However, to avoid kitsch is not so easy as it looks. You could try being outrageously avant-garde, doing something that no one would have thought of doing and calling it art - perhaps trampling on some cherished ideal or religious feeling. But as I argued last week, this way also leads to fakes - fake originality, fake significance, and a new kind of cliche, as in so much Young British Art. You can pose as a modernist, but that won't necessarily lead you to achieve what Eliot, Schoenberg or Matisse achieved, which is to touch the modern heart in its deepest regions. Modernism is difficult. It requires competence in an artistic tradition, and the art of departing from tradition in order to say something new