kitsch

kitsch. A term applied to art or artefacts characterized by vulgarity, sentimentality, and pretentious bad taste. In German the word means ‘vulgar trash’ (from the verb ‘verkitschen'—to cheapen or sentimentalize) and was ‘originally applied to ephemeral and trashy works, especially sentimental novels and novelettes, and their graphic equivalents, and to poetry of like character’ (Oxford Companion to German Literature, 1976). Its meaning was extended to cover other forms of expression, and in 1925 the art historian Fritz Karpfen published a book entitled Der Kitsch: Eine Studie über die Entartung der Kunst (‘Kitsch: A Study of the Degeneration of Art'). The first recorded occurrence of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is of 1926 (quoting a remark about ‘listening to “Kitsch” on the wireless') and the first serious critical discussion of the word in English was Clement Greenberg's essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ published in Partisan Review in 1939. Greenberg thought that kitsch was the outcome of a world in which money and desire had become much more widely spread than taste and knowledge—‘a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy'. He argued that before literacy became widespread, formal culture was the preserve of educated people with money and leisure; however, the ‘peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois’ lost the taste for their traditional folk culture and ‘set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide. Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits … The precondition for kitsch … is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends.’

Greenberg's analysis of how kitsch operates can still be considered broadly valid, but he took an extremely expansive view of what constituted kitsch, including jazz and Hollywood movies—forms that are now treated just as seriously as museum art. Among the artists he mentioned as exemplifying kitsch were Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell, who likewise are now treated with respect (at least by some critics). The reappraisal of artists such as these, formerly dismissed as shamelessly vulgar, came in the wake of Pop art, which blurred the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and therefore complicated attitudes towards kitsch. Postmodernism has further complicated the issue, for now kitsch imagery is used in an ‘ironic’ way by ‘serious’ artists such as Jeff Koons (although Koons himself says he does not perceive any ironic quality in his work: ‘What it does have for me is a sense of the tragic'). Artists whose work is still sometimes labelled kitsch in a straightforward, uncomplimentary, unironic sense include Salvador Dal’ (in his late religious paintings) and Vladimir Tretchikoff—the ‘ King of Kitsch'.

In the USA the term ‘Schlock art’ is sometimes used as an alternative to ‘kitsch'; ‘schlock', derived from Yiddish, means ‘cheap, shoddy, or defective goods’ (it is also used in the combination form ‘schlockmeister’ or ‘schlockmaster'—‘a purveyor of cheap merchandise').