Venus de Kitsch or, The Passion of the Venus de Milo

Venus de Kitsch: Or, The Passion of the Venus de MiloAuthor(s): MATTHEW GUMPERTSource: Criticism, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Spring 1999), pp. 155-185Published by: Wayne State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23124291 .

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MATTHEW GUMPERT

Venus de Kitsch:

Or, The Passion of the Venus de Milo

Theophanies

Summer in Paris, at the Louvre. But it could be Jerusalem, or Mecca. We stand

before the Venus de Milo like pilgrims, silent, rapt (Fig. I).1 At the end of the

hallway that leads, like a via sacra, to the statue, someone points, whispers: "There she is." The salle du Louvre the cella of a temple: a cultic space purged

Fig. 1

Criticism Winter 1999 Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 155-85

Copyright © 1999 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

155



156 Matthew Gumpert

of all movement, history, desire. Temple? Or train station? There are shouts,

laughter; children playing hide-and-seek, or looking anxiously for bathrooms.

Some tourists are clearly bored; others make fun of the statue they have trav

elled so far to see. A man with a movie camera pans from head to toe and

exclaims: "Would you look at the size of her feet? Must be size twelve!" All the

while, the sporadic insult of flashes, and a guard's futile refrain: "No flash!"

Summer in New York, at Gus's, a Greek restaurant. Wine, laughter, the usual

irreverent repartee. The waiter brings a plate of octopus; someone asks: "So,

what are you working on?" As if summoned into being by the question, there,

above the bar, beside a bottle of ouzo: the Venus de Milo. A reproduction, that

is. I point: "Her."

Introduction

How far is the Musee du Louvre from Gus's Restaurant? How far is the

"real" Venus de Milo from the "reproduction"? Art from kitsch? Consider the

reproduction of the Venus de Milo—what I call the Venus de Kitsch—as

symptom and symbol of the "postmodern condition."2 To celebrate this con

dition—call it the "triumph of commodification," the "waning of affect," the

"reign of the simulacrum," or the "loss of the real"—is to embrace what Susan

Sontag long ago called camp sensibility which "makes no distinction between

the unique . . . and the mass-produced object." Camp sensibility (we would

say postmodernity) "transcends the nausea of the replica."3 This essay cele

brates the replica; not, however, because the distinction between original and

copy has been neutralized by contemporary technologies and modes of cog

nition, but because it is naive to believe that such a distinction was ever

viable.41 want to show that the theophanies sketched out above are, and have

always been, identical. Which came first? The question rests on premises I am

trying to undo; to ask it is to seek out temporal, aesthetic, ontological priori

ty for an object which remains ever elusive. The "first" Venus de Milo—an

object that, I will argue, cannot be said to exist—is also, we like to believe, the

most beautiful, and the most real.

Both the Musee du Louvre and Gus's Restaurant, it is my contention, offer

mock theophanies: in both places, idolatry (the worship of an image) combats

and conspires with iconoclasm (the desecration of an image).5 That is my sub

ject here: kitsch as idol. Postmodern criticism's defining trait, it could be

argued, is its obsession with the image.6 Idolatry? No; postmodernism's con

flation of object and image is, in fact, an idealistic effort to rescue object from

image. Postmodernism is nostalgic criticism, masquerading as a criticism of

nostalgia; a New Iconoclasm posing as a New Idolatry. Our culture's adoration

of classical art is a paradigmatic expression of that nostalgia. Under its spell

we collapse the distance between the Musee du Louvre and Gus's Restaurant,

or we magnify it into something untraversable. I will attempt to traverse the



Venus de Kitsch 157

distance between these two spaces without nostalgia; to show that they have

always been the same scene.

Kitsch as Idol

Although kitsch is difficult to define, it has always referred (1) to the aes

thetic species of falsehood: the imitation. Clement Greenburg defines kitsch

as "ersatz culture," "the debased . . . simulacrum of genuine culture";7 (2) to a

strictly modern phenomenon, tied to the rise of popular culture. For Walter

Benjamin the premodern cult object was inseparable from its "aura"; it was

unique our relation to it ritualized, particularized.8 With the advent of

mechanical reproduction, the aura is lost: the cult object becomes a product,

infinitely reproducible. What is the aural The term's indeterminacy is the

source of its power, turning art into an archaic mystery cult.

For the Benjaminians, the waning of the old cult, and the rise of the new

(that of kitsch, or the Anti-Aura) is linked closely to modernity: to new audi

ences, economies, technologies.9 The typically apocalyptic-ecstatic postmod

ern diagnosis 0ameson, Harvey, Baudrillard), on the other hand, of a con

temporary world saturated and anaesthetized by mediated images, where imi

tation is indistinguishable from original, art from commerce, suggests a more

recent triumph. Celeste Olalquiaga's equation of kitsch and a postmodernity

marked by "irreverent recycling" is standard.10 But here postmodern criticism

is itself distinguished by the very repetition it purports to expose in contem

porary culture; Olalquiaga's postmodernity is an "irreverent recycling" of the

discourse of modernism. Both modernist and postmodernist remain nostalgic

prophets, the difference being that the postmodernist appears to celebrate

what the modernist proscribes.

Greenburg's "simulacrum of genuine culture"; Benjamin's cultic object

stripped of its "aura"; Olalquiaga's "irreverent recycling," all suggest that kitsch

is an ontological and theological category, not just a technological and aes

thetic one; all suggest that, despite the persistent efforts to tie kitsch to

(post)modernity, the concept is implicit throughout the long history of mi

mesis—by which 1 refer to the Western faith in and fear of representation.

Kitsch is the sin of representation; it is representation as sin; in other words:

idolatry. To condemn kitsch is to return to the Hebrew rejection of the graven

image, and to Plato's prosecution of imitation.11 To distinguish between art and

kitsch is to distinguish between truth and falsehood; between the true and the

false god.12 How to choose between the Venus in New York and Paris? Which

is the "real" Venus? Which Venus "refers" to the other?

The story of the Venus de Milo and her reproductions forces us to con

front idolatry much as Augustine did: as a question of referentiality. All signs

but God refer, Augustine argues in De Doctrina Christiana 1.2; only God is



158 Matthew Gumpert

re/erred to; God alone is to be enjoyed (frui); all other things are to be used

(uti). The idolater denies the referentiality of the sign—he enjoys it, in and of

itself. Idolatry is thus the fetishization of the sign.13 But Augustine begs the

obvious question: how to determine (and who determines) a referential origin

(i.e., god)? Idolatry, Michael Camille points out, is always someone else's error.

But to condemn the image of another is to acknowledge its power.14 The dif

ference between the "true" and the "false" image is always less clear than we

might prefer; and every iconoclast would seem to be an idolater in disguise.

Camille's discussion of the medieval category of idolatry suggests a con

nection between postmodern criticism's love-hate relation with popular cul

ture and the tension, central to the entire Western tradition, between iconola

try and iconoclasm.15 The debate over kitsch simply plays out, all over again,

the Platonic ambivalence towards mimesis which, as Derrida has suggested, is

always "ordonnee a la verite: ou bien elle nuit au devoilement de la chose

meme, en substitutant sa copie ou son double a l'etant; ou bien elle sert la

verite par la ressemblance du double. . . ,"16 Kitsch is to art, then, as mimesis

is to truth. The logic that governs both of these relations is what Derrida calls

supplementarity; the kitsch-imitation is marked by the range of valences

Derrida ascribes to the supplement, which can both extend or, more sinisterly,

replace the life of the original.17 It is the Platonic logic of supplementarity and

the Augustinian logic of idolatry that have distinguished kitsch from art. The

true god (art) is real; the idol (kitsch) is an imitation of and a surrogate for the real. This proposition, subtending the entire debate over kitsch, generates the fol

lowing corollaries: (i) god is singular; the idol is plural;18 (ii) god is original, without price or precedent; the idol is secondhand; a product designed to be

distributed, exchanged, bought and sold;19 (iii) god is natural; the idol is arti

ficial;20 (iv) god is immaterial, abstract; the idol is fetishistic;21 (v) god is

absolutely distant; the idol is intimately close; a portable deity.22

By all of the above criteria, Gus's Venus is a kitsch-idol: (i) it makes two

Venus de Milos; there can be only one; (ii) it is a product, something you can

buy and sell; (iii) it is an industrial forgery, not the "real" object wrought by

the hand of an artist; (iv) it is animated and anthropomorphized as I recog

nize it;23 (v) it belongs in a museum, not a restaurant. In fact, the museum is

there in order to shelter the "real" Venus from places like Gus's.

