or utilitarian). In these cases, there is art only insofar as the artist manages to embody his intentions in his formal project, and insofar as the work, though aiming at something outside itself, also manifests itself as a form for its own sake.
5.R. Egenter, Kitsch and Christenleben (Ettal, 195o), as quoted by Giesz.
6.Clement Greenberg, «The AvantGarde and Kitsch,» in Dorfles, ed., Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste.
7.See Chapter 8, «Two Hypotheses about the Death of Art.»

In his «Salon de 1859,» Baudelaire expresses great irritation at photography’s ambition to replace art, and exhorts all photographers to confine their activity to the utilitarian recording of images rather than try to infiltrate the realm of the imagination. But is it art that begs industry not to invade its turf, or is it industry that is pushing art out into other fields? On Baudelaire’s attitude toward this new situation, see Walter Benjamin. «On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,» in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969).

See Gerhart D. Wiebe, «Culture d’elite et communications de masse,» in Communications 3. For the sake of a more rigorous method of investigation, Wiebe proposes a distinction between the characteristics of art and those of mass communication, even though they arc often joined in one product. Except that his notion of the functions of «mass media»
saenedimims Tfida. w uicrlyit.,.., Adorno, «I would almost go so far as to say thatthe morepopular TV programs fulfill a regulating social and psychological function—that is, they tend to preserve a balance in a context that can be much more turbulent than we think . . . People would not spend so much time watching these programs if they did not satisfy a need, if they did not redress certain distortions, if they did not fulfill certain desires.»

See Dwight MacDonald, Against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1952), pp. 4043, and in general the chapter «Masscult dorno, «Ober den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des HOrens,» in Dissonanzen (Gottingen, 1985).

12.ISbeedRomanJakobson, «Linguisticsand Poetics,»inSelectedWritings, vol. 3 (The Hague: Mouton, 1981).

14. As mentioned, the notions of code and decoding can also be applied to nonlinguistic communications—for instance, to visual or musical messages as organizations of perceptual stimuli. But is it possible to decode such messages at a semantic level? This should not be too difficult in the instance of figurative or symbolic painting, since their mimetic nature can entail semantic references as well as iconographic conventions. On the other hand, there could very well be an interpretive code, maybe not quite as cogent as the linguistic system, based on a cultural tradition, in which every color would have a precise referent. As for music, Claude LeviStrauss speaks of it as a code because it refers to a precise grammar (whether tonal or dodecaphonic); sec G. Charbonnier, Conversations with LeviStrauss, tr. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), pp. Izo1 2 I. Yet he realizes that the notion of code does not apply so well to serial music, and therefore he elaborates the hypothesis that, in serial music, grammar operates only as prosody, «since the essential feature of linguistic rules, the feature which makes it possible to express different meanings by means of sounds which in themselves are arbitrary, is that these sounds are part of a system of binary oppositions.» In serial music, in contrast, «the idea of opposites remains, but the positions of the notes are not articulated as a system. In this sense, the code would seem to be more expressive than semantic.» LeviStrausss objection is important, since it can be applied to abstract painting. But it also applies to tonal smemusaicn,tic dimension.on the basisofa grammaticalcodethat hasno saenedimims Tfida. w uicrlyit.,.., Adorno, «I would almost go so far as to say thatthe morepopular TV programs fulfill a regulating social and psychological function—that is, they tend to preserve a balance in a context that can be much more turbulent than we think . . .

