It's oddly appropriate, I think, Ian, since only you would bring up such a thing in a coffee bar 

But I've been meaning to read that article recently, in fact, so I shall do so at some point soon I hope.

This is a gargantuan topic, and I don't want to write a point-by-point rebuttal of Greenberg here, as it wouldn't do justice to such a highly influential yet rather dated product such as this one. His warnings about the role of the artist are generally useful, as is his definition of the avant-garde. However, I don't subscribe to the premise of a "perspective of culture large enough to enable us to situate [kitsch and high art] in relation to each other" -- since it assumes that there must be some way to subsume all artistic efforts under one banner. That isn't fair to art, which is supposed to be free from many kinds of facile analysis, let alone such a clumsy dualism as highbrow vs lowbrow. Even within an individual artist's work, different pieces have different sets of socio-political intentions

Anyone who makes a plea for the artist's artist or the poet's poet gets at least a sympathy vote from me, since these particular flowers do need a lot of attention and serve a valuable purpose, but if the thing culminates in the following sentence, then I have to get a little indignant: "Since the avant-garde forms the only living culture we now have, the survival in the near future of culture in general is thus threatened."

A culture proclaiming itself the only living culture? If it thinks of itself that way, it deserves to be threatened! If anything, the composer's composer today, while leading a meager and marginal existence, needs to at least privately accept the modesty of their position, even as it is an essential one. And the society needs to leave room for this kind of uncompromising exploration. The work of the avant-garde is typically only of interest to other artists, true, but those other artists are influenced by what they see, and it reflects in their work, which in turn rattles a yet larger circle of artists, and so on. This is the trickle-down theory, but unlike the economic trickle-down theory, those at the "top" or the "middle" are not there by birth or privilege or climbing some mythical ladder, but can move from one place to another from one work to the next, or within a single work. At the same time, anyone else can suddenly contribute to an avant-garde understanding despite working their entire lives in the lowbrow.

And yes, the definition and analysis of kitsch here is extremely biased and almost embarrassingly dated. But according to the little preface, Greenberg adjusted it somewhat, eh? Warhol, Nico Huber, William Burroughs, have shown that the lines between kitsch and avant-garde are not nearly so easy to draw, and one should have already seen it when Duchamp was around. Greenberg's contempt shines through in the sentence "The net result is always to the detriment of true culture in any case." My question: did he continue to believe that when he was a little older than 29 years of age?!

That kitsch has wiped out folk culture would be lamentable if it were true. Folk culture, however, is endangered not by the existence of kitsch, but by a loss of vital factors within folk societies that allow them to produce, preserve, and disseminate "their" culture. People aren't so stupid that they latch themselves onto kitschy products due to some lack of personal investment in their own authentic roots. It all hinges on a quaint, snooty, romanticized notion of plain folk that also feeds the success of our reactionary political classes.

I am often alarmed at the state of culture, don't get me wrong. But I have two reasons for optimism: one is that people are individually much smarter than we give them credit for. It's just that they are a little stupid collectively -- but real art targets the individual, not the group, while commercialism targets the group rather than the individual. So commercialism, and kitsch, and rock'n'roll, have to be lacking in particularity to make their impact on an economic scale, and with a lack of particularity comes a lack of intellectual substance.

The other reason: the purpose of kitsch is to sell you something. There is only a small arsenal of ways to do that in novel ways. People get wise to these methods, and you have to invent new ones (incidentally, you do so by peeking at what the avant-garde does!), but the purpose of high art is to do god knows how many million things to the thirsty brain, and when people get wise to these, it's not time to scrap them, but time to immortalize them as among the hallmarks of human endeavor.

That got a little long, and it's not perfect, but I simply had to provide an anti-depressant to counteract this big beige creature that is Greenberg.

That's what I meant by my post being 'imperfect', I certainly don't mean watering down, but I would say that people who become familiar with Berio are more likely to take to early Stockhausen than those who try to take Stockhausen in based on a regular diet of Beethoven and/or the Beatles. Nothing against Berio in general, but there is quite a bit of 'troping' going on there, i.e., concessions to an ear conditioned by sonata form and the like.

the trickle-down metaphor is very bad, of course, as it implies upper and lower which implies better and worse. The avant-garde throws any number of objects in a dark pond in hopes that some of them will float. How's that for a more value-neutral metaphor?

Sorry.  WHAT?

SURPRISE POP QUIZ: You have an object and you want to know if it will float in water. Do you need to know the object's mass, weight, or density?

Would you all care to have a squizz at the word 'likely' in my post, please?