"Yet it is true that once the avant-garde had succeeded in "detaching" itself from society, it proceeded to turn around and repudiate revolutionary as well as bourgeois politics. The revolution was left inside society, a part of that welter of ideological struggle which art and poetry find so unpropitious as soon as it begins to involve those "precious" axiomatic beliefs upon which culture thus far has had to rest. Hence it developed that the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to "experiment," but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence. Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point. "Art for art's sake" and "pure poetry" appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague.
It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at "abstract" or "nonobjective" art -- and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape -- not its picture -- is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.
But the absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, being what he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others. The very values in the name of which he invokes the absolute are relative values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating, not God -- and here I use "imitate" in its Aristotelian sense -- but the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves. This is the genesis of the "abstract."(1) In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft. The nonrepresentational or "abstract," if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once the world of common, extroverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former."

"the reduction of experience to expression for the sake of expression, the expression mattering more than what is being expressed"

"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."

"That Repin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator -- that is miraculous."

"If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch, we now see, imitates its effects."

- Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"
http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html

"Kitsch is pretense. But not all pretense is kitsch. Something else is needed to create the sense of intrusion—the un-wanted hand on the knee. Kitsch is not just pretending; it is asking you to join in the game. In real kitsch, what is being faked cannot be faked. Hence the pretense must be mutual, complicitous, knowing. The opposite of kitsch is not sophistication but innocence. Kitsch art is pretending to express something, and you, in accepting it, are pretending to feel."

"Hence we find ourselves in a dangerous predicament. The emotions that we need cannot be faked; but the vision on which they depend—the vision of human freedom and of mankind as the subject and object of judgment—is constantly fading. And in these circumstances, there arises the temptation to replace the higher life with a charade, a moral conspiracy that obscures the higher life with the steam of the herd."

"The romantic artist is attempting to invest human life with a religious aura—to rewrite those purely human experiences of conflict and passion as though they originated in the divine. In this way, nineteenth-century art served to sustain the vision of a higher life in the midst of bourgeois mediocrity. But behind the efforts of the romantic avant-garde, another force was gathering momentum, and this force was kitsch. Romantic art involves a heroic attempt to re-enchant the world: to look on human beings as though they had the significance and the dignity of angels. To sustain this attempt requires moral and aesthetic discipline, of the kind we witness in Brahms or Keats or Wagner. It also requires a work of the imagination, a searching of ordinary human life for those sacramental moments when the light of freedom shines through."

"Kitsch reflects our failure not merely to value the human spirit but to perform those sacrificial acts that create it. It is a vivid reminder that the human spirit cannot be taken for granted, that it does not exist in all social conditions, but is an achievement that must be constantly renewed through the demands that we make on others and on ourselves."

"Art resists the disease; if it ceases to resist, it is no longer art. The writers, composers, and painters whom we admire are those who portray the uncorrupted soul, who show us how we might feel sincerely, even in an age when fake emotion is the currency of daily life. "

"But each of us, in his own way, conducts his solitary fight against the loss of dignity. Through family, religion, and the forms of public life, we shield ourselves from the horrific vision that surrounds us—the vision of ourselves as fakes."

-Roger Scruton, "Kitsch and the Modern Predicament"
http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_1_urbanities_kitsch_and_the.html