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Kitsch

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   Kitsch is a German term that has been used to categorize art that is
   considered an inferior copy of an existing style. The term is also used
   more loosely in referring to any art that is pretentious or in bad
   taste, and also commercially produced items that are considered trite
   or crass.

   Because the word was brought into use as a response to a large amount
   of art in the 19th century where the aesthetic of art work was confused
   with a sense of exaggerated sentimentality or melodrama, kitsch is most
   closely associated with art that is sentimental, mawkish, or maudlin;
   however, it can be used to refer to any type of art that is deficient
   for similar reasons—whether it tries to appear sentimental, glamorous,
   theatrical, or creative, kitsch is said to be a gesture imitative of
   the superficial appearances of art. It is often said that kitsch relies
   on merely repeating convention and formula, lacking the sense of
   creativity and originality displayed in genuine art.

   Though kitsch and kitschy may be terms used to criticize, the term is
   sometimes used as a compliment as well, with some finding kitschy
   artwork to be enjoyable for its " retro" value or unintentional, ironic
   humor or garishness.

History

   Though its precise etymology is uncertain, it is widely held that the
   word originated in the Munich art markets of the 1860s and 70s, used to
   describe cheap, hotly marketable pictures or sketches (the English term
   mispronounced by Germans, or elided with the German dialect verb
   kitschen that originally meant "to scrape up mud from the street").
   Kitsch appealed to the crass tastes of the newly moneyed Munich
   bourgeoisie who, like most nouveau riche, thought they could achieve
   the status they envied in the traditional class of cultural elites by
   aping, however clumsily, the most apparent features of their cultural
   habits.

   The word eventually came to mean "a slapping together " (of a work of
   art). Kitsch became defined as an aesthetically impoverished object of
   shoddy production, meant more to identify the consumer with a newly
   acquired class status than to invoke a genuine aesthetic response.
   Kitsch was considered aesthetically impoverished and morally dubious,
   and to have sacrificed aesthetic life to a pantomime of aesthetic life,
   usually, but not always, in the interest of signalling one's class
   status.

Avant-garde and kitsch

   The word became very popularized in the 1930s by the theorists Theodor
   Adorno, Hermann Broch, and Clement Greenberg, who each sought to define
   avant-garde and kitsch as being opposites. To the art world of the
   time, the immense popularity of kitsch was perceived as a threat to
   culture. The arguments of all three theorists relied on an implicit
   definition of kitsch as a type of false consciousness, a Marxist term
   meaning a mindset present within the structures of capitalism that is
   misguided as to its own desires and wants. Marxists suppose there to be
   a disjunction between the real state of affairs and the way that they
   phenomenally appear.

   Adorno perceived this in terms of what he called the " culture
   industry," where the art is controlled and formulated by the needs of
   the market and given to a passive population which accepts it — what is
   marketed is art that is non-challenging and formally incoherent, but
   which serves its purpose of giving the audience leisure and something
   to watch. It helps serve the oppression of the population by capitalism
   by distracting them from their alienation. Contrarily, art for Adorno
   is supposed to be subjective, challenging, and oriented against the
   oppressiveness of the power structure. He claimed that kitsch is parody
   of catharsis, and a parody of aesthetic consciousness.

   Broch called kitsch "the evil within the value-system of art" — that
   is, if true art is "good," kitsch is "evil." While art was creative,
   Broch held that kitsch depended solely on plundering creative art by
   adopting formulas that seek to imitate it, limiting itself to
   conventions and demanding a totalitarianism of those recognizable
   conventions. To him, kitsch was not the same as bad art; it formed a
   system of its own. He argued that kitsch involved trying to achieve
   "beauty" instead of "truth" and that any attempt to make something
   beautiful would lead to kitsch.

   Greenberg held similar views; believing that the avant-garde arose in
   order to defend aesthetic standards from the decline of taste involved
   in consumer society, and seeing kitsch and art as opposites. He
   outlined this in his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." One of his more
   controversial claims was that kitsch was equivalent to Academic art:
   "All kitsch is academic, and conversely, all that is academic is
   kitsch." He argued this based on the fact that Academic art, such as
   that in the 19th century, was heavily centered in rules and
   formulations that were taught and tried to make art into something
   learnable and easily expressible. He later came to withdraw from his
   position of equating the two, as it became heavily criticized. While it
   is true that some Academic art might have been kitsch, not all of it
   is, and not all kitsch is academic.

