The Changing Meaning of Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance 3031166310, 9783031166310

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The Changing Meaning of Kitsch From Rejection to Acceptance Edited by Max Ryynänen · Paco Barragán

The Changing Meaning of Kitsch

Max Ryynänen  •  Paco Barragán Editors

The Changing Meaning of Kitsch From Rejection to Acceptance

Editors Max Ryynänen Department of Arts Aalto University Espoo, Finland

Paco Barragán Advanced Studies in Art History University of Salamanca Salamanca, Spain

ISBN 978-3-031-16631-0    ISBN 978-3-031-16632-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

 Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance—On the Changing Meaning of Kitsch in Today’s Cultural Production (Introduction)  1 Paco Barragán and Max Ryynänen Part I Kitsch and Life  63  Kitsch in the Hypermodern Era 65 Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy  Sailing the Seas of Cheese 87 Erik Anderson  Kitsch in Relation to Loss119 Kathleen Higgins  Old Tricks for a New Dog: Toilet Humor, Politicized Kitsch, and the Trump Presidency143 Alison Rowley

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Part II Kitsch and Culture 165 K  itsch and Architecture167 Andrea Mecacci  From Fashion as Kitsch to Kitsch in Fashion: Redefining Beauty and Taste Today181 Maribel Castro Díaz  Digital Kitsch: Art and Kitsch in the Informational Milieu205 Domenico Quaranta  Kitsch, Beauty and Artistic Practice229 Jozef Kovalčik and Michaela Hučko Pašteková  Biokitsch in Art: And the Survival of the Prettiest249 Laura Beloff E  pilogue: What Next?263 Paco Barragán and Max Ryynänen I ndex267

Notes on Contributors

Erik Anderson  is Chair and Professor of Philosophy at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. His research interests include metaphysics, aesthetics, and environmental aesthetics. He also loves animals, bicycles, and jazz. Paco Barragán  has earned an international PhD in Advanced Studies in Art History from the University of Salamanca USAL), Spain. He is an art theorist and curator specializing in the history of the art market and museology. Between 2015 and 2017 he was the Head of Visual Arts of Cultural Centre Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile. In 2005 he was cocurator of the International Biennale of Contemporary Art (IBCA) in Prague, and in 2016 he was co-curator of Toronto Nuit Blanche. He has curated 93 exhibitions. Some of the books he has authored are The Art to Come (2002), The Art Fair Age (2008), and From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-liberal Biennial: On the “Biennialization” of Art Fairs and the “Fairization” of Biennials (2020). Laura Beloff  is an internationally acclaimed artist and a researcher in the cross section of art, technology, and science. Additionally, to research papers, articles, and book chapters, the outcome of the research is in a form of process-based installations, sometimes wearable artifacts, and often processes with experiments with scientific methods that deal with the merger of the technological and biological matter. The research vii

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engages with areas such as human enhancement, biosemiotics, biological matter, technology, artificial life, artificial intelligence, and robotics affiliated with art, humans, natural environment, and society. She is Associate Professor and the Head of Doctoral Education in the Department of Art & Media, Aalto University, Finland. Maribel Castro Díaz is an associate professor at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria (Madrid), where she teaches different courses in the degrees in Fine Arts, Design, and Audiovisual Communication. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Extraordinary PhD Award, 2011–2012). Her main research interests include narrativity in photography and visual arts, myth criticism, and relationships between art, fashion, and culture. As an artist, she has participated in numerous curated art exhibitions, art prizes, and photo festivals. Kathleen Higgins  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. She is author or coauthor of several books, including The Music of Our Lives and The Music Between Us, and editor or coeditor of several others, including Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty: Cross-cultural Perspective (with Shakti Maira and Sonia Sikka). She is writing a book on the aesthetics of loss and mourning. She is a former president of the American Society for Aesthetics and a former delegate-at-large for the International Association for Aesthetics. Jozef Kovalčik is Lecturer in Aesthetics at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, and director of Slovak Arts Council. He was previously Vice Rector at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where he also taught theory of art, theory of design, and aesthetics. His research has been focused on the relationship between high and popular culture, design theory, and art school education. He is also engaged in curatorial and translation activities and is the Editor-in-­Chief of Popular Inquiry: The Journal of the Aesthetics of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture. Gilles Lipovetsky  is a philosopher and sociologist from the University of Grenoble. He has authored many books devoted to topics like individualism, consumerism, luxury, globalization, cinema, feminism, and ethics. Two of his books have appeared in English: The Empire of Fashion

