Trumpism, NFTs, and the Cultural Politics of 21st-Century Kitsch

An intriguing new volume, Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism, edited by Grant Hamming and Natalie E. Phillips and recently published by Routledge, casts a scholarly gaze on a culture that many would prefer to avoid looking at altogether. And yet we can’t: the visual culture spawned by the forty-fifth president of the United States is, whether we like it or not, one of the pervasive phenomena of the Zeitgeist.

In this exclusive excerpt, art historian Dorothy Barenscott examines Donald Trump’s forays into NFTs and the promotion of a set of “kitsch” digital playing cards tokenized in the blockchain. Along the way, she uncovers some of the stakes and serious philosophical questions that arise around how contemporary art is currently valued aesthetically and commercially under the influence of Trumpism—and the question of what form of aesthetic, artistic, or political radicality in art is possible in its wake.

SPEAKING AT THE UPSCALE CIPRIANI CLUB in New York City during the final months of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton used the now infamous phrase “basket of deplorables” to describe half of Donald Trump’s supporters. In the speech, given at an LGBT-sponsored fundraiser, Clinton explicated what she argued were the illiberal and most dangerous elements of Trump supporters, what she identified as “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it,” specifically referencing and warning about the power Trump wielded on social media: “And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.” Within days the comment famously backfired, framed by the Republicans to prove not only the elitism associated with the liberal Democratic Party but also its out-of-touch blindness to the widespread discontent among the American population with political institutions. As the story and hashtag #basketofdeplorables went viral, the episode was ultimately weaponized and used against Clinton, contributing to her loss of the 2016 election.¹

Clinton arguably did not understand, or seriously underestimated, the roots of the dispossession of those who ultimately voted for Trump. Simply put, Clinton was by late 2016 associated with Establishment culture while Trump was positioning himself as champion of ordinary people disregarded and mocked by liberal elites. This was foreshadowed in the long-standing polarizing public response to Trump’s trademark tastes and the visual culture built up around branding Trumpism as far back as the 1980s. Those who loved Trump aligned with his “look” and the signature gold, rococo, and shiny artifice informing his spatial aesthetics; those who did not poked fun at his “tacky” taste as evidence of vulgarity, ostentatiousness, and an overblown ego. Not surprisingly, these opinions were often cast along political and class lines. At the same time, Clinton did not, or could not, anticipate the broad embrace of the deplorables label by Trump supporters, especially via the circulation of endlessly replicating and reproducing digital memes—often crude, visually unsophisticated, and a product of DIY efforts by supporters—that helped grow, fuel, and further bond a community united around powerful visual language rooted in humor, trolling, and disinformation. As Emily Apter describes in her exploration of memes in the age of Trump, “They engender an implicit trust among the ‘users’ who co-produce and distribute them, and, by doing so, model a kind of sharing economy.”²

Critically, the visual embrace of bad taste that through the 2016 presidential race formed the visual branding of Trumpism was, after Trump took power, the unofficial visual vocabulary of the United States presidency and a phenomenon that would eventually translate to what Allison Coffelt describes as a “felt truth” among Trump supporters in the face of Trump’s “slippery kitsch.”³ As I will argue, Trump’s kitsch aesthetics have only grown more potent with his loss of the 2020 U.S. presidency and his refusal to accept the outcome. Moreover, Trump’s desire to run for office once again in 2024 has resulted in his foray into the world of non-fungible token (NFT) art via the promotion of a set of digital playing cards secured by their existence in the blockchain. Uniting what David Edward Tabachnick argues are the four characteristics of Trumpism—celebrity, nativism, populism, and the outsider⁴—the non-fungible token emerges not only as the newest manifestation of Trump’s outsider politics and personal branding, but also as a potent visual medium portending the future of art production, exhibition, and consumption. In tandem with my analysis, I will trace out some of the stakes and serious philosophical questions that arise around kitsch and how contemporary art is currently “valued” aesthetically and commercially in accordance with Trumpism, posing the question of what form of aesthetic, artistic, or political radicality in art is possible in its wake.

