The Theoretical Death of Abstract Art

Yi Ying

As Erwin Panofsky states, ‘a spinning machine is perhaps the most impressive manifestation of a functional idea, and an abstract painting is probably the most expressive manifestation of pure form. But both have a minimum of content.’

The quote above refers to ‘the underlying principles in a work of art that cannot be openly flaunted, the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion – all this unconsciously qualified by one personality, and condensed into one work.’ [1] Although abstract art is not his focus here, it can be concluded as lacking in content in his judgment, as it has only pure form. Content is something hidden behind the work that cannot be openly flaunted, and if art has only pure form, it thus does not have the content to which he refers. Panofsky put down the argument at a time when abstract art was prevalent. While he would not research into abstract art in particular, he was convinced by intuition that what abstract art offered was form only, as he could not feel the presence of other content. In fact, we have all shared Panofsky's experience. When confronted with an abstract painting or sculpture, we respond to it directly, first and foremost, as a judgment of form. It can act on our physiological-psychological senses to achieve a visual or aesthetic pleasure. This pleasure is in fact very low considering its simple formal composition with extremely limited spatial scope. Without the support of ideas and techniques, the aesthetic form will soon come to an end. 

Abstract artists and critics are both well aware of this, and thus they would not base abstract art on purely formal relationships and visual pleasure. The key to abstract art also lies in what Panofsky calls "the underlying principles in a work of art that cannot be openly flaunted". If we apply Panofsky's statement to abstract art, we will be faced with a dilemma of judging an abstract work to be good or bad. There is no technique, no subject matter, no relatively universal standards in abstract art, but feelings and ideas. While feelings can be sensed, concepts lie entirely in interpretation. We can directly judge and appreciate abstract works that conjure up good feelings, yet those not clinging to strong feelings or aesthetics are not necessarily bad works. If Kandinsky's work is juxtaposed with a piece by Malevich, the aesthetic expression of the former is often clearly felt by us, and Kandinsky's extraordinary sensuality in form is an ability beyond average. On the contrary, Malevich's work requires our knowledge to understand why he painted the way he did, before we accept his work. This situation is common in abstract art, when artists tend to use symbols to complement the insufficient abilities. In the abstract art practice in China, it is most common to translate the symbols of traditional culture into abstract forms, which has similarities to Malevich's work, except that it is about tradition worship in comparison to Malevich’s machine worship. Form is the main object of aesthetics, argues the formalist critic Roger Fry, but form cannot exist independently either, because the viewer usually lacks the ability to appreciate form directly; form, hidden behind an image like bait, draws the viewer into the work and moves the viewer. In the time of Roger Fry's criticism, abstract art had not yet formed a climate, but he nevertheless realized that form could not be appreciated on its own, even though it was fundamental to artistic expression. Form without image becomes abstraction, and form may be derived from image, but image is not the essence of form, and absolute abstraction must completely exclude association with image.