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(2002) and Hypermodern Times (2005). Some of the books he has had published are L’Esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste (2013); De la légèreté. Vers une civilisation du léger (2015); Plaire et toucher. Essai sur la société de séduction (2017), which was awarded the Prix Montyon of the French Academy in 2018; and Le sacre de l’authenticité (2021). Andrea Mecacci  is Associate Professor of Esthetics at the University of Florence. His studies focus on some conceptual and operational categories of the aestheticization of the contemporary world: pop, postmodern, diffused aesthetics, and kitsch. He has been a visiting professor in the United States, Mexico, and China. His publications include Introduzione a Andy Warhol (2008), L’estetica del pop (2011), Estetica e design (2012), Il kitsch (2014), Dopo Warhol. Il pop, il postmoderno, l’estetica diffusa (2017), and Il gusto e il suo doppio. Saggi sul kitsch (2021). Michaela Pašteková  works at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (Slovakia), where she teaches aesthetics, mass culture, and theory of photography. In her research, she focuses on the influence of social platforms and new media on visual culture, aesthetics, and the evaluation of the photographic image. As a dramaturg in the festival of independent theater and dance Kiosk, she has also been actively involved in the aesthetics of performativity and contemporary dance for the last four years. She is also an active curator and art critic. Since 2015, she has been the chair of the Slovak Association for Aesthetics. Domenico Quaranta  is a contemporary art critic, curator, and educator interested in the ways art reflects the current technological shift. His essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in magazines, reviews, books, and catalogues. He is the author, among other things, of Beyond New Media Art (2013) and Surfing with Satoshi (2022), has edited and coedited a number of books and catalogues, including GameScenes: Art in the Age of Videogames (2006). Since 2005 he has curated and co-curated many exhibitions, including Collect the WWWorld: The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (2011–2012), Cyphoria (2016), and Hyperemployment (2019–2020). He teaches “interactive systems” at the

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Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara and is a cofounder of the Link Art Center (2011–2019). For more info: http://domenicoquaranta.com. Alison Rowley  is a professor in the Department of History at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author of two books: Putin Kitsch in America and Open Letters: Russian Popular Culture and the Picture Postcard, 1880–1922. Max Ryynänen  is Senior Lecturer in Theory of Visual Culture at Aalto University in Finland. He is the Editor-in-Chief of two journals, Popular Inquiry: The Journal of the Aesthetic of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture and the Journal of Somaesthetics. He is the ex-president of the Finnish Society for Aesthetics. Ryynänen has authored and edited books on, for example, somaesthetics, political aesthetics, the future of art education, and the history of art systems for various publishers (e.g., Routledge, Rowman & Littlefield, Springer, Palgrave). For more information, see http:// maxryynanen.net. Jean Serroy  is an emeritus professor at the University of Grenoble, France. He has taught as visiting professor in many foreign universities, among which are included Berkeley, Boston, Buffalo in the United States; Vancouver in Canada; Oxford in the United Kingdom; Florence, Turin, Rome, and Naples in Italy; Fukuoka and Tokyo in Japan; Busan and Seoul in Korea. Specialist in literature and art of the seventeenth century, he is also a conference speaker and cultural critic and addresses topics like painting, cinema, and gastronomy. He has written four books in collaboration with Gilles Lipovetsky on contemporary culture and world.

List of Figures

Old Tricks for a New Dog: Toilet Humor, Politicized Kitsch, and the Trump Presidency Fig. 1 Photograph showing button referencing both the “golden toilet” and “shithole countries” episodes. Taken November 2019. (Courtesy of the author) 151 Fig. 2 Photograph showing a sample of the toilet humor-related items available during the 2020 US presidential election. Taken September 2021. (Courtesy of the author) 156