Early Kitsch

Is there such a thing as ancient kitsch? I would argue, for example, that

the Hellenistic era is an Age of Kitsch par excellence.24 Nostalgia for the past;

new technologies of reproduction; the commercialization of a "classical"

canon;25 these trends, central to Hellenism, point ahead to postmodernity. The

Venus de Milo would appear to be part of the Hellenistic marketing of the

classical past. Although celebrated after its rediscovery in 1820 as an original



Venus de Kitsch 159

classical work by the hand, for example, of Praxiteles himself,26 the statue is,

in fact (it is generally agreed), a Hellenistic copy of a late classical copy of a

still earlier classical model, which, we can assume, was a copy of a still earli

er, now lost "original." Art historians have gone as far as calling it a "plagia

rism" of Praxiteles' Knidian Aphrodite (Venus as postmodern pastiche).27

Kitsch, Calinescu argues, implies that "there is no substantive difference

between itself and original beauty,"28 but with classical statuary, substantive

difference between copy and original is not always meaningful.29

Kitsch sculpture is always a form of "realism"—by which we mean the art

of manufacturing the "real."30 The kitsch object, in this sense, is too real: too

lifelike, too dramatic, too big, too little; a good description of Hellenistic

sculpture, with its tendency towards verisimilitude, melodrama, and pathos.31

Hellenistic sculpture is a moving art: art, in other words, that seems to move,

and seeks to move us. Gisela Richter points out a "tension" in the Venus typ

ical, she asserts, of Hellenistic art; the Venus' "statuesque pose" is contradict

ed by a "feeling of movement" conveyed "through the different directions of

torso and limbs and the variegated folds of her drapery"32 The aesthetics of

Hellenism—anthropomorphizing, bringing art "to life"33—are those of

Pygmalion. A program for fetishism. Indeed Aimee Rankin describes kitsch as

art over-invested with affect;34 but affect has always been attached, even to

"high art," even in the Classical period. Pliny on Praxiteles' Knidian

Aphrodite: "They say that a certain man was once overcome with love for the

statue and . . . embraced the statue and that there is a stain on it as an indi

cation of his lust."35 It would appear that whatever aura the Knidia possessed

was not sufficient to prevent its desecration. Nor is it just a work of art that

has been defiled, but a cult object. And a tourist attraction.

The marketing of "antiquity" is as pervasive a feature of Rome as of

Alexandria. Pliny notes that, in his own era, "[m]any People are so charmed

with the statuettes which they call 'Corinthian,' that they carry them around

with them."36 He decries the commercialization of art, the degenerating work

manship, and the mania for reproductions under the Empire, complaints that,

to a twentieth-century ear, sound all too familiar.37 But few of the objects

referred to in the documents collected by J. J. Pollitt on Roman art can be

called "art"; most are idols, like the statue of the son of Germanicus and

Agrippina which Augustus, acording to Suetonius, "used to kiss . . . fondly every day."38 Can such an object, caught in such a relation with its admirer, be

called "art"? Surely the term is here an anachronism, and fails to do justice to

the tension, in Augustus' kiss, between reverence and desire.39 Dio Cassus'

account of Claudius' prohibition of cult statues in his name offers a picture of

Rome as a vast warehouse overrun with idols: "the public buildings were so

filled with statues and votives that he said he would give some thought to

the problem of what was to be done with them."40 Here the process of



160 Matthew Gumpert

kitsch-commodification has ran its course; the work of art, once transcendent

idol, is now an inconvenience, an object that takes up space and gathers dust.

Why stop at Rome? Think of the importance of the relic in the Middle

Ages.41 During this period "[r]everence was paid" notes Germaine Bazin, "to

no fewer than fifty-seven veils of the Virgin."42 Folk art? Or an industry of idol

atry?43 More than any other event in medieval Europe, the Iconoclastic

Controversy suggests the supplementary logic of idolatry, a logic consistent

with Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum. The iconoclasts, Baudrillard

argues, "accused of despising and denying images," in fact, "accorded them

their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who were content to venerate God

at one remove."44 Baudrillard labors throughout Simulations to elaborate a his

tory of the fall from Platonic mimesis in Western culture.45 But his exposure

of iconoclasm suspends that history, revealing what Derrida had already

brought to light in his deconstruction of Plato: that mimesis has always

already been superseded by simulation.

There is no culture, then, without kitsch. Consider Adorno on Veblen:

"the metropolis of the nineteenth-century assembled a deceptive collection of

pillars from Attic temples, Gothic cathedrals, and the . . . palaces of Italian

city-states. Veblen pays it back; for him the real temples, palaces, and cathe

drals are already as false as the imitations. World history is the world's fair.

Veblen explains culture in terms of kitsch, not vice-versa."46 Veblen on culture

is more cynical than Baudrillard on Disneyland. My point is that we do not

have to wait for Disneyland to witness the triumph of kitsch over art.

Museum as Kitsch-Factory

We only have to pay a visit to the Louvre. The museum has always posed

as a haven for culture;47 its critics seek to expose it as a conspiracy against cul

ture, not art's sanctuary, but its prison; if a temple, then one for false idols:

"Mon pas se fait pieux. Ma voix change et s'etablit un peu plus haute qu'a

l'eglise, mais un peu moins forte qu'elle ne sonne dans l'ordinaire de la vie.

Bientot, je ne sais plus ce que je suis venu faire dans ces solitudes cirees, qui

tiennent du temple et du salon."48 Valery suffocates in the Louvre; not because

museums take art too "seriously," but because he does.49 The museum, realiz

ing Valery's dream of the "sanctity of culture"50 all too literally, is all the proof

he needs that, inside as well as outside, the barbarians have triumphed. For

Valery "there is nothing left," Adorno writes, in "Valery Proust Museum," "but

to mourn for works as they turn into relics."51 Adorno compares Valery's con

tempt for the museum with Proust's enthusiasm; for Proust is "an admiring

consumer, an amateur,"52 a Kitschmensch, less interested in art than in what art

does to him (Proust's Recherche could be considered a hymn to kitsch).53

Proust's museum, like Gus's Restaurant, is a place where art is consumed.

As early as 1815, Quatremere de Quincy, Secretary of the Academie des

Beaux-Arts, calls the Louvre a marketplace. If the museum withdraws art from



Venus de Kitsch 161

the realm of "commercial circulation," by the same token it deprives it of pub

lic utility and moral purpose.54 A proto-Marxist argument against commodity

fetishism; for the work in the museum is a fetish, an object without use-value.

Quatremere might have appreciated Richard Serra's efforts, a century and a

half later, to "liberate" art from the museum/marketplace. Douglas Crimp's

discussion of Serra's "site-specific sculpture" begins by paraphrasing Serra's

own dictum regarding the now infamous and dismantled Tilted Arc: "To

Remove the Work is to Destroy the Work."55 The point here is Serra's protest

against art's passive acquiescence in the conventional exhibition space: a

"nowhere" which "univeralizes" the object, detaching it from production and

reception alike.56 To grant the work of art a permanent place within the muse

um is to forever displace it; to deem it "priceless" is to make it perpetually

"price-able"; and to exalt it as a transcendent deity is to turn it into a kitsch

idol. John Berger imagines a visitor at the National Gallery in front of

Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks in a room which he compares to a chapel. "The

drawing," Berger suggests, "has acquired a new kind of impressiveness. Not

because ... of the meaning of its image" but "because of its market value."

