Kitsch

The Dictionary of Art, Macmillan, London, 1998.

Denis Dutton

Kitsch (from German, pretentious trash, < dialect, kitschen, to smear, verkitschen,

to make cheaply, to cheapen).

“Kitsch” has sometimes been used (for example, by Harold Rosenberg) to refer to
virtually any form of popular art or entertainment, especially when sentimental.
But though much popular art is cheap and crude, it is at least direct and
unpretentious. On the other hand, a persistent theme in the history of the usage of
“kitsch,” going back to the word’s mid-European origins,
is pretentiousness, especially in reference to objects that ape whatever is
conventionally viewed as high art. As Arnold Hauser has remarked, kitsch differs
from merely popular forms in its insistence on being taken seriously as art. Kitsch
can thus be defined as a kind of pseudo-art which has an essential attribute of
borrowing or parasitism, and whose essential function is to flatter, soothe, and
reassure its viewer and consumer.

In his 1757 essay, “Of the Standard of Taste,” David Hume remarks on “a species
of beauty, which, as it is florid and superficial, pleases at first; but...soon palls
upon the taste, and then is rejected with disdain, or at least rated at a much lower
value.” Kitsch was a term unavailable to Hume, but he may have had something
like it in mind. Clive Bell, inArt (1913), came closer to it when he denied that Sir
Luke Fildes’s The Doctor (1891, London, Tate) was a work of art because its
effect relies wholly on its sentimental subject-matter: the painting is “worse than
nugatory because the emotion it suggests is false. What it suggests is not pity and
admiration but a sense of complacency in our own pitifulness and generosity.”

While Bell’s assessment of The Doctor is

disputable, he makes a valid objection to art
which, rather than demanding or even examining
virtue, congratulates the viewer for already
possessing it. This same idea is stressed by the
novelist Milan Kundera in his meditation on the
concept of kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness
of Being (1984). Kundera characterises kitsch as
Sir Luke Fildes, The Doctor (1891)
calling forth “the second tear.” The first tear is
shed out of pity; the second we shed in recognition of our own feeling of pity. It is
essentially self-congratulatory.

Kitsch includes what advertising blurbs might call “original hand-painted

reproductions of fine works of art,” mass-produced tourist curios in imitation of
honest folk styles, most cinematic versions of famous composers’ lives, much
patriotic art, the funerary sculpture of California’s Forest Lawn Cemetery, and all
manner of religious reproductions and souvenirs. The kitsch object declares itself
“beautiful,” “profound,” “important,” or “moving,” but such values are not
internally achieved; they derive merely from the kitsch object’s subject-matter or
connotations. According to Tomas Kulka, the standard kitsch work must be
instantly identifiable as depicting “an object or theme which is generally
considered to be beautiful or highly charged with stock emotions.” Moreover,
kitsch “does not substantially enrich our associations related to the depicted
subject.” The impact of kitsch is limited to reminding the viewer of great works of
art, deep emotions, or grand philosophic, religious, or patriotic sentiments.

A major function of kitsch in the present century is to reassure

its consumers of their status and position, hence its
association with the ever-nervous middle classes. Just as an
ostentatious set of “great works of literature bound in hand-
crafted buckram” is not intended to be read, but to confirm
the literacy and wealth of its owner, so works of self-
consciously “fine” art may appear in domestic surroundings
as emblems of status and good taste. Straightforward
reproductions are not in themselves kitsch, but objects which
Vladimir Tretchikoff, Green Lady
incorporate high art images to proclaim refinement and
opulence are paradigmatically kitsch, especially if they alter
or re-work an original piece in another medium—for instance, sculptural
renderings of Dürer’s Praying Hands, Leonardo’s Last Supper in tapestry, or
repainted versions of historical masterpieces which are adapted to the aesthetic
expectations of the modern eye (aMona Lisa copyist once told an interviewer that
his paintings were always precisely true to the original, except that he improved on
it by “taking a bit of the chill out of her expression.”) Solemnity and a complete
absence of irony also mark kitsch: this distinguishes sharply the presentation of a
beardedMona Lisa in Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q (1919) from the kitsch
appearance of Leonardo’s painting on the top of a jewelry box. By poking fun at
high art idolatry, Duchamp and the Dadaists pitted themselves against kitsch and
intiated a modern tradition which has continued through Pop Art and the irreverent
strains of Postmodernism.

Not only religion, but also popular politics is fertile ground for kitsch: Nazi art
exploited kitsch imagery, as did official art in the Soviet Union. Kitsch is more
difficult to identify in purely abstract painting or nonprogrammatic music because
its effects so depend on descriptive elements. Still, the “contemporary decor” of
many homes includes mass-produced coffee-table sculptures in crude imitation of
modernist styles, suggesting, for example, Hans Arp or Henry Moore; along with
reproductions of the Parisian scenes of Bernard Buffet (1928- ), such items qualify
as modernist kitsch: they function to produce a thoroughly
up-to-date aura of refinement. 

Kitsch proper begins in the history of art with what has been
called bourgeois realism in the salons of the 19th century.
Some later Pre-Raphaelite work, with its romantic fantasies
of a medieval golden age, comes close to the boundary of
kitsch, while saccharine evocations of classical themes by
such figures as William Bouguereau (1825-1905) and Sir
Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) often cross the line.
The late output of Salvador Dali (1904-1989) has been called
kitsch, but though some of this work may be grotesque, its
flagrantly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true
kitsch, which always strives to please. Like forgery, kitsch is Adolphe-William
Bouguereau, Invading Cupid's
an inevitable feature of an art world in which money and Realm (1892)
desire are spread more widely than taste and knowledge.

Bibliography 
A. Celebonovic: Some Call It Kitsch: Masterpieces of Bourgeois Realism (New York, n.d.)
F. Karpfen: Der Kitsch: eine Studie über die Entartung der Kunst (Hamburg, 1925)
G. Highet: Talents and Geniuses (New York, 1957) 
G. Dorfles (ed.): Kitsch: an Anthology of Bad Taste (London, 1969) 
H. Rosenberg: The Tradition of the New (New York, 1970) 
L. Giesz: Phänonmenologie des kitsches (Munich, 2nd ed, 1971) 
A. Moles: Le Kitsch: l’art du bonheur (Paris, 1971) 
A. Hauser: Soziologie der Kunst (Munich, 1974) 
A. Hauser: Sociology of Art, trans. K.J. Northcott (Chicago, 1982) 
P. Crick: “Kitsch”, British Journal of Aesthetics, xxiii (1983), pp. 48-52. 
M. Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (London, 1984) 
T. Kulka: “Kitsch”, British Journal of Aesthetics, xxviii (1988), pp. 18-27.