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List of Images

Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance—On the Changing Meaning of Kitsch in Today’s Cultural Production (Introduction) Image 1 Johannes Vermeer, “The Milkmaid”, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2014, C-Print. (Photo Courtesy Bruce Marshall (Belfast))27 Image 2 Jeff Koons, “Tulips,” The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, 2016. (Photo Courtesy Robert Koo (Pasadena)) 36 Image 3 Melvin Martínez, “Il Giardino Florentino”, 2014–2016, collage on canvas, 96″ × 180″/245 × 460cm. (Courtesy of the artist (San Juan, P.R.)) 38

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Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance— On the Changing Meaning of Kitsch in Today’s Cultural Production (Introduction) Paco Barragán and Max Ryynänen

Can you imagine a culture without hierarchies, a cultural history without stories about the privileged debasing the taste of the less privileged, or Western culture without an art scene that trashed the bourgeois? In 300 AD, Sung Yu described great composers as birds flying high— and ordinary composers as low-flying.1 The Roman proto-satirist Petronius (27–66 BC) mocked in The Satyricon the tasteless rich for their status-driven appropriation of poetry.2 A conception of a sort of “high literature” evolved during the first centuries AD on the Indian continent, when the authors of the Sanskrit kavya, the artificial literary style of the courts, raised style and metaphor over plot and narrative, and so symbolically overshadowed vernacular literature.3 And, after centuries of differentiation between the liberal art(e)s and the vulgar art(e)s in medieval P. Barragán Advanced Studies in Art History, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain M. Ryynänen (*) Department of Art, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_1

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cathedral schools, where the seven artes liberales (e.g., grammar and logic) were “freed from physical labor,” and vice versa, for example, the vulgar arts of clothing people and militaria4—this criterion had a long historical root extending to ancient Greece, where “free men” evaluated practices the same way5—the privileged continental Europeans from Florence to Paris, and soon from Hamburg to London, too, established and cherished the mid-eighteenth-century idea of the seven fine arts. As we know, establishing the concept of art and the art system had famous and infamous consequences. The idea that painting and poetry, dance, sculpture, literature and, as a half-applied art, architecture (and eloquence, which was soon removed from the list, though), were connected through, for example, the use of imagination or creativity, helped to make the system more autonomous, and soon, as different artistic communities found each other, the arts became more interconnected— while the system itself was distributed through diaspora and colonialism all over the globe. This historical process made art into a house concept in upper-class families and an object of encyclopedic knowledge. As the idea of art spread between 1750 and 1770, the Uffizi relocated the “curiosities” and dismissed its nature as a Wunderkammer, a place for exhibiting weird objects, and turned the spotlights on works of art (the Louvre soon followed).6 And as early as the early nineteenth century, bourgeois and upper-class connoisseurs started performatively taking distance from popular culture.7 The increasing democratization of European culture and the rise of the modern bourgeois, which led to lower social boundaries and less patronage, pushed “artists” nearly into the same economic situation as street entertainers, begging for peanuts from collectors and audiences.8 This created a situation where an aesthetic division, the “great divide,” as Andreas Huyssen calls it, had to evolve. The “bogus arts” and mass culture became needed slurs marking the difference between high and low. The art system fed its members by also fostering the idea that this new concept and system of art was the highest product of mankind (putting an accent on man)—while overshadowing, sometimes violently, the artistic practices of females, poor people, and then, eventually, other cultures.9 Often the “invention of art” (as Larry Shiner calls it) accentuated a lesser

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appreciation of “others” and their artistic practices. The artsy turn of cultural history did not always work for democracy. In late medieval times, females were, in continental Europe, often not seen good enough for the careful work of the craftsmen as they lacked, for example, “skill” and “mimetic accuracy”, were too subjective, and (as Christine Battersby provocatively puts it) too “creative.” But when the new ideas of the artist and, consequently, the “genius” appeared on the scene, women suddenly lacked something else, all the attributes required for bold, creative work.10 Defenses of “other” cultural practices appeared, too. Already Aristotle (384–322 BC) defended less-statured culture by reacting critically to how his peers ridiculed the theater of the slaves. He wrote that as the souls of the slaves had been twisted due to bodily labor, a different type of spectacle resonated with them. Slaves needed, naturally, a very different theater than free men.11 The defense turns the spotlight on the formation of people, a topic that would become a typical pastime for democratically minded social scientists in the mid-twentieth century. We find, for example, Herbert Gans writing in the 1970s about five levels of cultural taste—thereby reinforcing the hierarchical ideals of the bourgeois—and then propagating aesthetic education to help everyone to reach highbrow literature and opera,12 i.e. the aesthetic culture of the eighteenth-century Western, Continental, and Central European upper-­ class male. Makers and audiences, and their classifications and cultural practices have often also increased their value in history. Late after their publication, the novels of the Brontë sisters suddenly gained literary value in the “circles”—anticipating the broader birth of the female author, the development of which we are still witnessing. Romani music is today viewed appreciatively and not only as a source for hijacking material for classical music—in the fashion that Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Haydn, and Rachmaninov made (in)famous. And the African pictorial traditions that Picasso made famous in the West by appropriating them can today be appreciated artistically globally—without the intervention of a “mediating” European artist. Some film became “art” too, already early, and in the Soviet Union and later through circ nouveau, some circus has had the same destiny.

