non-moderne

Moderns always ask the question 'how did we get here' (after answering the question 'how do we get there') and then 'how do we get out?
and then Thodor Adorno's:  ‘Even the fullest awareness of the disaster threatens to degenerate into gibberish’ . and I take that this full awareness is the enlightenment heritage.  We, us moderns, are always on the slippery slope of kitsch, the impure hoaxer, a masquerade for true being; and then landing in piles of kipple, Philip K. Dick's term for the piles of debris which seem to mount up everywhere and mysteriously automatic.in its generation.

Hand/s off!

[....] the more mysterious the source of the trace, the more persistent the feeling that something is really there. This is the point at which speculative thought seeks a foothold. As if in mockery of the dispassionate, scientific reflections of phenomenology, the speculative thinker sets out in search of the ineffable, feeling his way experimentally towards an interpretation.
Bloch's Traces, The Philosophy of Kitsch. T. Adorno 

Kitsch (and kipple) are infecting even the highest levels of the public/political sphere now. Perhaps this designates a new relationship between the host and the para-site which seeks to transform the whole modernist apparatus as we move more fully into the anthropocene. For sure, everything that was not/is not solid anymore (which is everything now) is beginning to float and vibrate with increased intensity, as all anchoring become suspect. At times there seems to be no way 'forward' because the very concept of forward (progress, happiness) is viewed with suspicion as just more of the same. The very idea of 'handing' off the baton to the future seems fraught with debris and triviality...and while the band plays on. The idea of the acheiropieta --really, the myth of an invisible inhuman hand working its way through history--does not carry the emblem of materialism emblazoned across any working or efficacy (the beginning of Agamben's inoperativeness?).

It has long been held that 'the critical mind' is one that shows the hands of humans at work everywhere so as to slaughter the sanctity of religion, the belief in fetishes, the worship of transcendent heaven sent icons, the strength of ideologies. The more the human hand can be seen as having worked an image, the weaker is the image's claim to offer truth. But this is only true to the myth of the acheiropoieta: that which is made without hands. Both science and religion are desirous of the state of the acheiropoieta icon, but the fetish subverts the aesthetic: fetishes have to be made. Human hands cannot stop toiling producing images, pictures of all sorts, to still generate, welcome, and collect objectivity, beauty, and divinities, exactly as in the --now forbidden--repressed, obliterated old days. The acceptance of this cheiropoiesis is the recognition of a new angelic collective with hands, not wings, simultaneously concealing (making occcult) and revealing(making) the face of God. 
Magical Thinking: History Possibility and the Idea of the Occult, Stuart McWilliams

kitsch is never done for

From Daniel Tiffany's endlessly interesting book on kitsch:

The vehemence of the modernist campaign against kitsch demonstrates that, beneath the current associations with mediocrity and harmless pleasure, kitsch has always functioned as an irresistible locus of moral and aesthetic taboos: triviality, hedonism, fakery, but also—somewhat incoherently—homosexuality and fascism.Unresolved in the wake of high modernism, the anxiety about the pleasures (and dangers) of kitsch continues to assert itself in forceful, though perhaps less absolute, ways. If radicalism in the arts implies—at least in part—reorienting the viewer towards whatever appears to be vacuous, trifling, indulgent, or worthless, then kitsch still marks an elusive frontier: to equate art and kitsch, or to deliberately produce kitsch. as if it were art, flirts even now with artistic suicide, with the self-destruction of art. 

Kitsch in its original formulations is said to be the antithesis of “true” art—what Greenberg calls “synthetic art.”  More bluntly, he states, “Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. … Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious.”  Broch declares simply, “Kitsch represents falsehood (it is often so defined, and rightly so).”  For certain modernists, the spurious nature of kitsch is inseparable from its mimeticism (which Greenberg calls a “surplus of realism”), in contrast to modernist abstraction.  Whatever the terms of comparison (between kitsch and “true” art), the basic attitude towards kitsch adopted by the modernists who defined it is riddled with condescension. It is crucial, however, to emphasize that the term “kitsch” has been used historically by only a restricted segment of society, the intelligentsia. What the elite calls “kitsch” may in fact conform to the basic criteria of “art” for many people. Thus the person who consumes and enjoys kitsch is never “the person who uses the word ‘kitsch.’”  From a sociological perspective, then, kitsch is an aesthetic category suspended between those who control its public name (to destructive ends) and those for whom it has no name (or who prefer not to use its public name), between those who refer to it with contempt and those who enjoy it without irony, reservation, or shame. This polarized structure reinforces the fundamental terms of misidentification and uncertainty surrounding kitsch: Is it art or not? But also, is it true or false, authentic or fake? Kitsch is thus not simply a particular kind of artifact but an artifact imagined and judged in divergent ways by communities in conflict with one another.