Nor did Kandinsky, who is practically and theoretically constructive about abstract art, believe that the expression of abstract art hovers on a purely superficial level. Abstract art has its content. He writes, “but the organic form possesses all the same an inner harmony of its own, which may be either the same as that of its abstract parallel (thus producing a simple combination of the two elements) or totally different (in which case the combination may be unavoidably discordant). However diminished in importance the organic form may be, its inner note will always be heard; and for this reason the choice of material objects is an important one. The spiritual accord of the organic with the abstract element may strengthen the appeal of the latter (as much by contrast as by similarity) or may destroy it.” [2] Inner harmony is what matters, according to Kandinsky, and this involves both the aspect of harmony and the inner being. Harmony consists of a harmony of parallel and symmetry, and a harmony of multiple confrontations. In general, the latter is more important than the former because it is closer to the inner. In an abstract picture, the position of point, line and plane results in the basic visual relationship - the parallel, vertical, and symmetrical combination of them conveys a sense of harmony, in opposition to the combination of movement, confrontation, and tension. As Kandinsky put it, when an angel of a triangular breaks through the edge of a circular plane, it generates a symbolic impact "no less powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo." Of course, symmetrical harmony likewise has the spiritual power often associated with a sense of solemnity, heaviness, and the sublime. The abstract artist uses various combinations of points, lines and colors to create a visual effect, in order to align the visual and the spiritual. It is, however, not up to the artist (like Kandinsky) how their spiritual claim in abstract form is judged and received by the viewer. In figurative art, how a figure is shaped depends on technical factors, but the viewer, even if he or she has no knowledge of techniques, can tell the "authenticity" or "falsity" of an image on the basis of life experience and, if there is a plot, on social experience and knowledge, even if they know nothing about techniques. However, in the face of an abstract work, these experiences and knowledge no longer help with the judgment, and intuitive feelings are essential to the judgment. We are moved by the form, because the appearance of the form acts on our psychological feelings, generating pleasant, warm, depressing, pathetic feelings. And first and foremost, we are able to respond to forms intuitively, and for most viewers 'I don't understand' is often the most common response. For a good abstract work, the key is to make a good combination of forms. But "good combination" also implies a formula, which can be employed in inferior abstract works without good sense to become "good abstraction". Indeed, this is the crisis of abstract art, as the formal harmony is solely sensory-based which leads to a decorative effect, a result that most abstract artists are reluctant to approve. This is also how abstract art gradually becomes mystical. In other words, the meaning or subject of abstraction, being internal, hidden, detached from or deep inside the canvas, is not revealed directly in the image. Moreover, it is inexplicable, since it comes neither from nature nor from any analyzable sense.

Despite the fact that Kandinsky's abstract work also developed from nature to abstraction, he, along with the other two most important abstract artists of the early 20th century, Malevich and Mondrian, did not approve of any connection between abstract art and nature. They denigrated decorative aesthetic forms. "From the Suprematist point of view," says Malevich, "the appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless; the essential thing is feeling – in itself and completely independent of the context in which it has been evoked." [3] Form arises from feeling, which in turn is independent of the context, something beyond the superficial world. Mondrian also believes that only when abandoning subjective emotion and imagination can an artist represent "pure reality" in their work. He criticizes Cubism for not developing abstraction to the extreme, and although opening up distinctive forms, Cubism has never been able to shake off its adhesion to nature - its forms all depend on a "specific" or "concrete" image of nature, while abstraction is exactly beyond the specific. Form can never reveal abstract relationships as long as it depends on concrete images. Why, then, is art bound to move towards abstraction? Why is abstraction a supreme value? An avant-garde genre notwithstanding, Cubism is still haunted by the material world, not beyond a world that we can perceive. From "inner reality" (Kandinsky), "pure reality" (Mondrian) to "feeling" (Marevich), none of these concepts are perceptible to us; they are, in Kandinsky's words, "veiled in darkness" and are part of "inner nature". "Language and its means of naming, describing, and defining, failed to help us grasp it. It belonged to a level of reality that not everybody could directly experience, and that occasionally eluded even the select few. It was a hidden reality the very experience of which required insight and intellectual and psychic effort. Since it was ‘veiled’ ‘inner nature’ it was not familiar to us to the same degree that the regular physical reality around us was. Yet this did not make it any less of an ‘object’, or any less the ‘content’ of a work of art, than a representation of material reality.” [4]