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Kitsch, which as a slur developed not coincidentally together with the modernist turn in the mid-nineteenth century, quite directly after the moment when art as a new concept, system, and institution had been stabilized in approximately the 1830s,13 has since worked as a conceptual tool directed against sentimental, artistically pretentious, and later increasingly sugared and cute art and culture. One late rise in cultural status has happened to kitsch, we claim. The change is twofold, and it follows the internal division of the concept, which we will discuss era by era later. Firstly, the everyday culture, from pink porcelain pigs to cheesy New Age posters, that surrounds us has become acceptable and openly enjoyed even in the critical (read: often quite cynical) parts of the art scene and intellectual circles. Secondly, kitsch, as we today see it formally speaking (sugared, cheesy, glittering, banally beautiful, eloquently but serious-mindedly campy), has weirdly become a big thing in the art market. These strains of development are connected, and we aim to sketch out an understanding of why and how this happened—without forgetting the notes we can make on the change in the concept itself and the historical roots we chase beyond the conceptual history of kitsch. Part I of the introduction combines the history of the concept and its global outreach with an analysis of everyday aesthetics (“The History of Kitsch and Its Everyday Use”), and Part II focuses on kitsch in today’s art world (“The Artworld Has Gone Kitsch”).

1 The History of “Kitsch” and Its Everyday Use One could write a history of aesthetically debased artistic practices and conventions connected to the type of products we have called, or now call kitsch. A global survey like this has never been done, at least not to our knowledge. It could include Western eras and movements we now formally could note to be kitschy, like the rococo, or to some extent, at least in some areas and in some artistic practices (like interior decoration and poetry), the Baroque—without forgetting the later movements of art

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deco and art nouveau. Venice could be considered a town that looks kitschy—although its building style was original and not meant to be sugared and sentimental when it was born. One could write about descriptions of distasteful idolatry in the Old Testament, the rebelling silversmiths whose shiny and beautiful “false gods” (and miniatures of the Temple of Diana) were debased by the righteous, led by Paul, in the town of Ephesus in Asia Minor—or the mocked golden calves built by King Jeroboam. The Roman Satyricon (by Petronius) is a story about sentimental and sleazy pre-bourgeois appropriation of art at Trimalchio’s, a nouveau-riche who picks his teeth with a silver quill, twelve-course dinner party—where the guests are forced to listen to the pompous poems of the pretentious host. This would, though, not make much sense, as the properties that we associate with kitsch, like the color pink, materials like porcelain, commercial sentimentalism, and certain forms of cuteness, are a product of a certain age of mass production and democratization of culture in Europe, and even more, labeled and categorized negatively following our modern conception of art, thereby leaving traces of cultural dynamics in today’s things seen as kitsch. Another way of approaching the topic is to focus on the way artistic endeavors have been seen to be non-authentic in one way or another. Not the art of the working class—which the privileged ones have seldom seen as a serious challenge—but the “bad” art of the educated privileged has been mocked or at least excluded on the grounds of being non-art at some point, probably in all artistically developed cultures. But the problematics of kitsch are peculiar, connected with the relative, hailed democratization of culture, which is a historical Western phenomenon, and mass production, which became a thing first in England and continental Europe in a way that fostered reactions from the elite in the nineteenth century—without forgetting that “art” as a concept and cultural system which evolved from the eighteenth century in Europe had the role in creating the cultural compartment of kitsch, as it needed to make a difference to its aesthetic challengers. And as art went increasingly abstract and purist when the millennium was at its end, “kitsch” labeled sentimental landscape painting, for example, as much as “mass culture” mocked cinema and detective stories.