   Other theorists over time have also linked kitsch to totalitarianism.
   The Czech writer Milan Kundera, in his book The Unbearable Lightness of
   Being (1984), defined it as "the absolute denial of shit." His argument
   was that kitsch functions by excluding from view everything that humans
   find difficult to come to terms with, offering instead a sanitised view
   of the world in which "all answers are given in advance and preclude
   any questions."

   In its desire to paper over the complexities and contradictions of real
   life, kitsch, Kundera suggested, is intimately linked with
   totalitarianism. In a healthy democracy, diverse interest groups
   compete and negotiate with one another to produce a generally
   acceptable consensus; by contrast, "everything that infringes on
   kitsch," including individualism, doubt, and irony, "must be banished
   for life" in order for kitsch to survive. Therefore, Kundera wrote,
   "Whenever a single political movement corners power we find ourselves
   in the realm of totalitarian kitsch."

   For Kundera, "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."

Academic art

   Nineteenth century academic art is still often seen as kitsch, though
   this view is coming under attack from modern critics. Perhaps it is
   best to resort to the theory of Broch, who argued that the genesis of
   kitsch was in Romanticism, which wasn't kitsch itself but which opened
   the door for kitsch taste, by emphasizing the need for expressive and
   evocative art work. Academic art, which continued this tradition of
   Romanticism, has a twofold reason for its association with kitsch.

   It is not that it was found to be accessible — in fact, it was under
   its reign that the difference between high art and low art was first
   defined by intellectuals. Academic art strove towards remaining in a
   tradition rooted in the aesthetic and intellectual experience.
   Intellectual and aesthetic qualities of the work were certainly there —
   good examples of academic art were even admired by the avant-garde
   artists who would rebel against it. There was some critique, however,
   that in being "too beautiful" and democratic it made art look easy,
   non-involving and superficial.

   Many academic artists tried to use subjects from low art and ennoble
   them as high art by subjecting them to interest in the inherent
   qualities of form and beauty, trying to democratize the art world. In
   England, certain academics even advocated that the artist should work
   for the marketplace. In some sense the goals of democratization
   succeeded, and the society was flooded with Academic art, the public
   lining up to see art exhibitions as they do to see movies today.
   Literacy in art became widespread, as did the practice of art making,
   and there was a blurring between high and low culture. This often led
   to poorly made or poorly conceived artworks being accepted as high art.
   Often art which was found to be kitsch showed technical talent, such as
   in creating accurate representations, but lacked good taste.

   Secondly, the subjects and images presented in academic art, though
   original in their first expression, were disseminated to the public in
   the form of prints and postcards — which was often actively encouraged
   by the artists — and these images were endlessly copied in kitschified
   form until they became well known clichés.

   The avant-garde reacted to these developments by separating itself from
   the aspects of art such as pictorial representation and harmony that
   were appreciated by the public, in order to make a stand for the
   importance of the aesthetic. Many modern critics try not to pigeonhole
   academic art into the kitsch side of the art/kitsch dichotomy,
   recognizing its historical role in the genesis of both the avant-garde
   and kitsch.

Postmodernism

   With the emergence of Postmodernism in the 1980s, the borders between
   kitsch and high art became blurred again. One development was the
   approval of what is called " camp taste." Camp refers to an ironic
   appreciation of that which might otherwise be considered corny, such as
   singer/dancer Carmen Miranda with her tutti-frutti hats, or otherwise
   kitsch, such as popular culture events which are particularly dated or
   inappropriately serious, such as the low-budget science fiction movies
   of the 1950s and 60s. " Camp" is derived from the French slang term
   camper, which means "to pose in an exaggerated fashion." Susan Sontag
   argued in her 1964 Notes on "Camp" that camp was an attraction to the
   human qualities which expressed themselves in "failed attempts at
   seriousness," the qualities of having a particular and unique style and
   of reflecting the sensibilities of the era. It involved an aesthetic of
   artifice rather than of nature. Indeed, hard-line supporters of camp
   culture have long insisted that "camp is a lie that dares to tell the
   truth."

