"Fussiness and kitsch, after all, are the two principle characteristics of so-called civilized man, highly stylized as he has become into a single human grotesque over hundred of thousands of years..."
-- Thomas Bernhard Old Masters
The kitsch of expressionism.
What had been at stake in the shift to non-representational painting often took two radically different directions, though the work in-itself may have been identical. On the one hand there was the appeal to the universal and spiritual and on the other, a different kind of universality, that of matter and the brutishness of form. Of course, non-representational painting quickly ceased to be non-representational. In fact it became rapidly representative of a host of things from the myth of the heroic artist to the hegemony of American capitalism. This was only extended by Pop art before reaching its reductio ad absurdem in Conceptual Art with its heightening of the importance of that most spiritual of cults – intentionality and its glamorization of banality. But if you know anything about glamour, you know that it always comes with nostalgia attached, if not riding piggy-back.