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Kathleen Higgins writes that “[o]ne of the reasons for the disappearance of beauty in the artistic ideology of the late twentieth century has been the seeming similarity of beauty to certain kinds of kitsch.”14 Since this comment focuses on the relationship between art and (kitsch as) pseudo art, one could ask why everyday objects have been called kitsch and debased in various ways. Kitsch is not only a problem of art. Wannabe artists, imposters, and whatever a cynical/critical intellectual would like to condemn have imitated new forms of art to gain status, and some only for aesthetic reasons. But this has not much changed the nature of art if we are not talking about the late phase of contemporary art (described in part 2). Like Umberto Eco notes in “The Structure of Bad Taste” (1964), art has also, at least partly, worked to keep up with the difference toward, for example, kitsch,15 which is another way to discuss the impact of kitsch. This might have been the case in the still modernist 1960s when Eco was writing about kitsch, but the trend cannot be said to have dominated art. If kitsch as (wannabe) art did not, anyway, much change art, kitsch as everyday culture, on the other hand, really changed everyday culture— and became something that defines Western culture as much as today it also defines many Far-East Asian cultural formations from Taiwan to Japan. Thinking about what we today call the everyday, we could even ask if kitsch had a decisive role in its birth. There are two primary ways to talk about everyday aesthetics. The first accentuates the routine nature of the everyday, the way we don’t “see it”—like water to the fish—and its familiarity (contra strangeness) and homeyness.16 The second focuses on objects. It is remarkable how kitsch has not been mentioned in this group of objects when the everyday has been discussed. There is no reason why tourist souvenirs and spiritual/ sentimental meditation posters (with, for example, a “beautiful woman” sitting in the lotus position on a mountain with a sunset) should not make us think of the everyday as much as milk cartons and design objects on the table.17 While it is still understandable that kitsch’s relationship to art is often seen as a form of “aesthetic lying”18 (Umberto Eco’s example of Giovanni Boldini’s paintings where neatly photorealistic portraits develop into being cubist at the margins so that the buyer can both get their image in

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an easily digestible way and feel like they are buying challenging modern art19), where’s the lie when one talks about a porcelain pig on the television set? Tomas Kulka has three criteria for objects to be labeled as kitsch. 1. Kitsch depicts objects or themes that are highly charged with stock emotions. 2. The objects or themes depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable. 3. Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes.20 These criteria, though, could well describe the majority of mass culture today. And most kitsch we meet is not something we’d see intruding into the art world. Everyday life is not meant to challenge us all the time, either, so these criteria cannot be seen as very clever if we want to evaluate our everyday. We can see in Kulka’s words an echo of the development of the concept, which originally was much more art-based than it is today. Like when viewing cultures that are not Western—pink and gold are used in ornamental Indian visual culture without a connection to the kitsch sensibility—gazing at everyday objects might sometimes fit the criteria. Still, they do not make sense, critically speaking. They might still help us to describe everyday kitsch. Uses of culture vary. Although art theorists like to think that abstract art is about sensual and intellectual contemplation, abstract paintings are used as bourgeois fetishes and/or upper-class show-offs, in a way, as kitsch (accentuating the pseudo-art meaning of the word here). Some kitsch is used as camp. To enjoy Michelangelo’s David nastily gone wrong as a small camp statue is only one way to engage with it. Someone else might just put it on the shelf, performing an interest in art (in a kitschy way); or kids could use it as a toy, fighting He-Man. Everyday kitsch still also has, sometimes, quite clear use functions, that are not much changed in the everyday. Some people who buy ceramic Marias with neon halos at the Vatican have a specific religious function for them as reminders of the spirit they desire to embody in their everyday life. They might look at the Maria when they feel that they are having a hard

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time following the ethos of their religion. And many who produce these works are sincerely in love with the practice. As makers, they are not “lying.” Jeff Koons21 said, Porcelain is a material which was created in the service of the monarch and made in the King’s oven. Of course, over the centuries it has become totally democratized but still the material always wants to return to the service of the monarch. There is this uplifting quality about it; this feeling of one’s social standing being increased just by being around the material.

