narrowest exercise of the expressive
strength of a medium is, for Greenberg, the vital modernist principle. The
application of the sensory refinement that each medium best supports is the
aim: in the case of painting, the interpretive inflection is best received and