Kitsch ( ; loanword from German)
The modern avant-garde traditionally opposed kitsch for its melodrama tendencies, its superficial relationship with the human condition and its naturalistic standards of beauty. In the first half of the 20th century, kitsch was used in reference to mass-produced, popular culture products that lacked the conceptual depth of fine art. However, since the emergence of Pop art in the 1950s, kitsch has taken on newfound highbrow appeal, often wielded in knowingly Irony, humorous or Sincerity manners.
To brand visual art as "kitsch" is often still pejorative, though not exclusively. Art deemed kitsch may be enjoyed in an entirely positive and sincerity manner. For example, it carries the ability to be quaint or "quirky" without being offensive on the surface, as in the Dogs Playing Poker paintings.
Along with visual art, the quality of kitsch can be used to describe works of music, literature or any other creative medium. Kitsch relates to camp, as they both incorporate irony and extravagance.
History and analysis
As a descriptive term,
kitsch originated in the art markets of Munich, Germany in the 1860s and the 1870s, describing cheap, popular, and marketable pictures and sketches.
[Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity. Kitsch, p. 234.] In
Das Buch vom Kitsch (
The Book of Kitsch), published in 1936, Hans Reimann defined it as a professional expression "born in a painter's studio".
The study of kitsch was done almost exclusively in Germany until the 1970s, with Walter Benjamin being an important scholar in the field.
Kitsch is regarded as a modern phenomenon, coinciding with social changes in recent centuries such as the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, mass production, modern materials and media such as , radio and television, the rise of the middle class and of which have factored into a perception of oversaturation of art produced for the popular taste.
Kitsch in art theory and aesthetics
Modernism writer
Hermann Broch argues that the essence of kitsch is imitation: kitsch mimics its immediate predecessor with no regard to ethics—it aims to copy the beautiful, not the good.
According to Walter Benjamin, kitsch, unlike art, is a utilitarian object lacking all critical distance between object and observer. According to critic Winfried Menninghaus, Benjamin's stance was that kitsch "offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation".
In a short essay from 1927, Benjamin observed that an artist who engages in kitschy reproductions of things and ideas from a bygone age deserved to be called a "furnished man"
(in the way that someone rents a "furnished apartment" where everything is already supplied).
Kitsch is less about the thing observed than about the observer.
áš Kulka, in Kitsch and Art, starts from two basic facts that kitsch "has an undeniable mass-appeal" and "considered (by the art-educated elite) bad", and then proposes three essential conditions:
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Kitsch depicts a beautiful or highly emotionally charged subject;
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The depicted subject is instantly and effortlessly identifiable;
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Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations related to the depicted subject.
Kitsch in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The concept of kitsch is a central motif in
Milan Kundera 1984 novel
The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Towards the end of the novel, the book's narrator posits that the act of defecation (and specifically, the shame that surrounds it) poses a metaphysical challenge to the theory of divine creation: "Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don't lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner".
[Kundera, Milan (1984). The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harper Perennial. p. 248] Thus, in order for us to continue to believe in the essential propriety and rightness of the universe (what the narrator calls "the categorical agreement with being"), we live in a world "in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist". For Kundera's narrator, this is the definition of kitsch: an "aesthetic ideal" which "excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence".
The novel goes on to relate this definition of kitsch to politics, and specifically—given the novel's setting in Prague around the time of the 1968 invasion by the Soviet Union—to communism and totalitarianism. He gives the example of the Communist May Day ceremony, and of the sight of children running on the grass and the feeling this is supposed to provoke. This emphasis on feeling is fundamental to how kitsch operates:
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.[Kundera, Milan (1984). The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harper Perennial. p. 251]
According to the narrator, kitsch is "the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements"; however, where a society is dominated by a single political movement, the result is "totalitarian kitsch":
When I say "totalitarian," what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously).