Whatever Berger means by "meaning" here, it has been compromised by com

merce. Berger's museum is a temple to a false god, art "enveloped in an atmos

phere of entirely bogus religiosity."57

The museum, of course, is not just a configuration of rooms, but a script:

a "proper" sequence of actions. Carol Duncan and Allan Wallach discuss the

way architecture and iconography collaborate to turn the museum visit into a

repressive ritual.58 Their museum is a covert fascist-capitalist space that decon

textualizes the art object, and thereby renders it "transcendent"; for them the

"prescribed route" which the visitor is "encouraged" to follow turns an ideo

logically constructed narrative into "history," or "nature," or "truth."59 All of

which has very little to do, ironically, with material reality. For if the museum

visitor is a member of a cult, his faith is at best perfunctory, a matter of keep

ing up appearances. What do people really do in museums? They touch things

they shouldn't touch; they cross forbidden barriers; they make passes, some

times, at other visitors; and the "prescribed route"60 is often abandoned. The

museum's aspirations to cult-status always generate iconoclastic opposition;

the very "seriousness" of the museum demands to be seen as "comic," or "bor

ing."61 The museum is, and always has been, both a temple of trancendence

and a kitsch-factory.

Theophany: Mike Tyson Meets the Venus de Milo

Venus' setting in the Louvre works to conceal that fact. She is alone, at the

center of the room to which she gives her name (insistent signs direct us

toward the "Salle de la Venus de Milo"), located at the end of a long corridor.

Architectural crescendo: as we approach, fighting hunger, fatigue, and the



162 Matthew Gumpert

bodies of our fellow tourists/pilgrims, the statue, first seen from afar, grows

steadily in size. Already larger than life, she stands upon a pedestal, defended

by a glass barrier. All of these features are rhetorical arguments for the hierat

ic: the Venus de Milo, the museum tells us, transcends now, as it always has

and always will, the realm of history, desire, and commerce.62

It is easy to succumb to this rhetoric: "Today thousands of visitors . . .

crowd around the statue . . . Unaware of the history of the figure, they see it

with fresh eyes as . . . one that embodies the enduring ideal of feminine beau

ty and yielding sensualism."63 Programmatic scene: the miraculous conversion

of the pagan (i.e., the ignorant tourist): the encounter between visitor and

statue a singular event, a theophany outside of history. But does any tourist

really approach the Venus de Milo "with fresh eyes"? Surely even the first

time, one is always seeing the Venus again. This statue has a story (in fact, a

lurid tale of greed and vandalism); but Havelock does not choose to tell it.

There are signs in the stone of a past; but the rhetoric of classicism and the

space of the museum always function to dehistoricize them.64

That rhetoric soon begins to cloy; the (now) blank marble becomes an

insult; the silence a tease. The museum, which would have us on our very best

behavior, provokes instead the vandal and the voyeur, the buffoon and the

bore. Today's Louvre is much as Valery found it; a place where culture is not

only revered but reviled; where mock epiphanies and comic theophanies take

place on a daily basis; where Mike Tyson, for example, meets the Venus de

Milo (Fig. 2). A photograph in The National Sports Daily shows boxer, statue, and star

tled tourist.65 Above the picture a caption reads: "A Farewell to Arms." There

are a number of ways to read this document: (1) As idolatry (Venus < Tyson);

the meeting between Tyson and Milo as a miraculous theophany. The event is

miraculous: that these two figures should find themselves in the same room,

etc. But if this is hagiography, than whose? Venus', or Tyson's? The tourist is

clearly transfixed by the presence of the boxer (the statue, after all, is always

there). Tyson is the real idol. (2) As iconoclasm (a) (Venus = Tyson); Venus is

toppled from her pedestal. Not that Tyson is raised in her stead. This is not a

cultural coup d'etat but the democratization of camp as Oscar Wilde defined it:

"the equivalence of all objects."66 That equivalence (Tyson = Venus) is a stan

dard feature of the postmodern landscape. The bad puns, gossip column

humor, and reference to Hemingway all conspire to persuade us that there is

no difference between high art and popular culture, between the Louvre and

Las Vegas, between Mike Tyson and the Venus de Milo; (b) (Venus £ Tyson); Venus is toppled from her pedestal, however. The image tells a story about

violence enacted against bodies. Venus is not Tyson's equal, but his opposite:

the first without arms, the second reducible to his arms (and the cliches which

inevitably follow—"instruments of destruction," "murderous weapons"

remind us that Tyson is a professional iconoclast, a man who destroys bodies,



163

1

Fig. 2



164 Matthew Gumpert

reputations, icons competing for the adoration of a worshipful public); the

first an inanimate statue, the second a sentient being (but the boxer is always

compared to the classical statue, his musculature marmoreal, etc., and his goal

is to paralyze his opponents, to turn them into inanimate bodies); the first

white, the second black (mirroring the racial discourse through which the

boxer's career is inevitably narrated); the first a woman, the second a man (the

Venus standing like an embodiment and an indictment of the violence the

boxer will wield, not just against other men, but against women, that violence

intimated in the caption beneath the photograph: "At last, a lady Mike Tyson

looks up to"). (3) As idolatry and iconoclasm (Venus > Tyson, Venus < Tyson). If the caption confirms the transcendent status conferred upon the statue (lit

erally and figuratively, Tyson must look up at her; she is out of his—and all of

our—reach), the very same words clearly serve to dispute that transcendence.

In them we hear the voice of the philistine in the locker room: contemptuous,

mocking, misogynist. This encounter is not, then, some perversion peculiar to

postmodernity; for the conflict and collaboration between idolatry and icon

oclasm is constitutive of all art. The museum, one might argue, was built to

make that encounter possible, and to contain it.

Indeed, investigation at the Archives du Louvre revealed just such an

effort at containment. When it was clear I came as idolater, not iconoclast (but

was that strictly true?), the archivist, initially reticent in complying with my

request for "material on the Venus de Milo," confessed to having collected any

and all references to the statue received by the Louvre for the past fifteen

years—despite the disapproval of the curator. It was like happening upon the

secret scrapbook of a crazed fan, or the votive offerings of an underground

religion: a cult, a strange mixture of worship and desecration. I saw love

poems addressed to the Venus, left at her feet; recommendations from a doc

tor obsessed with the statue's security, pleading that she be more carefully pro

tected from the hands of the heathen crowd; an article, entitled "Venus trop

caressee!," suggesting that the doctor's fears were not entirely unfounded ("Un

hebdomadaire grec accuse le Musee du Louvre . . . de 'detruire' la Venus de

Milo, faute de precautions pour la proteger des caresses intempestives de ses

admirateurs");67 a letter from "Venus Enterprises" (specializing in lingerie and

erotic films) seeking permission for the use of the statue's name.

But who "owns" the Venus de Milo? Despite the Louvre's efforts at quar

antine, the Venus de Milo reproduces, virus-like, outside the walls of the

museum. All of us are carriers; members of a cult. She is everywhere:

Je suis hante. Venus! Venus! Venus! Venus! Diary of a Statue Stalker

1995-96 . . . 1/8 National Public Radio, A Prairie Home Companion:

Guy Noir, PD., meets an armless dancer named Venus de Milo . . .

2/6 Intra-Venus de Milo: album by the fictive band Spinal Tap . .. 3/10 At Venus de Milo, dance club in Boston . . . 6/23 Julian Sands turns



Venus de Kitsch 165

Sherilyn Fenn (surgically) into a living Venus de Milo in Boxing Helena; facing her, a copy of the statue . . . 8/4 New York Times

Magazine: Olivier Laude on the "Window of the World" theme park

in Shenzhen, China: "Stroll into the park via the Golden Gate Bridge

. . . Ogle Michelangelo's David and the Venus de Milo, together at

last" . . . 10/12 TV sitcom Caroline in the City:; aesthete to macho-man:

"you'd probably take a look at the Venus de Milo and say, hey, with

jugs like those, who needs arms?" . . . 11/20 Gift: Venus de Milo

candles . . . 1/27 Multiple references in Alta Vista, index to the World

Wide Web; e.g., a digitized Venus by Mira Imaging, Inc . . ,68 1/29 NY: Aphrodite Clothing and Accessories; a plaster Venus in the win

dow . . .