IS. Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 3, p. 558. The message. can_communicate precise meanings, but the primary one is the message itself. One can speak of a «poetic» or «artistic» meaning even in the case of nonsemantic arts. There are artistic messages with very open and imprecise semantic references and a very precise syntactic structure (Jackson Pollock’s paintings, for instance). Most of the time, the semantic efficacy of these particular messages depends on the degree of awareness that we bring to their system of contextual relationships. In architecture, for instance, one can speak of the semantic value of a building not only because each of its elements refers to specific functions but also because of the symbolic nature that the general object assumes, in the way it articulates itself structurally and in the way it relates to its urban context; see Gillo Dorfles, «Valor’ comunicativi e simbolici nell’architcttura, net disegno industriale e nclla pubbliciti.» in Simbolo, comunicaziont, consume (Torino: Einaudi, 1962). This can also happen with the formal procedures of music, which often can assume such a precise referential value (to ideological situations, for instance) that they can be said to have a semantic function. And it certainly happens with painting, where even a style can assume (thanks to an interpretive process acquired through tradition ) an almost conventionalized significative value. For instance, an art director may agree to illustrate the jacket of a RobbeGriller novel with a painting by Mondrian, but he or she would never use the same painting for a book of Beckett plays. In none of these instances, obviously, is the relationship of signifier to signified as precise as it is in spoken language; but this relationship is secondary to a poetic message, just as it is called into question in the structuring of a linguistic message with poetic pretensions. In a poetic message, the structuring of the signs coordinates not only the signifiers but also emotions and perceptions, as is the case in the decorative arts and in music. Thus. when LeviStrauss accuses abstract painting of lacking «the essential attribute of the work of art, which is to offer a kind of reality of a semantic nature,» he is either confining the notion of art to a certain kind of art. or is simply refusing to recognize that, in a poetic message, the semantic function must be articulated in a different way.
To avoid this dead end, A. A. Moles has developed a distinction between the semantic and the aesthetic aspect of the message, in which the latter is connected to the structuring of its elements. See A. A. Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, tr. Joel E. Cohen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966).

16. Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 3, p. 25. This does not mean that the signifieds (when they are there) do not count. On the contrary, the poetic message so effectively forces us to question the signifieds to which it refers that we often have to return to the message in order to find, in its patterns of signification, the roots of their problematic nature. Even in the case of preexisting signifieds (say, the Trojan War in the Iliad), the poetic message casts a new, richer light on them, thereby becoming a means to further knowledge.

17.The Russian Formalists had already elaborated the postulates of this position before the Prague structuralists. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism (The Hague: Mouton, 1955).
18.See Chapter 2, «Analysis of Poetic Language.» 19.See Dorfles, Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste.

20. See Umberto Eco, » Di foto fatte sui muri,» II Verri 4 (1961); and idem, «Introduction,» I colon del ferro (Genoa: Italsider, 1963). On the semantic problematics of the «ready made,» see Claude LeviStrauss in Charbonnicr, Conversations with LeviStrauss. According to LeviStrauss, the object pulled from its habitual context and inserted into another context causes a «semantic fission»—that is, it disrupts the usual relationship between signifier and signified. «But this semantic fission also allows for a fusion, because the mere fact of placing this object in contact with other, new objects can reveal some of its latent structuralproperties.»
21. For the notion of the work of art as a «system of systems,» see Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973; orig. pub. 1949).
22. For the notion of modo di fonnare («way of forming»), see Luigi Pareyson, Estetica: Teoria della formativita, and ed. (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1960). See also note 4, above.
23. A. Manzoni, The Betrothed, tr. Bruce Penman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 206.
24. Marcel Proust, Under a Budding Grove, tr. C. K. Scott Montcrief (New York: Random House, 1982).
25. It could be argued that the physical description of characters specifically aimed at exciting the reader is not just characteristic of pulp novels. The great narrative tradition of the nineteenth century did it all the time. On the other hand, there are various ways of doing it. Salgari’s description of Marianna is totally «generic»—it has no depth. Her features could be those of any other «heroine.» Balzac’s descriptions of his characters may at first seem to be similar to those of Salgari, but in fact they are closer to Proust’s (even though they could be easily appreciated by Salgari’s readers). Balzac describes Colonel Chabert some thirty pages into the novel, when we already know something about the psychology of the character and can thus easily connect each of his physical attributes to some deeper trait—aside from the fact that there is nothing in the description of his face that could be defined as «generic» or that could be applied to other faces. The effect the description produces on the reader is immediately problematized by the rest of the page.
26. Lampedusa’s stylemes already have a history that could easily be traced back to Guido da