A famous example mentioned by Clement Greenberg describes an uneducated Russian peasant walking into an art museum and seeing a painting by Picasso along with a painting by Repin, he would certainly prefer Repin to the less readable Picasso, although "we will even suppose that he faintly surmises some of the great art values the cultivated find in Picasso." [5] What are "great art values"? Here, Greenberg means the values of abstraction that "are not immediately or externally present in Picasso's painting, but must be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to plastic qualities." [6] This is an assumption, and we might wonder if a cultivated audience is necessarily better able to find "great art values" than an uneducated peasant. Moreover, this value does not appear directly in the image but hidden and concealed according to Kandinsky, a reality outside the real world. In Greenberg's view, the spectator sensitive enough can react sufficiently to plastic qualities. If one judges by mere sensation, even the richest of sensations, the result is an aesthetic judgment, a decorative effect that Kandinsky and Mondrian have criticized. Greenberg was a generation later than Kandinsky and could not have been unfamiliar with Kandinsky's theories, but his "great art values" are by no means Kandinsky's "spirit," which is unknowable or only intelligible, while the Greenbergian abstract art value was knowledgeable, though not known to most, but can be proven in practice. One can only appreciate a work of abstract art if he/she understands the meaning of abstract art. The cultivated is not inherently capable of judging forms, but equipped with an intellectual privilege and identification with certain values. Greenberg argues that it is not technique that a peasant sees in Repin's painting, but he can recognize the vivid figures that are made with the techniques he is not even familiar with. "In Repin's picture the peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he recognizes and sees things outside of pictures," whereas, the elements of technique are isolated in Picasso's painting, which becomes "a play of lines, colors and spaces that represent a woman."[7] Such independent forms cannot be appreciated if they are unable to evoke memory and association of the image. Picasso's painting, while not yet purely abstract, is the basis for abstraction. Here, Greenberg draws a clear line between the cultivated viewer capable of appreciating abstract art and the uneducated peasant capable only of recognizing figurative images. For him, abstraction represents a higher value superior to the false art of Repin which provides "a shortcut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art" [8] The value of abstraction is therefore concretized and embodied in the dichotomy between cultivation and ignorance, avant-garde and academicism, abstraction and figurative. This also becomes the foundation of Greenberg's theory - the abstraction is not an ethereal spirit, or a reality outside of contexts; instead, its value exists in reality, and is inherited in history by the cultivated class.

Kandinsky sees the effects of abstract art on the surface as decorative, while the spirit behind the surface easily eludes the average viewer. Greenberg concretizes this relationship as the difference between the cultivated and the uneducated peasant, claiming that "Repin, or kitsch" that the latter appreciates, is "synthetic art". Here, "Repin" alludes to both the academic and the vulgar, or kitsch specifically, refers to the flattering low culture. To equate Repin with kitsch also means that academic and kitsch art are the same thing. Greenberg is not talking about the historical academic art in general, and his historic examination of the academic art is to confirm the value of the avant-garde. The avant-garde is separated from the academy art, and thus its antithesis is not academicism, but the kitsch derived from academicism. This marks the difference between Greenberg and Kandinsky. As Kandinsky contrasts abstract composition with the work of Michelangelo, he suggests a spiritual consistency between abstract art and classical art. Greenberg, however, argues that the bourgeoisie has single-handedly produced a cultural avant-garde as well as a cultural rear-garde, which share the same maternal gene. The separation of avant-garde art from academic art is the deconstruction and subversion of academic art, while kitsch inherits the vulgar, narrative and realistic image of academic art. Greenberg says that the technique of painting hidden in the image "weighs very little with the peasant," who merely recognizes the image and the plot that unfolds from it. "Technique" is a key word here. In the Renaissance period, "art is what art hides" (Leonardo da Vinci), while for modern or avant-garde art, art is what art reveals. The former means that the masterful artistic means appear only as images, and the viewer pays attention only to the realism of the image and neglects the technique of shaping it. Modern art is "art for art's sake", where technique is isolated from image and becomes a separate value. On that point, Greenberg clears states as follows:

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. [9]

Greenberg points out the derivation of abstract art, which was born in opposition to academicism by dismantling the descriptive representations and perspective plastic manipulations of academic art, separating the forms of artistic expression from the image, and once isolated, forms become mere shapes or symbols. Abstract art stemmed from the cultural confrontation between the avant-garde and the academic, creating a new history in which art returns to its ontological essence and no longer serves literature or power, nor is it "subject to any command." Greenberg admits that avant-garde artists "have retired from the public" because their art (abstract art) could not be understood or appreciated by the public. Despite Greenberg's association of avant-garde art with socialism, his exclusion of public interest from abstract art is consistent with the spiritual aristocracy that Kandinsky addresses in abstract art. For Greenberg, there is no difference between academic art and mass culture. Totalitarian systems adopt vulgar culture to suit the needs of kitsch. For example, in fascist Germany and Italy, or the totalitarian USSR, authoritarian systems reduced all culture to the level of pleasing the masses, and the avant-garde was outlawed because it was too difficult to understand to be used for effective propaganda. Of course, the spirit of freedom and anarchy embodied in the avant-garde was also intolerable in an authoritarian culture aiming at ideological control. In order to advocate the avant-garde and criticize academic, Greenberg intentionally brought popular culture and authoritarian systems together. In fact, the most developed popular culture, or kitsch in his words, is not in authoritarian countries, but in those that are most democratic, such as the United States, France and UK. Greenberg is right on one point, however, that the avant-garde simply cannot survive in authoritarian countries, especially in fascist Germany and Soviet Union. Italy might be the only place where futurism was to some extent transformed into a tool for fascist propaganda. The actual enemy of the avant-garde exists in capitalism, as in Greenberg's words, "where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-guard." "Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy."[10]

