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Gillo wrote: "Perhaps politics is always kitsch. Which would prove that there can be no agreement between politics & art. But it might be better to say that ‘bad politics’ is kitsch, or at least dictatorships are. And yet, even this is not altogether true: Napoleon was a man of exquisite taste, and so was Maria Theresa. Bad taste in politics begins therefore with modern dictatorships, and for an obvious reason: in the past, people could accept the fact that man was endowed - by fate or by the divinity - with super human powers. Alexander the Great or Caesar were not kitsch the way all modern dictators have been without exception (even when their politics happen to have been based on reason). Nowadays, whenever art has to bow to politics - or generally speaking, to some sort of ideology, even a religious one - it immediately becomes kitsch. ...On the whole, I do not believe that genuine art could have a political function these days for good or for evil. Or at least as far as countries belonging to the western brand of culture are concerned. It might be well that art could still have a political function in countries such as modern China or among some far-away African or Polynesian tribe... Here again the basic reason is due to the fact that nowadays art can no longer retain the figurative (in the sense of illustrative & anecdotal) role which it played in the past, and therefore any attempt in that direction can only degenerate into the worst possible kitsch." Basically, Gillo feels that since we, as a people, have become ‘wiser’ than to accept the notion of leaders having divine or super human powers. And this knowledge leads the collective ‘us’ into seeing any political art or piece suggesting this as not true, and at best not effective - at worst, kitsch. Well, at least we civilized westerners. Hmm. Ethnocentrism aside, isn’t this a bit too simple? Yes. Gillo basically uses this slim chapter on political kitsch into an attack of, of all things, avant-garde art: "Nobody could define the relationship between avant-garde and kitsch better than Clement Greenberg, in an essay published in 1939. The very fact that this essay was written during the years which witnessed such blatantly kitsch movements in Nazism, fascism, and Zhdanovian Stalinism, merely stresses & increases its importance." Wait. I mean I am no Nazi or Nazi lover, but to use such political movements, such fears, as a way to legitimize an attack on avant-garde art , well, isn’t that just as kitschy as anything Gillo has ever touted at as before? Using sentimental emotions & base fears to sway or ‘move people?’ If Gillo were running a campaign, I can only imagine what his posters, buttons & commercials would look like: images of concentration camps & the words "I won’t do this."
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