Hagiography: d Urville and Marcellus "Discover" the Venus de Milo

The earliest descriptions of the statue following its rediscovery in 1820

suggest an already flourishing cult.69 The Comte de Clarac, Conservateur des

antiquites du Louvre, is typical: "c'est Venus . . . belle que sur le mont Ida

. . . elle parut aux yeux emerveilles de Paris . . . ; voilant une partie de ses

charmes, la deesse dedaigne d'en faire briller tout l'eclat pour assurer son tri

omphe."70 Her reign is extensive. In 1874 she is "un sujet favori de decoration

. . . on la retrouve dans les chambres sans luxe comme sur les meubles pre

cieux des palais d'Europe."71 Arguing against restoration in 1890, Ravaisson

Mollien calls her "un debris sacre, auqel il faut se garder de toucher."72

Indeed, the story of Venus' rediscovery reads like a sacred text or chanson

de geste, complete with theogonies,73 theophanies,74 epic battles between good

and evil (French vs. Turks),75 triumphant arrivals,76 flights (from barbarians,

philistines and, more recently, Germans, in 1870 and 1940) into Egypt,77 and

journeys to Mecca.78 Those involved in the statue's rediscovery, likewise, have

demanded their own hero-cults. Dumont D'Urville, naval officer and future

explorer stationed, fortuitously, in the vicinity of Milos, remains France's

undisputed hero of the Venus affair.79 D'Urville's is a household name, his

achievements the subject of exhibitions80 and monuments. His tomb, for

example, at the Cimetiere Montparnasse in Paris, is an imposing obelisk with

the standard "great events" depicted in a series of bas-reliefs around the cir

cumference of its base.

In "Voyage dans les Mers du Levant" (Fig. 3), we see D'Urville, clad in

toga, in an awkward little boat that appears to have run aground upon Venus'

very knee. D'Urville's right hand points at the statue; a caption reads simply: "Venus de Milo Signalee." It would be hard to find a more explicit represen tation of theophany; but is it Venus' theophany we are watching, or her

abduction?81 In any case, the scene is only one in a series starring D'Urville;

Venus is a minor player in this saga; a bit of booty won by the conquering hero



166 Matthew Gumpert

Fig. 3

for the glory of France. The reliefs themselves are dwarfed, finally, by the phal lic enormity of the obelisk, the tomb/souvenir standing like an oversized mon

ument to machismo (Fig. 4). The fate of the Vicomte de Marcellus, the career diplomat charged with

purchasing the statue and bringing her "home," is less felicitous. D'Urville was

idolized; Marcellus is accused of idolatry.82 "Q]e le ferais proscrire," writes

Lenormant, "comme un des paiens de notre epoque.83 Marcellus' defense

against these charges is halfhearted. Indeed, his own writings on the Venus

make such a defense difficult; in his Souvenirs de I'Orient, for example, he likes

to call the statue "mon idole." Amongst Marcellus' writings are various peti

tions to the Louvre, including requests to have his name engraved on the

Venus' pedestal.84 To no avail. A number of letters refer to a long-ago-promised

delivery of a plaster cast of the Venus. In 1852 le Comte de Niewerkerke, directeur general des Musees, grants Marcellus' wish, "en souvenir," he writes,

"de la conquete que vous avez faite au profit de l'art. Cette copie est a votre dis

position au Louvre."85 Marcellus resigns himself, in the end, to a private cult,

and a substitute Venus: a souvenir, one, it must be added, a good deal smaller

than D'Urville's.

Kitsch

Ours is the age of the souvenir. Haskell and Penny point to the rise of new

technologies in the last century (reducing machines, improved pointing and

mechanical carving machines, sand-casting) allowing the production of copies in unlimited numbers, and the consequent degeneration of the quality of the



Venus de Kitsch 167

Fig. 4

classical replica, destined now not for museum or gallery, but home or gar

den.86 They wonder if "the promiscuous familiarity encouraged by these tech

niques may have unintentionally diminished the glamour of the statues repro

duced."87 This was not something Josiah Wedgwood worried about in 1779:

"the more Copies there are of any Works, as of the Venus Medicis . .. the more

celebrated the Original will be."88 Haskell and Penny disagree: "it was when



168 Matthew Gumpert

the Venus de' Medici was most multipled," they argue, "that we can trace ... a

decline in her reputation." Wedgwood, they conclude, "was [. . .] thinking of

high quality . . . copies and he would not . . . have been impressed by the

products of the plaster-cast makers, . . . marble workshops and bronze

founders of the nineteenth century."89 What would he have thought, we won

der, of the vastly more prolific technologies of replication in the twentieth cen

tury?

Driving Haskell and Penny's dialogue with Wedgwood is the Platonic pro

scription of mimesis. (To shift the discussion to the opposition good copy/bad

copy, as Haskell and Penny do, is a way of suppressing the possibility that

between any original and any copy there may be no opposition at all.) That

Haskell and Penny's critique of the technology of reproduction is fully con

tained within this proscription suggests how misleading it may be to identify

modernity as a rupture with the past. Demonstrating this is a task too large to

undertake here, suffice it to say that the very features of reproduction (com

modification, aethestic degeneration) which Haskell and Penny lament in the

modern era are those Pliny regrets in the reign of Vespasian.

We have seen how Baudrillard's attempts to excavate a history of the dis

course of the image was undone by this same proscription. Let us call the copy

of the Venus de Milo a simulation, by all means, so long as we call the original

the same thing.90 In turning then, as we do now, to a series of copies, we are

not moving from one order of mimesis to another, regressing from original to

secondhand. It is not a question, in these artifacts, of dissimulating a "real"

Venus de Milo; they are not being assayed (ontologically, ethically, aesthetical

ly) by reference to a present or absent original. Think of the objects that fol

low as representations of each other, rather than as genealogical descendants

of any singular, ancestral original. I have thus made no attempt to elaborate a

typology of reproduction here; it is not the inflection of the particular medi

um with which I am concerned, but reproduction itself as a form of ritual

idolatry.91

Venus of the Diner. On a placemat from a diner in Astoria, Queens (Fig. 5):

Venus a crude scrawl. A trivialized classical motif frames Hellenistic sculpture,

medieval palace, classical temple, and contemporary map alike; all of these

signifiers work together—along with a soup-stain or a stray french fry—as a

bricolage standing for and selling the idea of "Greece," or, perhaps: "Lunch."

Duplicated and degraded, by the same token the Venus is revived, her cult

confirmed, because her humble employment in the service of the insignificant

and the daily, sustains, while it mocks, as in a Passion or mystery rite, her rit

ual power. Think of this, in Bakhtinian terms, as a carnivalesque placemat; by

laughing at culture, it celebrates it in popular, corporeal terms.92

Venus of the Matchbox. On a box of Mexican matches, "Clasicos de Lujo"

(Fig. 6): the Venus de Milo, the Parthenon, the train "La Central." A rhetori



Venus de Kitsch 169

Fig. 5

cal defense of quality: the classic (or classical). All of these objects are the "best"

in their class, speaking cachet, prestige, power, and wealth; here they are

drafted in the service of a box of fifty matches. Comedy? Hubris? Savvy mar

keting? All three, perhaps.

Salt-and-Pepper Venus. "Venus Salt and Pepper Shakers," from H. Fishlove

& Co. in Chicago, 1948 (Fig. 7).93 The box promotes and demotes the Venus:

the Ionic column is there (requisite classical reference), but so are the slogans

("Gay!" "Practical!" "Amusing!") that read like so many signifiers for "post-war commercial boom."

How-Much-Is-That-Venus-in-the-Window de Milo. Venus above a coffee

shop in New York.94 An eminently postmodern landscape (Fig. 8): the beau

tiful and unique objet d'art a mere bibelot, grouped with the like (miniature classical busts and vases) and the unlike (clothing, signs, awnings, advertise

ments). This Venus works for a living: she stands in a window marked "L.

Biagiotti: Better Made Displays." What is being sold here is not the Venus de

Milo per se, but the very notion of display, the Venus long ago having become

a sign for the whole category of the exhibited, the gazed upon, the displayed.