The avant-garde is a bourgeois culture against the bourgeoisie, separating itself from within the bourgeoisie while at the same time attached to capitalist society. The avant-garde, Greenberg says, "assumes itself to be abandoned by the society to which it always remains attached precisely because it needs the money". However, Greenberg does not elaborate on how the avant-garde clings to this society through money, just as how authoritarian systems have reduced all culture to a level of pleasing to the masses is similarly unaddressed. Nonetheless, he speaks volumes about the relationship between the kitsch and capitalism which determines the elitism of abstraction. The avant-garde is not only divorced by the bourgeoisie, but also by the society (of kitsch). The target of kitsch is the working class, namely, the peasants and small owners urbanized to become proletarians, for whom the modern industrialized production makes it possible to acquire the necessary cultural knowledge. However, such culture lacks the leisure and peace necessary for the traditional urban culture, or the spiritual culture of a cultivated class. Away from the rural folk culture they originally had, the working class is thus surrounded by a new culture suitable for their cultural consumption. The problem is that this culture does not arise spontaneously but is produced for them to consume by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie produces mass culture for two purposes. One is to stabilize the people and provide the necessary cultural conditions for capitalist reproduction, while the aristocracy of the working class in Europe and the US also provides the necessary material conditions for the consumption of kitsch. In this sense, the production of kitsch is also a state policy of capitalism - the kitschy academic art and the mass culture itself both acts as an instrument for deconstructing the opposing forces that undermine the capitalist system. The significance of avant-garde comes to the fore against this background, as it rejects the bourgeois cultural control, and similar to abstract art, it is difficult to comprehend, which makes it impossible for the bourgeoisie to feed it to the proletariat. Another purpose is the production of the bourgeoisie for itself, that is, production for profit and money. Kitsch is mass-produced by machines and included within a powerful marketing network system where every member of society is its potential consumer and the real profiteers are the ones who create it. Greenberg particularly emphasized that "kitsch has become an integral part of our productive system in a way in which true culture could never be, except accidentally." That is to say, the avant-garde is created by hand instead of machine; it is original, not mass-produced or copied, or produced for money by any means.

Greenberg's positioning of popular culture is problematic to some extent, particularly in terms of the definition of the "avant-garde". The avant-garde was a destroyer of bourgeois society, first initiated by a small group of pioneering intellectuals and soon bringing impact to literature and art. Although the avant-garde did not participate directly in politics, but it would not have had the courage to disrupt the cultural order of the bourgeoisie without the political revolution of advanced intellectuals. Avant-garde art is an antithesis produced by the modern bourgeois, of kitsch fed by the bourgeoisie as a narcotic for people and as a profit-making machine. Based on this dichotomy, the avant-garde, isolated from the masses, is bound to be elite, noble (the rightful heirs of the classical elite culture). It is also destined to be unintelligible and rejected by the consumers of kitsch, despite the fact that these "consumers" are made by the bourgeoisie. Greenberg describes the avant-garde artists as "the first settlers of bohemia", suggesting the fate shared by the avant-garde artists and the proletariat who came to the city from the countryside. When an uneducated peasant is confronted with Picasso, the confrontation is actually between an economic bohemian whose identity has not yet changed and an artist who has transformed from a bohemian to a social elite. Picasso, who was not born a spiritual aristocrat but arriving in Paris from Barcelona, is not fundamentally different from a peasant who came to work in the city after losing his land. Picasso's early works reveal a very bohemian quality, in which the wandering entertainers and the marginalized individuals are also, to some extent, a portrait of his own life. The success of Cubism lies not in the fact that he challenged the bourgeoisie, but precisely in the success of his predecessors including Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne in their renown and market, which led to the logical development of the art form of the avant-garde. Picasso was the one who seized the opportunity. T.J. Clark has long pointed out that avant-garde art such as Impressionism is, above all, a middle-class act that reflects bourgeois ideology, and that it cannot be the representative of the proletariat. Take Manet's Olympia as an example, in which the woman lying on the bed and the maid with the flowers are the real underclass of society, looked at by the patron who is present not in the picture but in reality, as much as by the artist. Interestingly, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was also based on prostitutes in a brothel. "The English writer is a gentleman first and a writer second."  [11] As the avant-garde artists and critics, from Kandinsky to Greenberg, look down on their opponents on a spiritual high ground, they make no substantial damage to the culture they seek to rebel against, because the avant-garde was eventually included in the bourgeois culture. It is the bourgeoisie that ultimately embraces the avant-garde, while the popular culture will never be transformed by it. The hypothesis proposed by Greenberg that as soon as the proletariat becomes more literate, it will accept real art will not prove true, because mass culture has its own laws of development, and the proletariat is not attached to the avant-garde. A literate peasant will not become a cultivated audience; on the contrary, however, a cultivated class may become the recipients and consumers of mass culture.