Kitsch Aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, and the Contingencies of “High” vs “Low” Art

Historically, the analysis of kitsch aesthetics informing aspects of Trump’s visual brand has been contextualized around illiberalism and a culture of grievance associated with 20th-century fascism and the risks it posed to avant-garde “high art” going back to the writings of one of the most influential American art critics of that century, Clement Greenberg. In 1939, as the world was coming to grips with rising fascism in Europe, Greenberg identified key connections between authoritarian and ultranationalist politics and the shifting circulation of meaning around visual art production and reception arguing the need to protect and preserve art of the most bold, risk-taking, and abstract variety. The German word kitsch—loosely defined as cheap, decorative, and disposable mass-produced “low art”—was appropriated by Greenberg in the Partisan Review essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” to identify the cultural phenomenon of fascist popular art linking “the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture” with a capitalist model of production and distribution:

The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects. Since these regimes cannot raise the cultural level of the masses—even if they wanted to—by anything short of a surrender to international socialism, they will flatter the masses by bringing all culture down to their level. It is for this reason that the avant-garde is outlawed, and not so much because a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture.⁵

For Greenberg, the importance of protecting avant-garde art was grounded in its function “to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence.”⁶

During the cultural and historiographical turn of the 1980–90s, Greenberg’s polarizing analysis underwent a great deal of scrutiny by academic art historians and critical theorists, especially around the perceived elite modernism and de-politicization of the avant-garde it promoted within intellectual and art circles in the United States. Serge Guilbaut identified many of the contradictions of Greenbergian formalism in the essay “The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America,” describing how Greenberg’s aversion to popular culture and ideas about the direction of modern art and its relationship to the public were strategically deployed at the same moment as the tamp down of Marxist rhetoric and revolutionary language in a post-war America fearful of communism. As Guilbaut argues, “‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’ formalized, defined, and rationalized an intellectual position that was adopted by many artists who failed fully to understand it.” With kitsch as the target, artists were thus able to identify a target of attack, but as Guilbaut points out, “it resulted in a total withdrawal from the political strategies adopted during the Depression: he [Greenberg] appealed to socialism to rescue a dying culture by continuing tradition.”⁷

T. J. Clark refined Guilbaut’s reading of Greenberg (as isolationist, elitist, and advocating conservatism in the preservation of the avant-garde’s function in society) by pointing to the larger stakes in Greenberg’s vehement aversion to kitsch and the culture of negation on which it thrives: “Kitsch is the sign of a bourgeoisie contriving to lose its identity. It is an art and a culture of instant assimilation, of abject reconciliation to the everyday, of avoidance of difficulty, pretence to indifference, equality before the image of capital.”⁸ As Clark concludes, Greenberg was not willing to risk blurring the boundaries between art and life for fear of the avant-garde’s complete dissolution. And by the mid-1990s, William D. Routt teased out further dimensions of Greenberg’s arguments by examining the critical function of the audience in connection to kitsch. As Routt explains, “Greenberg chooses to discuss kitsch, and ultimately to condemn it, by describing and condemning its audience” and “sees and constructs a defining relation amounting to an identity of spectator and spectacle.” In this way, the “problem of kitsch” is now a question of public taste.⁹ Routt goes on to identify the “the roll call of kitsch manifestation” Greenberg cites as connected to media forms, such as photography and cinema, with broader “public qualities,” concluding, “The public nature of the media has become the public nature of the spectator.”¹⁰