Imagine yourself, now, walking past Puccio's Cafe Espresso; you look up, see

the words "Italian Kitchen," "Drink Coca-Cola," "Heros" and discern, still

higher, the familiar form of the Venus de Milo. As you continue on your way,

you spy an attractive pair of pants, and think, without pants one would be

naked; naked like the Venus de Milo: the Venus has no arms, you remember;

arms, legs; shirts, pants. You recall the Venus, the statues beside her; you won

der: are these the Heros of the Italian Kitchen? Does kitsch belong in a kitchen?



170 Matthew Gumpert

Fig. 6

Meanwhile your ruminations and bad puns are nearly brought to a sudden

halt by a careening cab. Wittingly, unwittingly, you are a protagonist, along with the Venus de Milo, in a thousand parallel, competing, intersecting nar

ratives, all of them private rituals sustaining, in one way or another, your cul

tic relation to that object.95 The point here is not psychology, which, as repre sented here, is crude, a mere syntagm of associations, but epistemology and



Venus de Kitsch 171

Fig. 7

phenomenology: how we come to know, over and over again, the Venus; how

she remains a feature of our cognitive, perceptual landscape.96 Venus de Braquehais. Nothing restricts us to contemporary landscapes in

our pursuit of the kitsch-object. Take Bruno Braquehais's Academic Study —

No. 5 (Fig. 9), one in a series of photographs produced in 1854.97 Kitsch

Ingres, essentially: an odalisque in an orientalist setting, gazing upon and

gazed upon by a plaster Venus de Milo. Elizabeth McCauley writes:

The chaste . . . Venus . . . gazing down on her . . . anti-Greek coun

terpart . . . draws the eye away from the real flesh and suggests that

armless "art" is . . . superior to clumsy "nature." This mishmash of

. . . props, representing classical, medieval, Renaissance, and

Oriental cultures, confuses rather than legitimizes the presence of the

. . . nude . . . Artifice, embodied in the baroque drapery and . . .

objects suggesting the senses, confronts nature in the . . . unidealized

female body.98



172 Matthew Gumpert

Fig. 8

But it seems to me that what Braquehais's image "confuses" is precisely

the distinction between "artifice" and "nature," flesh and plaster; both "models"

are part of the "mishmash of pretentious props," of the "objects" in a space

that is at once studio, harem, and museum. The photograph itself is, of

course, one more object for the collectioneur: a souvenir. At the same time,

Academic Study—No. 5 is a product and celebration of the industry of idola

try; not only in the reciprocal gazes of statue and woman, and that of the

implicit viewer who looks from one to the other, but in the technologies of

reproduction which the photograph both exposes and exploits: the souvenir

Venus imitating the original; the statue itself mimicking flesh-and-bone (and vice versa); the female model playing the painted odalisque; the studio

dressed up as harem; the photograph itself, reproducing and substituting for

a "live" performance.

Venus of the Textbook. Souvenir and handbook for the souvenir-maker, Le

Moulage is a how-to on sculptural reproduction. "J'ai choisi un exemple que

chacun connait," writes Pascal Rosier, "la Venus de Milo."99 If the Venus de

Milo is the example everyone knows, Le Moulage is a guide on how to make

examples of Venus, thereby ensuring that everyone know her. Moulage,

"1'ensemble des operations permettant de reproduire cette oeuvre a un ou

plusieurs exemplaires," is distinguished from JaQonnage, "l'intervention de la

main ou de l'outil pour la production d'une oeuvre unique"100 the two sug

gesting the Benjaminian distinction between art in the modern and the pre

modern era. But the first may function not as heresy but reformation, trans

lating and disseminating Venuses, turning the Venus of the Louvre into a ver

nacular Venus, a Venus of the People. Le Moulage offers us not the birth of

Venus (immaculate conception), but her continual rebirth.101 Venus, once

invaluable, immovable, singular, is now affordable; transportable, plural.



Venus de Kitsch 173

Hg. 9

Reformation, desecration. Wax Venuses are grouped with "objets . . . que Ton

trouve dans les boutiques de decoration: . . . bougies ornementales . . . imita

tions de plats cuisines . . . corbeilles de fruits factices."102

Art

In Olalquiaga's Megalopolis, the religious trinket, once object of an

authentic cult ("first-degree kitsch"), is marketed and mass-produced as self

conscious ("second-degree") kitsch, and eventually (as "third-degree kitsch")

regains its place in the promised land of the museum.103 Art and academia



Matthew Gumpert

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'■ I :'" t' . i{. 1/ i,S l\ «■'/' - '1 / -*V' / • / ;

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Rebirth of Venus

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Interview: Kirk Var

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Fig. 10

(e.g., this article) recuperate (and reproduce) kitsch. The Venus de Milo has not escaped this process. We should resist the temptation, again, to see the

recuperated Venus as a corruption or resurrection of an original (the Venus de

Milo inhabits the realm of the always-already-kitsch). Dali's Venus aux tiroirs turns the statue into a pastiche of psychoanalysis (Fig. 10);104 Picasso's Venus de Gaz is an abstracted, utilitarian Venus, its very title parodying our penchant

for classical icons; Magritte's Les menottes de cuivre mocks high "classicism," all marble and monochromatic, with a plastic, polychromatic, Mr. Potato-Head

Venus (Fig. II).105 Dali, Picasso, and Magritte alike would seem to topple



Venus de Kitsch 175

Fig. 11

Venus from her pedestal; all, in fact, end up only raising her higher. In this

respect their work does not seem distinct from the kitsch examined in the pre

vious section, except that the objects in the first group are mass-produced and

available at little cost to the consumer, while those in the second are distrib

uted in limited numbers, sold at exorbitant prices, and signed.

More recently Jim Dine has played upon our culture's reverence for the

classical idol. Consider the twin torsoes of Looking Toward the Avenue (1989).106



176 Matthew Gumpert

The patinated bronze surfaces of these Venuses, armless, headless, identical in

every way but size, suggest an antiquity cynically manufactured, designed to

be a "classic" from the start.107 Compare them to the twin towers of the World

Trade Center as seen by Baudrillard: "that there are two of them signifies the

end of all competition, the end of all original reference."108 Dine's Venuses,

simulacra, are also there to announce the death of the original. It is true that

Dine's Venuses are not identical, but similar in the geometric sense; but simi

larity, perhaps even more than identity, succeeds in destabilizing the hierarchy

of copy and original.109

Andres Serrano's Female Bust (1988), finally, is a photograph of a repro duction of the Venus de Milo immersed in urine (Fig. 12).110 It belongs to a

series of works in bodily fluids, the most infamous being the Piss Christ

(1987).111 To pair Female Bust with Piss Christ already suggests to what extent

the Venus de Milo functions as a contemporary idol. Is Female Bust about an

artist pissing on the Venus de Milo? Are we forced to bear witness here to the

desecration of classical beauty? And yet Female Bust is beautiful. Perhaps this

is a work, instead, about transcendence; about beauty emerging, purified,

from filth. That is: from the human body and its humblest, most integral ele

ments. Which suggests, in turn, an entirely different story: that of renewal

through the body. I have speculated on how a work as canonical as the Venus

de Milo becomes "involved"—by way of a placemat in a diner, or a plaster cast

in a storefront window—in rituals of everyday life; humble and corporeal rit

uals: eating, drinking, walking. Piss Christ, bell hooks writes, shows us "sacredness is present in the ordinary dimensions of human life"; it "demands

that we see in bodily fluids the possibility of a resurrection . . . that . . .

redeems."112 That these words should apply so well to Female Bust should

hardly surprise; after all, what do the different readings above narrate, in

effect, but successive episodes of the same Passion: a story of desecration,

transcendence, and renewal through the body? Likewise, when Arenas insists

on the tension between idolatry and iconoclasm and "the promise of resur

rection" in Piss Christ,113 refer her commentary to Female Bust. Which under

scores to what extent we are dealing, in the reproduction of the Venus de Milo,

with both an heretical and a sacramental act, with ritual and its parody.