   Much of Pop art attempted to incorporate images from popular culture
   and kitsch; artists were able to maintain legitimacy by saying they
   were "quoting" imagery to make conceptual points, usually with the
   appropriation being ironic. In Italy, a movement arose called the Nuovi
   Nuovi ("new new"), which took a different route: instead of quoting
   kitsch in an ironic stance, it founded itself in a primitivism which
   embraced the ugliness and garishness, emulating it as a sort of
   anti-aesthetic.

   Conceptual art and deconstruction posed as interesting challenges,
   because, like kitsch, they downplayed the formal structure of the
   artwork in favour of elements which enter it by relating to other
   spheres of life.

   Despite this, many in the art world continue to have an adherence to
   some sense of the dichotomy between art and kitsch, excluding all
   sentimental and realistic art from being considered seriously. This has
   come under attack by critics who argue for a reappreciation of Academic
   art and traditional figurative painting, without the concern for it
   appearing innovative or new. A different tactic is taken by the
   Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum, who composed a manifesto entitled " On
   Kitsch," where he makes a point of declaring himself a Kitsch painter
   rather than an artist, even though very few critics would actually
   think of his artwork as kitsch.

   Nerdrum has claimed that in his career and the career of many other
   artists, the art establishment, what he calls the Curatoriat, imposes
   values and prevents honest personal expression — he turns around the
   formulations of Adorno and Kundera. He states that while art serves the
   public, kitsch serves personal expression; art serves politics, while
   kitsch loses itself in the eternal and is pure sensuality, "naked
   talent exposing itself." Nerdrum declares: "Art exists for art itself
   and addresses the public. Kitsch serves life and addresses the human
   being."

   Postmodernism is also under attack by Nerdrum, because it holds to a
   camp taste, which only appreciates kitsch in terms of the irony of a
   "failed seriousness," while he argues that kitsch should in fact be
   looked at as real, sincere expression of beauty.

   In any case, whatever difficulty there is in defining its boundaries
   with art, the word kitsch is still in common usage to label anything
   felt in bad taste.

The concept of the "kitsch-man"

   The term "kitsch-man" (or Kitschmensch) refers to an individual who
   compulsively metamorphoses all of his aesthetic experiences into
   kitsch, regardless of whether the work of art concerned is good or bad.
   Whenever the kitsch-man contemplates art, it always involves the
   adoption of a particular viewpoint, a perspective swamped with the
   vicarious and the sentimental. When the kitsch-man encounters a genuine
   artwork and its kitsch replica (e.g. a twelve-inch copy of
   Michaelangelo's pieta in plaster) the response elicited will be no
   different. Pathos is projected onto genuine works of art, transforming
   art from the past into objects of sentimentality. Even nature is not
   immune to kitsch under the apprehension of the kitsch-man, in
   particular those components of nature that have endured kitsch
   portrayals to the extent that they have become hackneyed. A sunset, for
   example, could too closely resemble its representation in cheap
   paintings or "romantic" films; here the kitsch-man makes natural
   occurrences seem "false".

Examples

   Many lawn ornaments like this garden gnome are considered kitsch.
   Enlarge
   Many lawn ornaments like this garden gnome are considered kitsch.

   One of the first painters that served as a demonstrative example of
   kitsch is the Hungarian Charles Roka. Despised by the art world, he was
   nevertheless loved by the people. He became famous for his numerous
   variations of the Gipsy Girl, where he painted exotic looking Gypsies
   in a pin-up style, and for sentimental portraits of children with their
   pet dogs.

   A modern example of a painter considered by most art critics and
   academics to be producing kitsch, but who has a loyal following that
   generally does not claim artistic sophistication, is the commercially
   successful American Thomas Kinkade, who brands himself the "Painter of
   Light™" and claims to be the United States' "most collected living
   artist." Kinkade paints scenes of stone cottages, lighthouses, cobble
   stone streets, rustic villages, and other vistas, with emphasis on the
   glittery ornamentation in the play of light and natural foliage. His
   work is meant to be sentimental, patriotic, quaint, spiritual, and
   inspirational. In the United Kingdom the artist Maggi Hambling is
   considered by many to be an unconscious exponent of kitsch, with the
   coffin-like Oscar Wilde memorial and the controversial Scallop
   sculpture (however, Hambling's portraits of the dying Henrietta Moraes
   escape such critical accusation).
   His Station and Four Aces by C. M. Coolidge, 1903.
   Enlarge
   His Station and Four Aces by C. M. Coolidge, 1903.

