This essay quotes Yeats's lines "Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence" to illustrate its claim that the abstract was born when artists stopped imitating God and started imitating other works of art and literature.
The third section of this essay describes how both a "Tammany alderman" and an "Austrian house-painter" begin to express resentment of their culture in the forms of puritanism and eventually fascism. This essay quotes Yeats's lines "Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence" to illustrate its claim that the abstract was born when artists stopped imitating God and started imitating other works of art and literature. Its second section begins by describing how Industrial Revolution led to universal literacy, creating the demand for a new kind of cultural commodity. In response to an essay by Dwight MacDonald about Soviet cinema, which was also published in the (*) Partisan Review, this essay explains why a Russian peasant prefers a painting by Ilya Repin to one by Picasso. Published in 1939, it begins by addressing how the same civilization can produce both a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, examples of the two contrasting types of art mentioned in its title. For 10 points, name this essay by Clement Greenberg.
The third section of this essay describes how both a "Tammany alderman" and an "Austrian house-painter" begin to express resentment of their culture in the forms of puritanism and eventually fascism.
"Avant-Garde and Kitsch"