A ritual of remembrance. A crucifix is a souvenir in the etymological

sense: that which serves to remember. The Venus in Female Bust is obviously a

souvenir in the more popular sense: a cheap reproduction. But Serrano's work

manages to restore the souvenir to its etymologically appointed function.

Serrano has been criticized as an artist who wants above all to shock; the

"point" of the Piss Christ is, from this perspective, its own notoriety and its

own inflated market-price. But if Serrano is "selling out" Christ, then, once

again, he is only reenacting his Passion. Female Bust, too, is designed, like

every souvenir, to "sell," and its story, ultimately, is that of every souvenir: a

story about desecration and resurrection: the Passion of the Venus de Milo.1H



Venus de Kitsch 177

Fig. 12

Back to the (New) Louvre

Serrano could have purchased his bust at Ellinikon, a souvenir shop on

42nd street in Manhattan, a place dedicated to selling things (out). A muse

um for the postmodern age. Plastic caryatids and plaster cast Apollo

Belvederes; Venus de Milos next to Botticellis and Byzantine icons.115

Meanwhile the "real" Venus de Milo stands on her pedestal in the Louvre. But

the Louvre today both is and is not the same place it always was. In brief: the



178 Matthew Gumpert

new or "Grand" Louvre appears to be modeled upon that preeminent post

modern space, the mall.116 Modem architecture, Jameson has remarked, seeks

to engage the surrounding city in a dialogue; the postmodern building aims

to seal itself off from and to simulate the city.117The same can be said for I. M.

Pei's Grand Louvre, its entrance capped by the pyramid, its exhibition space

reconfigured along axes radiating from a central foyer. That foyer is a vast

lobby, really, from which one can initiate any number of possible routes: to

Egyptian art; Baroque painting; the giftshop; rest room; post office. It repro

duces not only the space and functions of the city, but of the museum itself.118

Dudar comments on the post office, "handy for mailing souvenir cards"; she

describes the "boutiques crammed with expensive knickknackery and . . .

videocasettes."119 (You can also find Venus de Milo envelopes, decals, posters,

postcards, and medals.) The museum becomes, in fact, only a larger boutique

filled with more expensive knickknackery. Inner and outer Louvre are dedi

cated alike to mechanisms of reproduction, dissemination, and marketing.

The new Louvre is one vast simulacrum-machine.

But this is what the Louvre has always been: a souvenir shop; Ellinikon

on a vast scale. The "new" Louvre is just a little more honest. Thus a 1973

exhibit at Brussels's Ready Museum on "La Venus de Milo ou les dangers de

la celebrite" is redundant, preempted by the Louvre itself.120 In "The

Postmodern Museum" Rajchman envisions a museum, "no longer a space or

sanctuary apart from things, but a mirror of their infinite reiteration."121 But

what our tour of the museum, the restaurant, the gift shop, the studio, the

diner, etc., will have shown, I hope, is that the museum has never been a sanc

tuary apart from things; that it has always been the mirror of their infinite reit

eration. The Venus de Milo has always been the Venus de Kitsch.

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Notes

1. Yves Gellie, The Venus de Milo, photograph in Helen Dudar, "At the Louvre, Art

Lives among the Growing Pains," Smithsonian (Dec. 1933): 43. All photographs

hereafter, unless otherwise stated, by author.

2. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989).

Discussions of kitsch (e.g. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William

Weaver [San Diego: Harcourt, 1986], 16) tend to privilege the Renaissance canon

or Judeo-Christian themes: Mona Lisa, David, The Last Supper. 3. Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New

York: Delta-Dell, 1966), 289. Why not the Venus de Camp? Camp suggests an

ironic appropriation of kitsch; see Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity:

Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1977), 230. I collapse the distinction between ironic and naive

appreciation.



Venus de Kitsch 179

4. See Harvey, Postmodernity, 42; Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Defining the Postmodern," in Postmodernism ICA Documents, ed. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Free Association

Books, 1989), excerpted in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1933), 171.

5. To Eco's question "Can we be sure that the European tourist's pilgrimage to the

PietA of St. Peter's is less fetishistic than the American tourist's pilgrimage to the

Pieta of Forest Lawn?" (Hyperreality, 39), this article answers: No.

6. See Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1989), xxvii.

7. Clement Greenburg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 10. For Calinescu, kitsch is exemplified by a

"Greek statue reduced to the dimensions of a bibelot" (Modernity, 236). 8. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in

Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 223-24: "A . . .

statue of Venus . . . stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who

made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who

viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted

with its uniqueness, that is, its aura."

9. See Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry:

Enlightenment as Mass Deception," in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John

Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), excerpted in During, 29-43; more

recently, John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 32.

10. Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xiv.

11. Conversely, Plato's examples of "bad" mimesis—e.g., the gardens of Adonis

(Phaedrus)—are really kitsch. The golden calf is a kitsch deity. 12. "Its relationship to art can be compared ... to the relationship between the . . .

Anti-Christ and . . . Christ . . . The Anti-Christ looks . . . acts and speaks like . . .

Christ, but is . . . Lucifer" (Hermann Broch, "Notes on the Problem of Kitsch" in

Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles and Vivienne Menkes [London: Studio Vista Limited, 1969], 62-63).

13. John Freccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics" Diacritics (1975): 37-38.

14. Camille, Gothic Idol, xxv, xxvii.

15. I refer to the eighth-century Iconoclastic Controversy, and to the more general distrust of the image in Western culture. Catholicism distinguishes venerating from worshipping an image. But St. John of Damascus and other Iconodule parti sans defended iconolatry by the doctrine of incarnation: Jesus himself is an icon of God. My thanks to Christopher Calderhead for clarifying this issue. It is "ori ented toward reality: either it harms the unveiling of the thing itself, replacing what is by a copy or a double; or it serves reality through the resemblance of the double . .

16. (". . . oriented toward the truth: either it harms the unveiling of the thing itself

by replacing what is with its copy or double, or it serves truth through the dou ble's resemblance . . [ed.'s trans.]) Jacques Derrida, "La Double Sceance," in La Dissemination (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), 213.

17. See Eco, Hyperreality, 19.

18. The "unclean spirit" in Mark 5.8-9 says: "My name is Legion, for we are many" (King James version). Kitsch is a polytheism. "When the camera reproduces a

painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image" (Berger, Seeing, 19-21). 19. Isaiah 2.8: "[the Philistines'] land is full of idols; they worship the work of their

own hands. See Camille, Gothic Idol, 28-40. This links kitsch to idolatry ("You have built yourselves a God of gold and silver! / How do you differ from the idol

ator, / except he worships one, you worship hundreds?" (Dante to Pope Nicholas



180 Matthew Gumpert

Ill in Inferno, trans. Mark Musa [London: Penguin, 1971], Canto 29, 112-14); or

commodity-fetishism, on which see Calinescu, Modernity, 229; Dorfles, Kitsch,

19-20; Berger, Seeing, 21; Adorno on Veblen's critique of "conspicuous con

sumption" ("Veblen's Attack on Culture," in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and

Sherry Weber [Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1981],

78); and Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; New York,

1953). 20. I've always felt mountains looked too much like postcards. Harold Rosenberg

explains in The Tradition of the New (New York, 1965), 265: "In America kitsch is

Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century." Cf. Oscar

Wilde's statement that sunsets had come to look like paintings by Corot

(Calinescu, Modernity, 229). Nature as artifice.

21. Artifice as nature: the Pygmalion Effect. Eco spots a Venus in the Palace of the

Living Arts with arms and the legend: "Venus de Milo brought to life as she was

in the days when she posed for the unknown Greek sculptor" (Hyperreality, 20).

Kitsch brings art "to life"; it is what happens when we kiss an icon, "fall in love"

with a painting, fondle our favorite porcelain puppy. Cf. Aimee Rankin on kitsch

as art over-invested with "affect" ("The Parameters of 'Precious'," Art in America

[Sept. 1985], 112), see 10-11.