During the period of industrialization, peasants who had lost their land came from the countryside to the cities and joined the urban working class. Modern, industrialized production has changed their old way of life. Time accumulating in collective labor, mechanization and machine production and the factory system became natural clocks, in which day and night and the seasons disappeared in the labour. Time has become a social structure, divided into measurable, precise units for people to contest and consume. Since the beginning of the modern labour time, the working class has struggled for a reasonable amount of labour time. Just as the mass culture of the middle class emerged in the Impressionist period when leisure was guaranteed by the working hours of the white collar of the middle class, "kitsch or popular culture" has been guaranteed by the working hours of the working class. A certain dedicated amount of time is essential here, as it is what makes it possible for the working class to have their own popular culture, and such a time is both determined by capitalist production and achieved by the striving of the working class. In a sense, kitsch is a right of the working class, for whom the avant-garde is never their culture, as the avant-garde happens in galleries, museums, and other official public venues involved with capital, no matter how it labels itself as anti-bourgeois. The visual culture of the underclass, however, proceeds in a completely different way. It is a process of being spontaneously and passively generated rather than creating itself self-consciously. This is articulated in the work of Impressionists such as Manet, Seurat and Toulouse-Laudrec. The Models (1888-89) by Georges Seurat is typical of such expression, with three nude models against the background of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, another work by Seurat, contrasting the two very different social classes. In the foreground are working women who sell their bodies, whereas the background depicts the social life of a cultivated class. The former may be a waitress in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Manet), or a dancer in the Moulin Rouge (Laudrec), that is, venues of popular culture. The cabaret culture is not a "kitsch" culture created by the bourgeoisie for literate workers, as Greenberg puts it, but a unique culture brought by peasants or immigrants from their homeland. In the 1880s, when the avant-garde was taking place, there were over 500 ballrooms in London, which were by no means the saloons of high society, but a mixture of country ditties, local music, immigrant song and dance. With alcohol, noise, smoke, and pornography, it represents a lifestyle so peculiar to the underclass that "conscientious" critics called it a "den of criminals". Many ballrooms were forced to close in 1878, when the British Parliament passed an act for strict control of such venues, and they moved to play nostalgic and exotic songs before the emergence of film and recording. In 1887, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, which was put into commercial manufacture along with recordings in 1898. The 1920s saw the mechanization of recording, and by 1928 there were 2,500,000 phonographs in the UK. It was at this time that popular culture entered into mass production. The German philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno talks of a standardized sound being distractedly consumed like a cigarette or a bowl of corn flakes. [12] Cheap dancing halls revived, proving that capital is not making popular music, but seeking business opportunities in kitsch and in turn, promotes the mass development of kitsch. The spread of ragtime, jazz, and tango, all born in the working-class as "folk" music, is inseparable from the commercialized music production. The "animal dances" from North America including foxtrot, eagle rock and bunny hug overturned the conventional ballroom dance in Europe, liberating people from rules and hierarchies. Young people found an outlet in dancing, and even women were freed from being led around on the floor by men. The Royal Academy of Dance required certification of ballroom instructors, and allowed four dances (waltz, foxtrot, quickstep and tango) in ballrooms. However, such restrictions were no longer effective as more than 27 million record were released at the time. 