What is apparent in recalling these shifting readings of Greenbergian modernism all those decades ago is how thoroughly contingent the perception around avant-garde and kitsch was (and remains). In more recent years, previous definitions of what art is, who artists are, and what they can collectively signal to the public are challenged as contemporary art strains under the conditions of neoliberalism and the arrival of new technologies capable of accelerating global production and proliferation of images evolve and become democratized and accessible to the masses. In turn, Greenberg can often read today as more prescient than out-of-touch, guiding a new generation towards understanding the potency of Trump’s embrace of kitsch in connection to politics, publicity, audience, and address. For example, in Thierry de Duve’s 2010 reassessment of Greenberg, he includes a careful consideration of the art critic’s Jewish identity and ties this to Greenberg’s renouncement of a “messianic—or in other words, politico-religious— conception of the function of art in society.”¹¹ Here, warnings about kitsch culture are given further context and framed within Greenberg’s own understanding of Otherness that Jewish culture represents for Gentiles during times of war. As a result, we can better unpack, for example, Trump’s strategic use of anti-Semitic rhetoric and deployment of dog-whistle visual images to attract and engage new followers (some of which ironically enough are tied directly to Nazi propaganda from WWII). At the same time, de Duve tackles the messier contours of visual language, artistic intent, and the problem of messaging audiences outlined by Greenberg, describing the way art can send mixed signals in terms of what, and to whom, it is addressing an idea. “Need I underline,” remarks de Duve, “how often avant-garde art and its potential for active negation have been perceived as either an activity of snobs or of social agitators?”¹² Paired with de Duve, Boris Groys’s 21st-century re-evaluation of Greenberg recasts the avant-garde and kitsch dichotomy as more relevant than ever, not simply describing “two different areas, types or practices of art, but, rather, two different attitudes towards art.”¹³ In this updated reading of Greenberg, we find a most useful conclusion: “The opposition that Greenberg described as macro-cultural defines, in fact, the aesthetic sensibility of every individual member of contemporary society.”¹⁴

NFTs, Trumpism, and Savage Capitalism

The debates surrounding Greenberg provide critical clues about the power of Trumpism, a political ideology that mirrors the illiberalism and culture of grievance associated with 20th-century fascism while leveraging and upholding a visual culture grounded in similar forms of “insensibility,” “tastelessness,” and strategic spectatorship that are reactionary, profit-seeking, and suspicious of all forms of art associated with the established elite. Moreover, in the past few decades, as postmodern contemporary art loses its ability to shock and avant-garde artists are absorbed into and made consumable and profitable by the elite art and academic institutions they once sought to subvert, kitsch culture gains in power and legitimacy via what Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy suggest are “the new initiates, the billionaires—the leading class who has reclaimed this new style without complexity.”¹⁵ Nowhere is this more evident than in the direct influence that the contemporary art market has on the global explosion of art fairs, blockbuster art exhibitions, online art sales platforms, and the merging of art/fashion/design marketing globally. Driven by the tastes and interests of ultra-wealthy collectors who mostly favor artists, past and present, working in popular and urban art idioms such as Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Banksy, and KAWS, spectacle and profit appear to override any critical engagement with the art. Add to this the overlapping phenomenon of social media culture—looking to leverage art as part of influencing, lifestyle branding, and appropriation—and the conditions of early 21st-century kitsch have radically transformed visual culture as we know it. “Our era is observing the advent of hypermodern, rich, and reflective meta-kitsch that becomes both the object and subject of creation,” argue Lipovetsky and Serroy, leading to “a chic and legitimate kitsch that, while prolonging and using the unchanging conditions of permanent kitsch, opens up to new ways of thinking, creating, and valuing it. And selling it.”¹⁶

The birth of NFT art appears almost inevitable within the context of digital screen culture married to hypermodern kitsch and the billionaire class, and, arguably, the perfect manifestation of Trumpism and what Enzo Traverso describes as “savage capitalism . . . an age of financial capitalism, competitive individualism, and social precariousness” where Trump “does not organize and mobilize the masses” but simply “attracts an audience in an atomized society of consumers.”¹⁷ As a form of cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens were first minted in 2014 as part of an emerging crypto economy that created a new class of tokenized and non-reproducible assets that could circulate as an alternative form of money exchange via the internet. By 2017, the market for NFTs had come to center on a collectability paradigm with digital visual representation and exclusivity as key characteristics distinguishing one NFT from another. As Catherine Frieman analyzes in her research connecting NFTs to meme culture and fascist art, “At the heart of the NFT art phenomenon is a tension between authenticity and reproducibility.”¹⁸ Trump, who had been obsessed with branding and managing the perception of his wealth and power throughout his life, saw in the NFT an opportunity to expand his influence while turning a profit and raising money for his presidential run in 2024. The timing was also perfect. As Trump faced a Twitter ban for inciting violence in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and in the aftermath of his second impeachment trial (both in 2021), Trump continued to deny Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral win and needed other avenues to continue engaging and building community with his supporters.