22. Kitsch is where you put it; to put it in the wrong place is theft; prostitution; des

ecration: Mona Lisa on a dish-towel (Dorfles, Kitsch, 19-21, plates 7-11) or tele

vised into the comfort of your own home (Berger, Seeing, 19-20). Kitsch is com

fortable, cozy, fun, easy. Art is difficult. "Richard Egenter may be right," Calinescu

agrees, "when he identifies kitsch as the sin of 'sloth'" (Modernity, 260, 226). See

Egenter, The Desecration of Christ (English version of Kitsch und Christenleben)

(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1967), 75. Implicit here is another distinc

tion: art is public; kitsch is private; see Isaiah 2.20: "In that day [the day of the

Lord] a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols of gold, which they made

each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats." True faith forges a community of believers; idolatry is idiosyncratic worship.

23. Thus I become what Broch calls the Kitschmensch, the "Kitch-Man" ("Notes," 49).

Rosenberg derides critics who are connoisseurs of popular culture; their work is

"kitsch criticism of kitsch" (Tradition, 261).

24. As I do in "Herodas' Mimiamb 4: Hellenistic Kitsch?", CAMWS Conference, April 14, 1996, Nashville, TN.

25. J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Greece, 1400-31 B.C.: Sources and Documents (Englewood

Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 204.

26. E.g., letter from the Due d'Aumont to M. Forbin, 19 June 1821, Archives du

Louvre, Musee du Louvre, Paris.

27. See Rhys Carpenter, Greek Sculpture: A Critical Review (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1960), 172 and 212; Gisela Richter, A Handbook of Greek Art

(London, Phaidon Press, 1959), 159.

28. Calinescu, Modernity, 252.

29. Eco at the Ringling Museum of Art in Florida: "We read one of the plaques . . .:

'Dancer. Modern cast in bronze from a Greek original of the fifth century B.C. The

original [or rather the Roman copy] is in the Museo Nazionale in Naples.' So? The

European museum has a Roman copy" {Hyperreality, 36).

30. See Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 61.

31. See Gisela Richter, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1970), 237; John Boardman, Greek Art (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1964), 195 and 203.



Venus de Kitsch 181

32. Handbook, 159; Margarete Bieber, The Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1961), 159, speaks of an "inharmonious double

movement."

33. Richter, Handbook, 160.

34. See n. 21.

35. Pliny, New History 26.20; qtd. in Pollitt, Greece, 128. See, too, Lucian, Amores,

13-14, and Kenneth Clark, The Nude (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 127-28.

36. New History 34.48; qtd. in Pollitt, The Art of Rome c.753 B.C.-337 A. D. Sources

and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 79. See also Bazin, The Museum Age, trans. Jane van Nuis Cahill (New York: Universe Books, 1967), 18-19.

37. New History 34.5; qtd. in Pollitt, Rome, 155. See Bazin, Museum Age, 16.

38. Suetonius, Gaius Caligula 7; qtd. in Pollitt, Rome, 113-14.

39. Tiberius, according to Pliny (New History 354.62, qtd. in Pollitt, Rome, 132), fell

in love with Lysippos' Apoxyomenos. 40. Dio Cassus 60.5.4-5; qtd. in Pollitt, Rome, 139.

41. See Ludwig Giesz, "Kitsch-man as Tourist" in Dorfles, Kitsch, 156 and Jacques

Sternberg, Kitsch, ed. Marina Henderson (London: Academy Editors, 1971), n.p. 42. Bazin, Museum Age, 30.

43. See Boccaccio's tale of Friar Cipolla (Decameron, 6th Day, 10th Story). 44. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip

Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 9.

45. Baudrillard offers a list of "successive phases of the image" (Simulations, 11-12)

closely tied to corresponding historical eras (83, 100-1).

46. Adorno, "Veblen's Attack," 79.

47. And continues to be perceived as such by the public. See Pierre Bourdieu and

Alain Darbel, Lamour de I'art: les musees et leur public (Paris: Minuit, 1969); Mike

Merriman, "Museum Visiting as a Cultural Phenomenon" in The New Museology, ed. Peter Vergo (London: Reaktion, 1989), 165. Statistics on visits to the Louvre, which show the average visit to be under 90 minutes (Bruno Suner, Pel [Paris:

Hazan, 1988], 113), and favoring the obvious Trinity—Mona Lisa, Venus de

Milo, Victory of Samothrace (Timothy W Ryback, "From Villain to Hero: I. M.

Pei's Louvre Odyssey," Art News 94, 6 [1995]: 99)—suggest both the superficial

ity of tourism and the precision of pilgrimage. 48. ("My step becomes pious. My voice changes and sounds somewhat louder than

at church, but less strong than in ordinary life. Soon I no longer know what I

came to do in these waxed solitudes that have something of the temple and some

thing of the salon." Ed.'s trans.) Paul Valery, "Le Probleme des musees" in Pieces

sur I'art (Paris: Gallimard, 1934), 116.

49. Adorno, "Valery Proust Museum," in Prisms, 184.

50. Ibid., 182. 51. Ibid., 180.

52.Ibid. 53. Ibid., 182. 54. Qtd. in Daniel J. Sherman, "Quatremere/Benjamin/Marx: Art Museums, Aura,

and Commodity Fetishism," in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel Sherman and I. Rogoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1994), 134.

55. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 151.

56. Ibid., 155.



182 Matthew Gumpert

57. Berger, Seeing, 22-23.

58. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, "The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis," Marxist Perspectives 1 (1978): 28.

59. Duncan and Wallach, "Museum," 43.

60. Ibid., 35. 61. Or as camp; that is, "art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken seri

ously because it is 'too much'" (Sontag, "Notes on Camp," 284).

62. See Sherman and Rogoff, "Introduction: Framework for Critical Analysis" in

Museum Culture, xv.

63. Christine M. Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors (Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1995), 94.

64. Venus' missing arms, rather than constituting proof of the past, guarantee the

statue's classical status and pure objecthood. "Sont-ils ... bien utiles?... la Venus

. . . demeurera celle vers laquelle nous tendons nos bras" (Rene Puaux, "Les Bras

de la Venus de Milo," Le Temps 21 Nov. 1928).

65. Reprinted from The National Sports Daily n.d.

66. Qtd. in Sontag, "Notes on Camp," 289.

67. ("A Greek weekly accuses the Louvre ... of destroying Venus through insufficient

protection against unrestrained caresses from her admirers." Ed.'s trans.) "Venus

trop caresse," LUnion 17 April, 1982.

68. The electronically digitized and disseminated Venus, suggesting idolatry on an

entirely new scale, will be the subject of a future article.

69. The Venus de Milo is also a recurrent motif in European nineteenth-century poet

ry and fiction; I treat the literary cult of the Venus elsewhere.

70. (it is Venus . . . beautiful as she appeared on mount Ida . . . to Paris's wonder

struck eyes . . .; not deigning to display her full beauty for the sake of victory, the

goddess veils some of her charms.) See Sur la Statue antique de Venus Victrix

(Paris, 1821), 2.

71. (a favorite decorative motif . . . one finds her in simple chambers as well as on

the precious furniture of European palaces.) See Jean Aicard, "La Venus de Milo

d'apres des documents inedits," Le Temps 9-11 April 1874.

72. (a sacred fragment, that one must not touch.) See E Ravaisson-Mollien, La Venus

de Milo, lu dans la sceance publique annuelle des cinq Academies du 25 octobre 1890

(Paris, 1890), 4.

73. "II a ete trouve il y a trois jours, par un paysan qui piochait dans son champ, une

statue de marbre blanc representant Venus" (Three days ago a white marble stat

ue representing Venus was found by a peasant hoeing his field) (Dauriac to

David, 11 April 1820, Comptes-rendus de I'academie des inscriptions 4th ser. 2

[1874]: 162). The Vicomte de Marcellus offers an alternate birth: "Je la nommai

Venus Anadyomene . . . puisque je venais de l'arracher en quelque sorte a la mer"

(Souvenirs de I'orient [Paris, 1839], 248).

74. Marcellus, on his efforts to obtain the statue: "Venus m'etait apparue en songe . . .

belle plus que les plus belles" (Venus had appeared to me in a dream . . . more

beautiful than the most beautiful women) (Marcellus, Souvenirs, 244).

