Throughout the centuries, the life of artworks has been plagued by such misunderstandings, such misreadings, such crass misconceptions, indeed to the point that they almost seem to be the norm; whereas the exemplary decoding (exemplary not because unique, but because rich, complex, and allencompassing) often constitutes the ideal criticism. Which only proves that the consumption of a form is not always total and irreversible. Even the structure that is appreciated for only one of its levels will, given the deep kinship that connects all the stylemes to one another, remain intact in the background, like a lurking presence, the unachieved promise of a potentially fuller appreciation.
On the other hand, if an inexact or incomplete reading impoverishes the message, without however entirely obliterating it, the opposite can also occur: a message containing little information, read in the light of an arbitrary code, can often appear much richer than it was meant to be. When the Wounded Bison of Altamira is interpreted according to contemporary aesthetic standards, it will automatically acquire a wealth of intentions that for the most part are contributed by the addressee.
Most archaeological finds are generally interpreted with the help of references that were totally foreign to their authors: the missing arms and the natural erosions of time become the signifiers of an allusive incompleteness fraught with meanings that have been acquired through centuries of culture but were quite unknown to the Greek artisan. And yet, as a system of elements, the object may have also implied this system of signifiers and of possible signifieds. Similarly, to the eyes of an intellectual in search of local lore, certain forms of popular entertainment can appear charged with a Fescennine obscenity of which the comedian is quite unaware; and yet, in his desire to satisfy the presumed taste of his audience, he might have well included in his show a series of references to archetypal behaviors that still function, and are developed and grasped, instinctively.
What happens to a message that is interpreted by means of an overcharged code is very similar to what happens to the objet trouve that the artist pulls out of context and frames as a work of art: in this case, the artist selects certain aspects of the object as the possible signifiers of signifieds that have been elaborated by his cultural tradition. By arbitrarily superimposing a code on a message that has none (a natural object, for instance) or has a different one (some industrial product), the artist in fact reinvents, reformulates, that message.
The question here is whether he is arbitrarily imbuing the object with references culled from an extraneous tradition (that of contemporary art, for instance, by virtue of which a stone may resemble a HenryMoore sculpture, and a mechanical assemblage a work by Jacques Lipchitz) or whether, in fact, it is contemporary art which, in its ways of forming, has included references to natural or industrial modes of being by integrating elements from other codes into its own…'»
The addressee’s reception can thus alter the informative power of the message. Because of its complex structure, the poetic message retains the power to elicit a variety of decodings. The life of messages caught in the whirlwind of mass production and mass consumption, including the life of the poetic message whenever it is sold as a commodity, is much more varied and unpredictable than we might think in our moments of greatest discouragement.
Even the most indiscriminate and naive superimposition of codes and decodings inevitably involves an exchange between message and addressee that cannot be reduced to a simple scheme—an exchange that will remain forever open to investigation, exploitation, and renewal. It is here that tastes are determined and works are rediscovered, despite the thoughtless brutality of a daily consumerism that seems to reduce every message to sheer noise and to thrive on absentminded reception.
Kitsch as «Pars Pro Toto» or «Boldinism»
A work of art is a system of relationships among several elements (the material elements that make up the object, the system of references that underlies the work, the system of psychological reactions that the work provokes and coordinates) occurring at different levels (the level of visual or sonic rhythms, the level of plot, the level of ideological content, and so on).21
The unifying characteristic of this structure, its aesthetic quality, is that it always appears organized according to a recognizable procedure, «the way of forming» that constitutes the style of a work and that reflects the author’s personality as well as his or her historical and cultural context.22 Once it is recognized as an organic work, the artistic structure allows for the identification of stylistic elements that we shall here call stylemes. Given the unitary character of the structure, each styleme possesses characteristics that connect it to the other stylemes and to the fundamental structure—so much so, that a styleme is enough to suggest the structure of the entire work, just as it is always possible to reconnect a severed limb to a mutilated statue.
The successful work of art becomes a model and invites imitation. This can occur in two different ways. In the first case, the work of art offers itself as the concrete example of a particular way of forming which may inspire other artists to elaborate their own personal stylistic procedures. In the second case, the work of art provides a whole generation of exploiters with the stylemes necessary to evoke the characteristics of a particular context even after they have been extracted from it (if nothing else, as mere mnemonic aids, so that when a consumer recognizes a given styleme he will instinctively remember its origin and attribute its former success to the new context).
Art is often much too complex for the average consumer, who has only so much time to devote to it. At best, he will be able to appreciate only its most obvious features, or to interpret it according to some formula, the pale ghost of a previous interpretation. So why not help him out by providing him with fragmentary stylemes that have proved particularly effective? If Poe’s «tintinnabulation of the bells» has had a strong impact on the collective mind, then why not employ it to advertise a detergent? No matter how successful it is, the ad will never be considered as an aesthetic experience.
Stravinsky’s work is full of classical citations, which, openly acknowledged as such, become crucial elements of his compositions, to be reckoned with in any interpretation. This is also the case with collages and «polymaterial» collage paintings, in which the various items that are attached to the canvas are meant to refer back to their origins.
But one of the most salient characteristics of Kitsch is its inability to fully assimilate a citation into a new context. The borrowed styleme sticks out of its new context (which is too shaky to support it, too diverse to integrate with it) like a sore thumb, and yet it is never acknowledged as an intentional citation. Quite the contrary, it is palmed off as the real thing, an original invention. This is why I would like to define Kitsch in structural terms, as a styleme that has been abstracted from its original context and inserted into a context whose general structure does not possess the same characters of homogeneity and necessity as the original’s, while the result is proposed as a freshly created work capable of stimulating new experiences.
We find a typical example of this sort of procedure in the work of a painter justly famous with the average public of his time: Giovanni Boldini.
Boldini was a wellknown portraitist, a ladies’ painter, the creator of portraits that have earned their owners prestige and pleasure. In other words, Boldini’s art was in demand. The beautiful woman (be she noble or simply a member of the haute bourgeoisie) who commissions her portrait is not interested in acquiring a work of art; what she wants is a flattering reminder of the indisputable fact that she is a beautiful woman. To achieve this end, Boldini constructed his paintings by the book, with the specific intent of producing the desired effect.
The naked parts of his women are painted according to all the canons of a refined naturalism: pleasantly plump, suggestively creamy, teasingly flushed. Their lips are full and wet, their flesh eminently touchable; the look in their eyes can be sweet, daring, malicious, or dreamy, but it is always straightforward, keen, and fixed on the viewer. These women do not evoke an abstract idea of beauty, nor do they turn it into a pretext for formal digressions; they represent specific women, to such an extent that the viewer will end up desiring them. Cleo de Merode’s nudity is meant to excite; Princess Bibesco’s shoulders are offered to the desire of the viewer; Marthe Regnier’s sex appeal invites direct contact.
But the moment Boldini moves on to paint the clothes of these women, the moment he moves from the cleavage to the corset, and from this to the folds of the skirt, and from these to the background itself, he abandons all pictorial gastronomy to venture into the realm of art: the contours are no longer as precise, the colors glance off the canvas in luminous strokes, things are blobs of paint, objects melt in the light.
The lower portion of Boldini’s paintings is impressionistic. Here he