Kundera's concept of "totalitarian kitsch" has since been invoked in the study of the art and culture of regimes such as Stalinism, Nazi Germany, Italian Fascism and Iraq under Saddam Hussein.[Makiya, Kanan (2011). Review: What Is Totalitarian Art? Cultural Kitsch From Stalin to Saddam. Foreign Affairs. 90 (3): 142–148] Kundera's narrator ends up condemning kitsch for its "true function" as an ideological tool under such regimes, calling it "a folding screen set up to curtain off death".[Kundera, Milan (1984). The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harper Perennial. p. 253]
Melancholic kitsch vs. nostalgic kitsch
In her 1999 book
The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience, cultural historian Celeste Olalquiaga develops a theory of kitsch that situates its emergence as a specifically nineteenth-century phenomenon, relating it to the feelings of loss elicited by a world transformed by science and industry.
[Olalquiaga, Celeste (1999). The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. Bloomsbury.] Focusing on examples such as
paperweights,
aquariums,
mermaid and the Crystal Palace, Olalquiaga uses Benjamin's concept of the
Walter Benjamin to argue for the utopian potential of "melancholic kitsch", which she differentiates from the more commonly discussed "nostalgic kitsch".
[Olalquiaga, Celeste (1999). The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. Bloomsbury. pp. 26, 75]
These two types of kitsch correspond to two different forms of memory. Nostalgic kitsch functions through "reminiscence", which "sacrifices the intensity of experience for a conscious or fabricated sense of continuity":
Incapable of tolerating the intensity of the moment, reminiscence selects and consolidates an event's acceptable parts into a memory perceived as complete. … This reconstructed experience is frozen as an emblem of itself, becoming a cultural fossil.[Olalquiaga, Celeste (1999). The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. Bloomsbury. p. 292]
In contrast, melancholic kitsch functions through "remembrance", a form of memory that Olalquiaga links to the "souvenir", which attempts "to repossess the experience of intensity and immediacy through an object".[Olalquiaga, Celeste (1999). The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. Bloomsbury. p. 291] While reminiscence translates a remembered event to the realm of the symbolic ("deprived of immediacy in favour of representational meaning"), remembrance is "the memory of the unconscious", which "sacrifices the continuity of time for the intensity of the experience".[Olalquiaga, Celeste (1999). The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. Bloomsbury. p. 294, 292] Far from denying death, melancholic kitsch can only function through a recognition of its multiple "deaths" as a fragmentary remembrance that is subsequently commodified and reproduced. It "glorifies the perishable aspect of events, seeking in their partial and decaying memory the confirmation of its own temporal dislocation".[Olalquiaga, Celeste (1999). The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. Bloomsbury. p. 298]
Thus, for Olalquiaga, melancholic kitsch is able to function as a Benjaminian dialectical image: "an object whose decayed state exposes and reflects its utopian possibilities, a remnant constantly reliving its own death, a ruin".
Further usage
Historical fiction
Jewish-American author
Art Spiegelman coined the term "" to describe mass-market, overly sentimental depictions of
the Holocaust from the end of the
Cold War onwards, including works inspired by his own graphic novel on the subject,
Maus. The term is usually used to criticize works seen as relying on
melodrama and mass recognition to commercialize the experiences of Holocaust survivors, such as
Life Is Beautiful or
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, but also includes more critically respected works like Polanski's
The Pianist.
[Audi, Anthony. "Art Spiegelman: If It Walks Like a Fascist…" Literary Hub, 22 March 2017. Retrieved 7 July 2024.][Bourne, Michael. "Beyond Holokitsch: Spiegelman Goes Meta", The Millions, 22 November 2011. Retrieved 7 July 2024.][Corliss, Richard. "Defiance: Beyond Holo-kitsch", Time, 1 January, 2009. Retrieved 7 July 2024.]
Swiss historian and anti-Semitism expert Stefan Maechler also commented on the role of kitsch sentimentality in the context of Wilkomirski syndrome, writing on that "once the professed interrelationship between the first-person narrator, the death-camp story he narrates, and historical reality are proved palpably false, what was a masterpiece becomes kitsch."[Maechler 2000, p. 281.]
