Art and kitsch therefore become moral terms. Art comes to consist of objects and performances which conform to the arbitrary artistic standards of an individual or group, while kitsch consists of objects and performances which do not.
So one person might consider Martin Amis’s fiction to be art, while another might consider it an inept imitation of his father’s art, and therefore kitsch. Similarly one person might consider C. M. Collidge's portraits of dogs playing poker to be kitsch, while another may be unable to see any substantial difference between it and René Magritte's highly regarded representation of a steaming locomotive suspended in a fireplace.
The ambiguity of these and other moral ideas is, as usual, in large part a product of modern technology. Back in the days when there were few channels of communication, it was easy for one conception of art to become generally accepted – if you never heard of an alternative to it, you were more likely to agree with the conception you were allowed to hear about.
These days, though, channels of communication are virtually infinite, and acquaintance with the moral conceptions promoted by all of them utterly impossible. So people often fall back on their own fears as sources of their moral ideas. People who fear their own violent impulses compensate by attributing them to others who, they claim, abuse animals. People who fear their own unusual sexual impulses become crusaders for family values. People who invade Iraq for no particularly good reason and kill thousands of Iraqis stand firm against abortion. And for not coveting thy neighbour’s goods.
The religious often argue that unbelief provides no grounds for morality, while religion does. However, this argument only holds if no alternative to religious morality is allowed to be discussed. The belief that there is no heaven – such as the Christian heaven, into which believers think they can worm their way by not having the courage to stand up to the cosmic bully who threatens to blast them to hell if they don’t do his will – has profound moral implications, but if you don’t let people think about them, then they can’t base a morality on them.
Art is morality, and morality art. We cannot acquire the knowledge necessary to provide a foundation for an objective moral code. In particular, we can never know exactly what behaviours human beings are capable of developing, and if we do not know that we cannot prescribe particular behaviours and condemn others. After millennia of being instructed not to steal, for example, our fingers are still remarkably light, especially since millions of us still believe that stealing from someone richer than we are is admirable on our part and salutary for the richer people. Perhaps theft isn’t a sign of evil so much as it is a sign of an incorrigible inability to connect beliefs about abstract ideas with beliefs about specific opportunities which present themselves to us.
In morality, as in art, kitsch has effectively triumphed. In the absence of objective standards, any standard goes. You send money to Save the Vegetables, I send money to Protect Our Peonies, and we are both moral beings. We feel pretty moral, at least. As Milan Kundera has observed, the kitsch consists not only of admiring something, but also of admiring yourself for admiring it. And if you and I should ever meet in, say, business, one or the other of us may feel so moral as to feel justified in screwing the other demonic vegetable/peony-hating prick. The law, of course, may catch up to us if we try anything funny, but, as we know, law is the creation not of real people but of two classes of demon – politicians and lawyers.
We don’t know much about morality, but we know what we like. And that is the morality of kitsch.
Posts
