Anachronistic Angel: 2011

"The Widow", kitsch example of
late 19th century popular lithograph
of a humorous painting
by Frederick Dielman.

My usual routine is quite boring, didn’t know what to do for this day, just browsing… Sick & tired of facebooking. As I was on pause, I just kept staring with my favorite pin-up girls. Oh! The vintage era seemed to have captivated me. Though I’ve been looking since the day I fell in love with vintage, with that sort of art, I didn’t know really what it is named. I adored art so much, though I am not well educated as my brother did, as I may say, I just have the “eye” for what is beautiful or not. As I was browsing through pages of different art photos in the net, I come across with what they called “KITSCH”. I said to myself, ahh so this is what they called Kitsch. They said that Kitsch a German word, is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that are unoriginal. Kitsch also refers to the types of art that are aesthetically deficient (whether or not being sentimental, glamorous, theatrical, or creative) and that make creative gestures which merely imitate the superficial appearances of art through repeated conventions and formulae. Excessive sentimentality often is associated with the term.

John McHale, Karl Pawek, Ludwig Giesz, Lotte H. Eisner, Ugo Volli,

Vittorio Gregotti, and Aleksa Celebonovic;

and essays by Hermann Broch and Clement Greenberg

In the book kitsch is defined as follows:

The word kitsch could derive etymologically from the English ‘sketch’ or, according to the other opinions, from the German verb ‘verkitschen (‘to make cheap’). According to Giesz (Ludwig Giesz: ‘Phanomenologie des Kitsches’ …1960) which is without doubt the most complete work on the subject, the word kitsch could approximately be said to mean ‘artistic rubbish.’

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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" or "to smear"). In "Das Buch vom Kitsch", Hans Reimann refers to kitsch as a professional expression "born in a painter`s studio". A writer like Edward Koelwel rejects that Kitsch is derived from the English word "sketch", pointing to how the sketch was still not in vogue. He argues that Kitsch pictures quite the contrary were highly finished paintings (See "References and further reading"). Kitsch appealed to the crass tastes of the newly moneyed Munich bourgeoisie who allegedly 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.

However, there is a philosophical background to kitsch criticism which is largely ignored. An exception is Gabrielle Thuller, pointing to how kitsch criticism is based on Immanuel Kant`s philosophy of aesthetics. Kant describes the direct appeal to the senses as ”barbaric”. Thuller`s point is supported by Mark A. Cheetham, who points out that kitsch ”is his [Clement Greenberg`s] barbarism”. A source book on texts critical of kitsch underlines this by including excerpts from Kant´s and Schiller`s writings (issued by Reclam publishing company). (For book references, see beneath.) One thus has to keep in mind two things: 1) Kant`s enormous influence on the concept of ”fine art” (the focus of Cheetham`s book), as it came into being in the mid to late 18th century, and 2) how ”sentimentality” or ”pathos” (defining traits of kitsch) do not find room within Kant`s ”aesthetical indifference”. Kant also identified genius with originality. One could say he was implicitly rejecting kitsch, the presence of sentimentality and the lack of originality being the main accusations against it. This stands in stark contrast to f. ex. the Baroque period, when a painter was hailed for his ability to imitate other masters (one such imitator being Luca Giordano). Another influential philosopher on fine art was G. W. F. Hegel, emphasizing the idea of the artist belonging to the spirit of his time (”Zeitgeist”). As an effect of these aesthetics, working with emotional and ”unmodern” (or ”archetypical”) motifs was referred to as kitsch from the second half of the 19th century on. Kitsch is thus necessarily seen as ”false”.

As Thomas Kulka writes, ”the term kitsch was originally applied exclusively to paintings”, but it soon spread to other disciplines such as music. The term has been applied to painters such as Ilja Repin (Clement Greenberg, ”Avantgarde and Kitsch”), and composers such as Tschaikovskij, whom Hermann Broch refers to as ”genialischer kitsch”, or ”kitsch of genius”. (Also referred to in: Theodor Adorno, ”Musikalische Warenanalysen” and Carl Dahlhaus, ”Über musikalischen Kitsch”.

AVANT- GARTE AND KITSCH

The word was popularized in the 1930s by the theorists Theodor Adorno, Hermann Broch, and Clement Greenberg, who each sought to define avant-garde and kitsch as 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 imagine 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 experience.

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. Broch accuses kitsch of not participating in the development of art, having its focus directed at the past, and Greenberg speaks of its concern with previous cultures. (Seeing this as something negative is obviously a result of the influence of Kant`s idea of originality and Hegel`s Zeitgeist theory on the concept of ”fine art” - and quite the opposite of the Renaissance mindset. Michelangelo, f. ex., started his career by making a fake ”antique” Cupid, as Rona Goffen recounts in ”Renaissance Rivals”.). To Broch, 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. Consequently, he opposes the Renaissance (trying to win over death through a ”heathen” and life celebrating attitude - equivalent to kitsch) to Protestantism, with its ascetic tendencies (equivalent to art).

Greenberg held similar views to Broch, concerning the beauty/truth division; 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." He wrote 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." (One should, however, keep in mind the observation of Boris Groys, 2004:”Art is originally propaganda for itself, consequently it can effortlessly be used as propaganda for something else: as political propaganda...” – from Haus der Kunst-News, 18. July 2007. Groys is professor für Kunstwissenschaft, Philosophie und Medientheorie at the Hochschule für gestaltung, Karlsruhe).

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."

The concept of the "kitsch-man"

The term "kitsch-man" (or Kitschmensch, coined by Broch) 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."

In his ”Phenomenology of kitsch”, Ludwig Giesz deals almost exclusively with this topic, seeking the anthropological background for kitsch. In this process he refers to Saint Augustin, who is shocked by his own enthusiasm while attending the performance of a Greek tragedy. The more the characters suffer, the more joy the audience (and previously himself) feels. If the plot is not gripping, everyone goes home disappointed. This would imply that the dichotomy between kitsch man (the rest of the audience) and ”art man” (Saint Augustin) is an age-old opposition.

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.