It’s not an argument that I’d hitherto contemplated, but anything that defends garden gnomes while attacking modern art is obviously correct in my book.
It was only with the rise of the Avant Garde and specifically subsidies for those artists that this magical category of “Kitsch” comes about in which all the folk arts and lower-class aesthetic sensibilities as dismissed not by an aristocracy that feels noblesse oblige, but by ethnic and class enemies who need to discredit and exclude the productive national majority ethnicity from their own institutions, so that they, the capturing ethnicity and interests, might extract the tax dollars and institutional prestige the productive classes themselves generate.
Now you might say “that’s cute but do you really care about Garden Gnomes and dogs playing poker that much?”
No but I REALLY care about realistic historical depictions in art, and the national character and mythologization of my people. And the SECOND you let these parasites get in and declare the national majority’s folk art is somehow illegitimate or aesthetically bankrupt, something they’d never say about the absolute WORST minority art (No black, jewish, muslim, latino, queer, lesbian, communist, or any other EVER gets accused of kitsch no matter how inept, propagandistic, or downright dumb their art is), the second you give them that power, they use it in every single instance against any work that might moralize, uplift, or express the values of the ethnic majority or middle-class.
This is the reason your architecture is ugly, this is the reason sculptures only depict sexual degeneracy or political corruption, not heroism, this is the reason every approved artwork that isn’t a legacy holdover (which their paid activists destroy) exists in some way to actively offend, “challenge”, or “discomfort” the productive classes who actually make society run.
When’s the last time a museum curator proudly said they’re displaying a work to “Challenge” the black community? To “discomfort” the Jews? That offending the queer community is necessary to start a dialogue?
Never.
Because the purpose of art is not “contemplation” or “challenging assumptions” it’s aesthetic warfare to moralize or demoralize enemy peoples and communicate the dominance hierarchy, either through aesthetic mogging or humiliation.
That being said, I’ve never been a fan of that 70s macrame home art one would sometimes see on displayed on wooden walls or the classic velvet Elvis. But the idea that Thomas Kincaid’s pretty paintings are somehow less artistically worthy than Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs is obviously and intrinsically false.