Reclamation
The
Kitsch movement is an international movement of classical painters, founded in 1998 upon a philosophy proposed by
Odd Nerdrum,
[E.J. Pettinger [4] "The Kitsch Campaign" Boise, 29 December 2004.] which he clarified in his 2001 book
On Kitsch,
[Dag Solhjell and Odd Nerdrum. On Kitsch, Kagge Publishing, August 2001, .] in cooperation with Jan-Ove Tuv and others incorporating the techniques of the
with narrative,
romanticism, and emotionally charged imagery.
See also
- Notable examples
Informational notes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
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Adorno, Theodor (2001). The Culture Industry. Routledge.
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Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten (2008). "Wabi and Kitsch: Two Japanese Paradigms" in Æ: Canadian Aesthetics Journal 15.
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Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten (2019) The New Aesthetics of Deculturation: Neoliberalism, Fundamentalism and Kitsch (Bloomsbury). Foreword by Olivier Roy.
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Braungart, Wolfgang (2002). "Kitsch. Faszination und Herausforderung des Banalen und Trivialen". Max Niemeyer Verlag. /0083-4564.
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Mark Cheetham (2001). "Kant, Art and Art History: moments of discipline". Cambridge University Press. .
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Gillo Dorfles (1969, translated from the 1968 Italian version, Il Kitsch). Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, Universe Books. LCCN 78-93950
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Norbert Elias (19981935). "The Kitsch Style and the Age of Kitsch," in J. Goudsblom and S. Mennell (eds) The Norbert Elias Reader. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Gelfert, Hans-Dieter (2000). "Was ist Kitsch?". Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in Göttingen. .
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Giesz, Ludwig (1971). Phänomenologie des Kitsches. 2. vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Partially. Reprint (1994): Ungekürzte Ausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. / .
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Gorelik, Boris (2013). Incredible Tretchikoff: Life of an artist and adventurer. Art / Books, London.
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Greenberg, Clement (1978). Art and Culture. Beacon Press.
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Holliday, Ruth and Potts, Tracey (2012) Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste, Manchester University Press.
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Karpfen, Fritz (1925). "Kitsch. Eine Studie über die Entartung der Kunst". Weltbund-Verlag, Hamburg.
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Kristeller, Paul Oskar (1990). "The Modern System of the Arts" (In "Renaissance Thought and the Arts"). Princeton University Press.
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Kulka, Tomas (1996). Kitsch and Art. Pennsylvania State University Press.
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Moles, Abraham (nouvelle édition 1977). Psychologie du Kitsch: L'art du Bonheur, Denoël-Gonthier
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Nerdrum, Odd (Editor) (2001). On Kitsch. Distributed Art Publishers.
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Olalquiaga, Celeste (2002). The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience. University of Minnesota
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Reimann, Hans (1936). "Das Buch vom Kitsch". Piper Verlag, München.
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Richter, Gerd, (1972). Kitsch-Lexicon, Bertelsmann.
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Ryynänen, Max (2018). "Contemporary Kitsch: The Death of Pseudo Art and the Birth of Everyday Cheesiness (A Postcolonial Inquiry)" in Terra Aestheticae 1, pp. 70–86.
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Scruton, Roger (2009). Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press
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Scruton, Roger (1983). The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture
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Shiner, Larry (2001). "The Invention of Art". University of Chicago Press. .
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Thuller, Gabrielle (2006 and 2007). "Kunst und Kitsch. Wie erkenne ich?", . "Kitsch. Balsam für Herz und Seele", . (Both on Belser-Verlag, Stuttgart.)
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Ward, Peter (1994). Kitsch in Sync: A Consumer's Guide to Bad Taste, Plexus Publishing.
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"Kitsch. Texte und Theorien", (2007). Reclam. . (Includes classic texts of kitsch criticism from authors like Theodor Adorno, Ferdinand Avenarius, Edward Koelwel, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Hermann Broch, Richard Egenter, etc.).
External links