   Several Dogs Playing Poker paintings produced in the early 20th century
   by C. M. Coolidge are famous examples of kitsch. A painter classified
   as making kitsch is Margaret Keane, who worked in the 50s and 60s,
   painting mostly portraits of waif children; but whether her subject was
   child, adult, or animal, all of her pictures had very large, staring
   eyes that always directly faced the viewer.

   Another painter who is commonly used as an example of kitsch is the
   fantasy artist Boris Vallejo, born in Peru. His painting involves
   muscular heroes, voluptuous ladies, and monsters, all depicted in a
   fantasy setting. Vallejo's works and similar ones are often painted on
   the sides of vans and featured in calendars. Critics of his paintings
   find them garish and gaudy in similar ways to Siegfried and Roy shows
   in Las Vegas.
   Inkpots and deer antler for penholders
   Enlarge
   Inkpots and deer antler for penholders

   Velvet paintings, which are widely sold in rural America, usually have
   kitsch themes. They often depict images of Elvis Presley, Dale
   Earnhardt, John Wayne, Jesus, Native Americans and Cowboys. One example
   of a kitsch velvet painting features an 18-wheel truck driving through
   the night with a ghostly image of Jesus in the sky watching
   protectively from above. Some kitsch items, typically small statuettes,
   deviate from the original concept, such as a Santa Claus in biker garb
   riding a chopper. Commonly, they can also be found bearing unrelated
   symbols, such as the motorcycle Santa wearing Green Bay Packers colors
   and logo. The musicians whose work may be considered kitsch are
   Stockholm Syndrome, Modern Error and Telekinesis for Cats. The
   Eurovision Song Contest is considered by some to be an example of
   kitsch. One could also consider such music to be examples of the
   closely related concept of camp.

   Las Vegas is considered by many the pinnacle of architectural kitsch in
   the world, and may be used as good example of how luxury and kitsch can
   be together. 1959 Cadillacs also seem to illustrate this. Modern
   Shanghai is arguably considered the eastern capital of architectural
   kitsch, with its flamboyant towers and office blocks at the Pudong
   district, pumped up by the growth of the Chinese economy.

   The plastic pink flamingo (see: Plastic flamingo) lawn icon,
   popularized in the 1950s, has been reviled as kitschy bad taste or
   revered as retro cool.

   Of course, these are only strong, defining examples of what art purists
   refer to as kitsch — many would say that it saturates all popular
   culture, and some would equate popular culture and kitsch as being one
   and the same; as Clement Greenberg remarked, kitsch is "all that is
   spurious in the life of our times."

Trivia

     * The term "kitsch" was selected in June 2004 by a British
       translation company as one of the ten English words that are
       hardest to translate.
     * "Kitsch" is also a song by Barry Ryan.
     * "Kitsch" is also the name of bands in Spain, New Zealand and
       Israel.
     * "Kitsch" is also the name of an all-features magazine published at
       Cornell University.
     * Kitsch is the main export of Hell, MI.
     * Soviet Kitsch is the name of an album by Russian-born singer-
       songwriter Regina Spektor.

Quotations

     * "Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious
       experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style,
       but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is
       spurious in the life of our times." — Clement Greenberg, "
       Avant-Garde and Kitsch", 1939.
     * "The more romantic a work of art, or a landscape, the quicker its
       repetitions are perceived as kitsch or "slush". — Arthur Koestler,
       1949
     * "[K]itsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and
       figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its
       purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence." —
       Milan Kundera, 1984
     * "Kitsch is the expression of passion at all levels, and not the
       servant of truth. It keeps relative to religion and truth... Truth,
       kitsch leaves for (modern) art. In kitsch skill is the important
       criteria.... Kitsch serves life and seeks the individual." Odd
       Nerdrum, "Kitsch — The Difficult Choice", 1998.
     * "I think that what's truly vulgar is kitsch, that means the lack of
       technical awareness." ( Daniele Luttazzi, 1st February 2001
       interview at L'Espresso).

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