75. "Un detachement de marins . . . assaillit la petite troupe des ravisseurs . . . et en

leva la statue au moment ou les barbares ... la tramaient liee de cordes a travers

les rochers de la plage" (A troop of sailors . . . attacked the small band of ravish

ers . . . and carried off the statute at the very moment when the barbarians . . .

were dragging her by ropes over the rocks on the beach) (Aicard, "Venus de

Milo").



Venus de Kitsch 183

76. "Sauvee de tous les dangers . . . elle retrouve a Paris le temple qui lui etait du"

(Saved from all dangers . . . she has found in Paris the temple due to her) (ibid.).

77. Charles Blanc to F Ravaisson-Mollien, 31 March 1871 (during the siege of Paris),

Archives du Louvre: "la Venus . . . a ete mise en lieu sur . . . elle sera rendue au

jour des qu'il y aura aucun danger a le faire" (Venus . . . has been taken to a safe

place . . . she will be returned to the light when there is no danger in it). Solomon

Reinach, wondering, in "La Venus de Milo," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 3 (1890): 382,

why the Venus was initially buried, suggests that "quelque paien ami des arts

aurait ainsi cache la Venus pour la preserver de la fureur stupide des iconoclastes"

(Some art-loving pagan must have hidden Venus to protect her from the stupid furor of the iconoclasts).

78. "II est vrai qu'a l'exemple de bien d'autres j'ai fait le pelerinage de llle . . . je me

suis laisse montrer . . . 1'endroit... ou la deesse de Milo est apparue pour la pre miere fois" (It is true that, like many others, I have made my pilgrimage on the

island ... I have been shown ... the place . . . where the goddess of Milo

appeared for the first time) (Reinach, "Venus de Milo," 376).

79. D'Urville himself is not shy about promoting his own identification with the

Venus, launching two careers—his and the statue's—in an address to the

Academie des Sciences, Paris, 22 January 1821 ("Relation de la campagne de la

Chevrette," Annales Maritimes 13 [1821]: 149-79). D'Urville even achieves the

requisite martyrdom when he is killed in a train accident in 1842.

80. "Dumont D'Urville: Navigateur, Savant et Decouvreur" at the Musee de la Marine,

Paris, May 14-June 10, 1990.

81. In descriptions of the melee that may or may not have taken place, the word

"enlevement"—abduction—appears often (see n. 75).

82. Marcellus himself compares his own obscurity to D'Urville's renown: Marcellus to

le Comte de Forbin, 18 August 1821, Archives du Louvre.

83. (I will have him proscribed as one of the heathen of our time.) Charles

Lenormant, "M. de Marcellus et la Venus de Milo," Correspondant 33 (1853-54): 932.

84. Letter to M. de Cailleux, 17 novembre 1833, Archives du Louvre.

85. (in remembrance of the conquest you made for the sake of art. This copy is at your

disposal at the Louvre.) Le Comte de Niewerkerke to Marcellus, 26 May 1852, Archives du Louvre.

86. Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical

Sculpture, 1500-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 123.

87. Ibid., 122.

88. Quoted in Ibid.

89. Ibid.

90. Baudrillard, Simulations, 2.

91. I use idolatry both from the perspective of the iconolater and the iconoclast: lin

guistically marked (as opposed to "true" faith), and linguistically unmarked

("true" faith a specialized case of idolatry). 92. "Folk humor denies, but it revives and renews at the same time" (Mikhail

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky [Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1984], 11).

93. My thanks to Dr. Susan McMorris for bringing this object to my attention.

94. Photograph, Dorfles, Kitsch, 161.



184 Matthew Gumpert

95. The anecdotal here is not, in fact, anecdotal, but must be considered central to

any generalizable theory of aesthetic reception-which is never fully generalizable. The issue is important because kitsch, as a category of aesthetic object distinct

from art, is always seen as idiosyncratic. 96. Joyce offers such a psychology in the interior monologues of Ulysses; in ch. 8

Bloom compares classical statues with contemporary bodies, and vows to verify the anatomical correctness of the statue by a trip to the museum (James Joyce,

Ulysses [New York: Modern Library, 1934]).

97. Reproduced in Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial

Photography in Paris, (c)1999 C. Rerscovia, Brussels/Artists Rights Society (ARS),

New York. 1848-1871 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), plate 63.

98. McCauley Industrial Madness, 170.

99. (I have chosen an example that everyone knows, the Venus de Milo) Pascal

Rosier, Le Moulage (Paris, 1990), 7.

100. (the set of operations that make it possible to reproduce this work once or many

times) and (the intervention of hand or tool for the production of a unique work.)

Ibid. 101. Photograph, Rosier, Moulage. (c)1999 C. Herscovia, Brussels/Artists Rights

Society (ARS), New York.

102. (objects . . . one can find in furnishing stores: . . . decorative candles . . . imita

tions of cooked dishes . . . baskets of artificial fruit.) Rosier, Moulage, 55.

103. Olalquiaga, Megalopolis, 42-50.

104. Cover illustration for Sculpture (Nov.-Dec. 1990).

105. Photograph, Magritte. (c)1999 C. Herscovia, Brussels/Artists Rights Society

(ARS), New York.

106. Photograph in Matthew Kangas, "Rebirth of Venus," Sculpture (Nov.-Dec. 1990):

36.

107. See also Dine's Black Venus (1991). On Dine's relationship with the Venus a critic

writes: "The Venus came into his life as a plaster Venus de Milo he purchased in

an art store and began to 'doctor.'" Dine himself is cited: "I knocked the head off,

I scratched it, I scraped on it." (Nancy B. Tieken, Jim Dine's "Wheat Fields,"

Denver Art Museum, 1994, n. p.) Is Dine playing "doctor" with the object of his

affections? Is this iconoclasm or idolatry? 108. Baudrillard, Simulations, 135.

109. On similarity undoing referential origin, see Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

110. Reproduced in Brian Wallis, ed., Andres Serrano: Body and Soul (New York:

Takarajima Books, 1995), n. p. (c)1999 C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights

Society (ARS), New York.

111. Brought to national attention when Senator Alphonse DAmato of New York, in a

literal gesture of iconoclasm, tore up a copy on the Senate floor in May 1989.

112. bell hooks, "The Radiance of Red: Blood Work" in Wallis, Serrano, n. p. 113. Amelia Arenas, "The Revelations of Andres Serrano" in Wallis, Serrano, n. p. 114. Many other contemporary artists have "returned" to the Venus de Milo: Barton

Lidice Benes's Green Goddess (1984) is a souvenir Venus wrapped in dollar bills

(Rankin, "'Precious'," 116); in Marie-Claude de Brunhoff's Les Reves de la Venus de

Milo (1995), Venus regains her missing arms ("Les Theatres immobiles," Galerie

Samy Kinge, Paris, Nov.-Dec. 1995).



Venus de Kitsch 185

115. "James Fenimore Cooper was horrified by the 'attenuated Nymphs and Venuses,

clumsy Herculeses, hobbledehoy Apollos and grinning Fauns' which he saw in a

shop in Livorno which specialized in exporting such marble copies" (Haskell,

Taste, 123).

116. Cf. Fredric Jameson on the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Postmodernism: Or, The

Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 38-45.

117. Jameson, Postmodernism, 40.

118. The gallery leading west from the "hall d'accueil," has "les proportions

majestueuses d'une . . . galerie bordee de commerces . . . dans la tradition des

passages parisiens" (the regal proportions of a . . . gallery of shops ... in the tra

dition of Parisian covered passages) (Bruno Suner, Pei, 27). Conversely, the

Louvre Metro stop, reproductions of famous works on its walls, simulates the

Grande Galerie.

119. Helen Dudar, "At the Louvre," 42.

120. Colette Lambrichs, et al., eds. La Venus de Milo ou les dangers de la celebrite

(Brussels: Ready Museum, 1973), n. p. 121. John Rajchman, "The Postmodern Museum," Art in America (Oct. 1985): 113.



Venus de Kitsch or, The Passion of the Venus de Milo

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