Koons’ comment says a lot about how some materials have a special nature in Western culture. While bronze is the classical modern material for sculpture, with authenticity, porcelain echoes not only bourgeois culture, but also some kind of feeling of (sometimes fake) elevation. It was a key interior design material of the period when the concept of kitsch developed, not coincidentally. One could, without hesitation, say that the concept of kitsch, together with the main examples considered to be kitsch, is, though, really a highbrow product—and has its origins in the world of art. It originated in the 1860s and continued to develop in the early twentieth century,22 first nailing, for the critical mind, the newborn presence of, in a way or another, mass-appealing and mass-produced challengers to the highbrow, but developing into a more complicated slur, focusing on certain atmospheres, emotions (sentimentality) and later increasingly a property like cuteness. Geographically speaking, relatively close to the area where the idea and the institution of the fine arts developed, kitsch became a phenomenon and an issue. According to Matei Calinescu (1986), the most cherished story about the birth of the concept presents British tourists buying sketches in a marketplace in Munich in the 1860s, but being misunderstood by German marketplace painters. Kitschen meant to “make new furniture out of old” in Southern German, and it also referred to picking trash. And Verkitschen meant “to make something cheap.” There is also a claim that “playing with mud” would have been one early root of the concept,23 referring to the muddy (fake deep) colors of some marketplace paintings.

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The new concept, which thus had more than one root, overshadowed other European concepts that had already gained some presence in early modernity, where kitsch objects, both in art—as the concept had just become furnished—and the everyday, where mass production increased, were suddenly commonplace. Some of these concepts have survived, like poshlost (Russian, по́шлость), which still today can, for example, point to a politician who “bullshits.” The Spanish cursi can still today be used to refer to bad taste in interior design (during this editing process the apartment of one of the editors was called cursi!). The Yiddish schlock (bad quality) and schmaltz (sentimental, exaggerated) might have developed pretty much in the same regions that fostered the early concept of kitsch, and they might have gained quite a global impact through diaspora and then the Americanization of culture, but they never really made it into concepts used in cultural debates. The French Camelot (cheap and bad quality) might point more to a salesperson now, but it has also been used to refer to kitschy objects—at least before the victory of the concept of kitsch. Eco jokes that kitsch might have made it as a concept following how kitsch had a strong presence in German culture24 (as German culture is kitschy, he hints). But a more serious attempt to speculate about it could point to the very central role of Germany in early twentieth-century modern art. Not coincidentally, the concept was first mentioned in written form, as much as we know it, by the decadent modernist German playwright Franz Wedekind in 1911. “Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque,” he wrote.25 This inaugurates what we call the first wave of kitsch thinking. Arriving on the cultural scene just before the advent of the Second World War, the concept, which had a pre-presence already in, for example, Friedrich Schiller’s discourse about sentimentality and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s reactions to fake antiques on his trip to Venice, Rome and Naples,26 became more than an intuition, reaction or mark of taste. It became a phenomenon on its own—and a very negative one when slurred by the privileged critical mass. The concept did not invite a high-class theoretical take, though, before 1939, when Clement Greenberg published “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in the Partisan Review. Kitsch stood culturally on a steady continental

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European base, as the author, Clement Greenberg, was a white New York snob who had fallen in love with abstract expressionism. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” hardly today looks like a text about kitsch if one reads it carefully. Although Greenberg points out some of the features discussed as kitsch even today, from sentimentality to stereotypical artistic forms of expression which raise the eyebrows of those who share good (modern, highbrow, ethnically white American) taste, he at the same time discusses it (like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s idea of “culture industry,” which saw daylight in 1944)27 as an all-encompassing cultural wave, which also includes even early modern paintings by Ilya Repin and everyday craft, to the extent that today we might also call his article a classic in defining mass culture and popular culture (the difference between these two concepts is maybe mostly value-based, the popular less accentuating the hoard-like nature of the consumers, which many feel makes mass culture an inappropriate word).28 Greenberg’s critique of the unauthentic nature of fake indigenous craft sold for tourists and marketplace art accentuates the authentic, pure nature of the abstract art of his scene as much as the originality of the art made by indigenous people for themselves. Greenberg, an idealist and an elitist, accentuated one point that we also agree with, and that is that kitsch became such an everyday issue that one could talk about it in the way he did, that it was present everywhere.29 Not long after that, many American sociologists revised the constellation by focusing more clearly on what they called “middlebrow,” which meant below “highbrow,” but somehow above “lowbrow”—and this also had its impact on the European discussion, as, for example, Umberto Eco wrote a treatise on the debate for Rivista Pirelli in the early 1960s, just before taking up the kitsch issue.30 As the lowbrow could be plain entertainment, and the highbrow had real aesthetic and artistic aspirations, the middlebrow was about a desire to have an affinity with the highbrow, to be associated with “real art” and to acquire the status (falsely). After defending vaudeville and slapstick film in The Seven Lively Arts (1924), the democratically minded Gilbert Seldes in The Public Arts (1956) mentioned critically the Metropolitan Opera, for instance, as a place that was middlebrow in its safe programming.31 This middlebrow is actually what Pierre Bourdieu discusses critically in his study on the