[,,,,]

Acknowledging the interdependence of elite culture and the adversarial potential of popular culture inevitably engages Peter Bürger’s conception of the historical avant-garde as a movement integrating art and life, vanguardism and populism. 16 From this perspective, kitsch may eventually be regarded not as the nemesis of the avant-garde (in Greenberg’s formulation) but as a baffling mutation of Dada, a development marking the collapse of the iconic—and unstable—opposition between avant-garde and kitsch.

Questions on the digital world --AI, the 'uncanny valley' of extreme mimicry, etc.--cry out in the noisy void.

kitsch me if you can

Kitsch as an odd fellow traveller, beggar lice on the coat tails of the modern, a stain which modernism fears as a viral agent somehow devaluing the modernist values in kitsch's banal but not ironic values, values which seem to magically appear with the advent of the modern. Truth or fiction? It really doesn't matter to kitsch as it forms its own totemist confusions of its origins and purported values of just there-ness, doppelgangers of beauty and strength without being very strong and often of a surprisingly banal and etiolated beauty. Is something else going on here, in kitsch's duplicity, something impossible to ignore and yet difficult to see and conceptualize? Except of course as an exercise in a certain stupidity and culpability of the masses, not to even speak of its governing mood of melancholia:

For champions of modernity, fear of the occult is an essential fear. Its presence even at the heart of the scientific revolution, however, speaks insistently of a view of history harsher still than the evolutionary myth: we have escaped nothing in our history, and what we presume to have escaped still dwells within us.

Magical Thinking: History possibility and the Idea of the Occult, Stuart McWilliams

kitsch

I started thinking, albeit somewhat unconsciously, about kitsch upon the closing of our gallery in The Town. We had plans for the gallery to be an outpost of new works which were historically aware of the changing circumstances of world culture, globalism, tech, and all the rest, and how small towns and villages were impacted. As it turned out, those sorts of artistic interrogations were completely off the mark. As was feared, the idea of kitsch overflowed the banks. The choice was to go with the flow, and become a devotee of kitsch (if that is even possible once one becomes aware of kitsch), or flee. Which we did. (I believe however that it is possible for kitsch to be redistributed under the rubric of art but that is a precarious reprocessing job and often misunderstood outside the urban precincts of 'Art'; it can sometimes be accomplished as folk art. And there is also the idea that for a great many folks kitsch itself is art. period. Hence all the jokes about 'avant-guard modern art'.)

Clement Greenburg opined that kitsch and modern avant-guard arrived around the same time, out of the destructive social forces of industrial modernism that were changing the nature of experience, that old cultures were being destroyed but the masses still needed some kind of easily digestible diversions so kitsch was born:

The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city's traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless, their taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.

So kitsch would be formed from the detritus of a mechanical culture. Kitsch became a placeholder for the rubes and their approach to art:

Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money-not even their time. The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.

So art as a research program and operating on it's own grounds as its own pincers of a world wide (in actuality, as the West) dialectic, hence unfurling its own data projects as art works, installations, mixed media, destructuring projects in general (cubism, expressionism, conceptual art and so forth) as worthy of the highest accolades of Western modernist accreditation while kitsch is simply the leftovers, the miserable tailings falling off the great milling projects of modernism: the knick knack, bric a brac, tchotkes endemic to any great cultural process.

The problem is that kitsch slowly forms its own world system, parasitically feeding off its host modernity, giving an illusion of, impossibly, time regained, forming vertiginous encrustations of affect and nostalgia. In watching the animated film Guardians of the Galaxy #2 one is confronted by the talking tree trunk Groot who loves to listen and dance to old pop songs while an Eternalist de/restructuring of the universe takes place all around him