The field of visual culture may differ from music in that the working class does not produce images self-consciously on its own. "Kitsch" in visual culture is mainly images made by machine. Photography was invented in the 1840s and soon entered domestic life in the decades that followed. In 1861, there were already 200 photography studios in London, which offered popular photographic products, from portraits, landscapes, to model poses shot for academy painters (which in a sense echoes the assertion by Greenberg that academicism is kitsch). Initially acting as the imitation of painting, photography had completely replaced painting in small portraits by 1870, a decade from its birth. The 1880s saw the advent of compact cameras and snapshots, marking that the images produced by machine really made their way into homes, wedding photos, travel commemorations, family photos, anniversary photos and photo albums. Such images were not created for aesthetics, but rather, they dissolved the aesthetics of art. In the early 20th century, the social function of photography was further expanded to the realms of criminal records, investigative journalism, commercials, celebrity stills. Photography provided images for all desires and taught the public eye to consume images, and in turn, the consuming eye transformed photography. Movie was already a commonplace by Greenberg’s time. By 1914, cinema had replaced the theatre and ballroom, and cinemas with over 4,000 seats emerged in the 1920s, a time when going to the movies had become the most important thing to do on the weekend for many. "Whether we like it or not,” claims Panofsky, “it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60 percent of the population of the earth. If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters, and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies the social consequences would be catastrophic." [13]

Decades after the age of Panofsky and Greenberg, popular culture is now more formidable than ever, from the development of movies to the rapid iteration of pop music. Abstract art, however, has instead come to the position of kitsch, becoming a minor role in the art market. Even the paintings, which Greenberg held up as a symbol of elitism, have been completely marginalized in contemporary visual culture. It now appears that the theory of abstract art is not a development of art but a retreat, despite the radicality of Greenberg. "Nothing shall be changed without its confrontation with other substances." [14] What confronts the avant-garde is popular culture. "Postmodernism has often been defined as the crisis of modernism. In this context, this implies that the postmodern is the crisis caused by modernism and modern culture confronting the failure of its own strategy of visualizing. In other words, it is the visual crisis of culture that creates postmodernity, not its textuality." [15] Popular culture did not emerge in the 1930s but as early as 1839, a century before Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", when La Gazette de France declared the "invention" of photography to so significant that "it upsets all scientific theories on light and optics, and it will revolutionise the art of drawing.” No wonder the academic painter Paul Delaroche proclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" [16] The modernist visual revolution that began with Impressionism is in fact a strategic response to mass culture, since the real revolution happens not in painting but in visual culture. Both the theories of Kandinsky and Greenberg in terms of abstraction merely act a link in the flatness envisioned by Greenberg. Although abstraction has developed the flatness to its extreme, it will eventually retreat to its medium. Indeed, Kandinsky's painting eventually moved towards abstract aestheticism and became part of popular culture. The research focus of Greenberg, on the other hand, moved from the absolute flatness to the medium. It was already the age of Pop Art when his theories proved their value ephemerally in Minimalism. He failed to foresee in the 1930s, as Greenberg himself put in his later years, that pop culture would grow so formidable. The lament recalls the words of Delaroche, but belatedly.

[1] Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, trans. Fu Zhiqiang, Liaoning People’s Publishing House, 1987, p.17.

[2] Artists on Art, Edited by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972, p.450.

[3] Ibid., p.453.

[4] Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art, 3, Routledge, New Youk and London, 1998, P313.

[5] Clement Greenber, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 1939. http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Iain Chambers, Popular Culture, Methuen London and New York, 1986, p.37.

[12] Ibid., p.138。

[13] Quoted from Ibid.，p.77。

[14] Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Commercial Press, volume 2, item 37. Quoted from Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Yang Kailin, Jiangsu Education Publishing House, 2006, p.10.

[15] Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York, 1999, P3.

[16] Graham Clarke, The Photograph, Oxford University Press, 1997, P12.