Within a year, Trump responded by launching both his own social media platform— Truth Social—and a new line of NFT playing cards featuring his kitschy digital likeness.¹⁹ His debut card, featured in his social media posts, was fittingly that of a cartoon inspired superhero figure situated in a boxing ring with a championship belt declaring Trump as title winner.²⁰ Rendered in highly saturated hues of red, white, and blue, referencing the American flag emblazoned prominently on his belt and draped across his oversized shoulders at the central vertical axis of the composition, the NFT reimagines the outcome of the 2020 election and offers visual language that takes strategic cues not only from the emerging visual language of kitschy NFTs, but also that of 19th century history paintings, such as Jacques Louis David’s iconic propaganda image Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1800–01), which incorporate exaggeration, strong diagonals, and neoclassical compositional elements to create striking portraits of political figures rewriting history, rendering them superhuman to their audience. As many commentators pointed out, Trump had used both generative AI and outright plagiarism of copyrighted digital illustrations to create the NFTs. Even so, at $99 a piece, Trump was able to sell out his NFTs within a day, generating an estimated four million dollars.²¹

It is significant to note here that kitsch culture had already infiltrated the early development of cryptocurrency before the art world took notice. For example, Cryptokitties, a blockchain game where participants created, bought, and sold NFTs of animated cartoon cats, was wildly popular in the NFT’s early development, and the speculation and media interest in cryptocurrency focused squarely on connecting urban subculture with the peculiar and repetitive kitschy subjects chosen for NFT minting. One early tactic of Trumpism was to use repetition and finding agreement and consensus with his supporters to amplify Trump’s misrepresentations, what Kellyanne Conway called “alternative facts” and what would later co-create the conspiracy theories associated with denying Biden’s 2020 election win. In this sense, Trump’s NFTs (and especially sold as a collection of playing cards) were completely in alignment with the cryptosphere and, as Frieman suggests, “a financialization of everyday life and social relations” with a “particularly aggressive, discordant, and masculine form of utopian capitalism.”²² Ironically enough, the plagiarism and use of AI by Trump was likely perceived as transgressive by his supporters and in line with avant-garde tactics that champion disruption and the outsider. Yet, as David Joselit identifies in his careful teasing out of the distinction of the NFT art object from earlier moments of radical avant-garde art intervention, such as Marcel Duchamp’s creation of art from manufactured objects, the NFT distinguishes itself as the absolute reverse of the readymade: “It bears repeating: Duchamp used the category of art to liberate materiality from commodifiable form; the NFT deploys the category of art to extract private property from freely available information.”²³

Conclusion: Trolling the Avant-Garde

Returning to Greenberg, it is critical to point out how compelling his predictions were about the challenges facing the avant-garde vis-à-vis popular visual culture and the eventual institutionalization of the art world writ large. While critics have decried his conservatism and disregard of the transgressive and avant-garde spirit of neo-Dada, pop, minimal, and conceptual artists of the 1960–70s, Greenberg maintained his position throughout his lifetime and refused to accept the notion that art and life could simply and unproblematically collapse into one another. After all, as de Duve reminds us, Greenberg warned, “The door is open to concocted art as a form of ‘avant-gardism.’”²⁴ Today, that concocted art may very well be masquerading as the NFT, or any other number of digital and AI art forms that are made popular, profitable, and highly visible in our relentless screen culture. As Domenico Quaranta argues in his recent assessment of “digital kitsch,” the NFT market exploits the art world’s weaknesses where economic value is increasingly mistaken for cultural value and “an aggressive bunch of crypto investors posing as collectors” delights in “their new role as cultural gatekeepers (and the money it brings in).”²⁵

To be sure, current conditions in the art world, along with significant transformations in visual culture and new media technology, work to reveal many of the mechanisms of neo-liberalism that have supported the rise of Trumpism as a political movement. Much of this comes down to eerily similar conditions Clement Greenberg warned about concerning politics, publicity, audience, and address in the lead-up to WWII. Indeed, as Hal Foster argues in his 2017 essay “Père Trump,” the invention of new techniques of seeing coupled with populism is not new and creates a “paradox of information that undermines knowledge,” which “overwhelms us with data even as it deskills us in interpretation, connects us even as it untethers us.”²⁶ Here, the language of Trumpism is set within the historical context of past cultural and political revolutions that face a literal and figurative crisis of representation.

