History Repeats, Public Thinking (Bernays, Greenberg)
Identity is just a pose for the public image. It is either an act of tremendous bravery or a deeply romantic conviction to believe in the cultivation of the 'barbarians'.
Prompted for this article by watching a performance in a public space that challenged an audience unprepared for what it was asked to witness.
Art that engages with public thinking does not merely portray the crowd. It examines the quality of thought the crowd is set to exercise. This relationship works both ways. In an art world increasingly shaped by an unquestioning culture of acceptance, the public can come to reproduce and even defend the very patterns of thought that are being examined and criticized.
In modern societies of scale, public opinion is rarely spontaneous. It is shaped, simplified, and circulated. Two theorists who grasped this with particular power were Edward Bernays and Clement Greenberg. Bernays analyzed the science of strategic persuasion; Greenberg analysed the form that mass persuasion often takes — kitsch. They both illuminate why art has repeatedly positioned itself against the habits of the masses, and why that argument carries real risks.
Bernays, writing in the aftermath of the First World War and drawing on Freud as well as the empirical lectures of wartime and economic propaganda, argued in “Propaganda” (1928) that the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses” is simply a planned feature of the industrial democracy. Large populations cannot calculate and decide on every complex issue. Specialists organize attention, desire, and association. The result is not necessarily crude deception but a continuous management of what the public feels and thinks. Consent is manufactured through symbols, repetition, and emotional linkage rather than through sustained argument. The risk Bernays identified — sometimes sympathetically, sometimes with detachment — is that democratic life becomes dependent on techniques that bypass independent judgment.
Greenberg, a decade later in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), translated a related diagnosis into the language of culture. Kitsch, he wrote, is the art of the masses produced by industrial society: conventional, sentimental, instantly accessible, and pre-digested. It requires no effort of attention, it confirms rather than challenges. Where genuine culture demands the work of perception and thought, kitsch supplies ready-made emotion and the comfort of recognition. Greenberg saw the avant-garde as a reaction — an attempt to keep aesthetic experience difficult, formal, and resistant to the marketplace of easy feeling. Kitsch, in this view, is not merely bad taste. It is the aesthetic expression of a public whose capacity for insight has been weakened, or displaced, by the very conditions of modern life. The public is increasingly self-invited to identify or to not identify through an immediate and simplified response.
The risks are considerable. First, the atrophy of critical capacity. When public discourse is continuously shaped by techniques of association and by kitsch’s promise of effortless satisfaction, individuals practice reception more than analysis. Second, the ethical reform of taste and opinion. Opinions become identity, complexity becomes suspect, objection is experienced as contamination rather than disagreement open to dialogue. Bernays understood that the ability to attach emotion to products, policies, or persons is a form of power; Greenberg saw that kitsch democratizes access to that power while simultaneously lowering the standards by which it is judged. The result is a public sphere in which genuine argument competes poorly against the speed and warmth of pre-packaged sentiment.
On the contrary, art’s critique has become hazardous, offering the viewer the pleasure of superiority while remaining safely inside a cultural market that rewards gestures of contrast. More importantly, rejecting kitsch can create an even greater distance between the public and cultural criticism. Art looks at the conditions that can make public thinking shallow, reactive, and easily influenced. Avoiding this pitfall requires an informed perspective.
In an age of instantaneous gratification, the observations of Bernays and Greenberg remain as relevant as ever. The techniques through which attention and opinion are influenced have become increasingly developed, while identity is only a pose for the public image.
To acknowledge this vulnerability is not to regard the masses as incapable of independent judgment. On the contrary, it raises the question of how such judgment can be cultivated. Art that critically engages with public thinking can make visible the mechanisms through which perception is directed, simplified, or made predictable. The challenge is therefore not simply to resist another sentimental formula, but to create the conditions for more attentive forms of perception and judgment. The persistence of that question may itself be part of art’s critical task.