In today’s visual media environment, it is easy to remain cynical and conclude that art criticism and critical debate around visual art and culture no longer matter. Returning to Hillary Clinton’s viral “deplorables” comment with which I opened this discussion, this attitude can be read, in part, as a reflection of what Andrea Fraser argues is the “massive scale of the interface between cultural and political elites and patronage.”²⁷ Still, it is precisely this kind of pessimism and skeptical thinking that leads to capitulation and acceptance of a new world order without resistance. Clearly, in the case of Trumpism, the threat to the democratic order is both real and urgent. As such, there is an immediate need not only to redefine “institutional critique,” but also to challenge a new generation of artists to understand and leverage the aesthetic sensibilities of 21st-century kitsch culture, thereby raising critical awareness of the role that the billionaire class—of which Donald Trump claims membership—plays in our shifting understanding of visibility, influence, consumerism, and free speech.

NOTES

1. Roxanne Roberts, “Hillary Clinton’s ‘Deplorables’ Speech Shocked Voters Five Years Ago— But Some Feel It Was Prescient,” The Washington Post, August 31, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/08/31/deplorables-basket-hillary-clinton/.
2. Emily Apter, “Alphabetic Memes: Caricature, Satire, and Political Literacy in the Age of Trump,” October, no. 170 (2019): 7.
3. Allison Coffelt, “Slippery Kitsch and the Aesthetics of Power,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 21, no. 5 (2017): 478.
4. David Edward Tabachnick, Donald Trump’s Populist Presidency Is the Real Coup, Not the Impeachment Inquiry (Toronto: Canadian Press Enterprises Inc., 2019).
5. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939),” in Art in Theory, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 539.
6. Greenberg, 531.
7. Serge Guilbaut and Thomas Repensek, “The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America,” October, no. 15 (1980): 67.
8. T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1982): 147.
9. William D. Routt, “Making Looking Public: Clement Greenberg Imagines the Kitsch Public,”Continuum 11, no. 3 (1997): 50.
10. Rout, 51.
11. Thierry de Duve and Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: Including a Debate With Clement Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 44.
12. de Duve and Greenberg, 60.
13. Boris Groys, “Clement Greenberg’s ‘Art and Culture’, 1961,” Burlington Magazine 152, no. 1284 (2010): 182.
14. Groys, 182.
15. Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, “Kitsch in the Hypermodern Era,” in The Changing Meaning of Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance, ed. Max Ryynanen and Paco Barragan (Switzerland: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2023), 66.
16. Lipovetsky and Serroy, 66.
17. Enzo Traverso, “Trump’s Savage Capitalism: The Nightmare Is Real,” World Policy Journal 34, no. 1 (2017): 17.
18. Catherine J. Frieman, “NFTs as Skeuomorphs: Weaponized Sameness and Fascist Utopias,” American Anthropologist 125, no. 1 (2023): 194.
19. Trump’s NFT cards are sold exclusively on his website, and new releases can be viewed at https://collecttrumpcards.com/. A web platform for collectors with a searchable database of Trump NFTs can also be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/TrumpNFTTradingCards.
20. For a screenshot of Trump’s debut NFT card and social media launch, see Michael C. Bender and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Sells a New Image as the Hero of $99 Trading Cards,” The New York Times, December 15, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/us/politics/trump-nft-trading-cards-superhero.html.
21. Philip Kennicott, “Trump NFTs Are Not a Form of Art: Unless You Consider Grifting an Art Form,” The Washington Post, December 17, 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/12/17/trump-trading-card-nft-art/.
22. Frieman, 196.
23. David Joselit, “NFTs, or the Readymade Reversed,” October, no. 175 (2021): 4.
24. de Duve and Greenberg, 81–2.
25. Domenico Quaranta, “Digital Kitsch: Art and Kitsch in the Informational Milieu,” in The Changing Meaning of Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance, ed. Max Ryynanen and Paco Barragan (Switzerland: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2023), 222.
26. Hal Foster, “Père Trump,” October, no. 159 (2017): 3.
27. John Hulsey, “On Institutional Democratization and Reflexive Resistance: A Conversation with Andrea Fraser,” October, no. 178 (2021): 94.