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middle-­class and upper-class desire to acquire cultural status, Distinction (the French original was published in 1979).32 However, Bourdieu (and most of his followers), weirdly, seems not to get that he is criticizing the bourgeois and not the art world. Kitsch is a word they could have used from time to time when discussing the middlebrow, with an accent on kitsch as pseudo art. In Germany, Richard Egenter wrote about kitsch as the devil’s trick in his Kitsch und Christenleben (1950) in a way that echoed Tertullian’s second-­century taste-wise broader note that theater and sports lured people away from the real thing (i.e., God). Egenter’s “real thing” was also modern art.33 The period that marked only negative views on kitsch and accentuated it as a kind of a stalker of art also produced Ludwig Giesz’s work on the pleasures of kitsch (Kitschgenuss), where self-centered, sentimental self-enjoyment was criticized.34 It was also mentioned critically by many key thinkers of the era, such as, besides Adorno and Horkheimer, Luigi Pareyson (important to note here: Eco’s teacher).35 Herman Broch nailed a feature that connects to Higgins’s comment on how artists of the art scene have been reluctant to use beauty in their works because kitsch has lurked in beauty in various, alluring ways. According to Broch’s 1933 thoughts, kitsch did not imitate the good, as it imitated only the beautiful. His idea that kitsch was the evil in art’s value system had little reflection on kitsch as a pocket with any potential. Broch was also the first to blame romanticism for the development of kitsch.36 Broch’s idea gained wider recognition with the (a little late) kitsch reader of the first wave, Gillo Dorfles’s Kitsch: Antologia del cattivo gusto (1968).37 It is remarkable how much the academic discourse on kitsch changes then. The second wave differs from the first by taking in more notions about everyday life (not just leaning on art) and by not only being negative about the phenomenon. It also marks a growing accent on allying kitsch more with feminine consumer culture than masculine. A conceptual change must have been in the air. One can see it starting already in 1964. Besides the essay “The Structure of Bad Taste” by Umberto Eco, published that year, one key article on our topic was published in the fall of 1964, again in the Partisan Review. Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” essay is a text we often put on the table when discussing today’s gay camp culture or campy attitudes toward

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or applications of today’s most banal forms of mass culture. The original text, which made the concept more widely known and accepted, was about aesthetic objects with a kitschy flavor, like Tiffany lamps, and the taste of the parents of the radicals of the 1960s, mainly bourgeois taste with a female-cultured accent.38 Sontag’s appraisal of the way of enjoying everyday consumer culture through a twofold interpretation, which was gaining more presence in the mainstream at the time (choreographer Yvonne Rainer was so tired of “camp” that she outlined “no camp” in her dance manifesto from 1965), was in a way also a more positive note on kitsch, at least thinking about the way one could enjoy some of it as camp. The same year, Eco published his classical work Apocalypse postponed (Apocalittici e integrati: Comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa), where he wrote art historically about Peanuts, reported on the debates that abbots (like Suger) and monks had about painting as mass communication in churches in medieval times,39 and discussed Superman as a myth. These essays partly followed a path broken by the structuralists. Eco admired Roman Jakobson and the work done in the Prague School of cultural semiotics, where already Jan Mukařovský’s 1936 Aesthetic Function: Norm and Value as Social Facts had analyzed in a democratic way aesthetic functions in both high culture and popular culture,40 but then the French structuralists (whose work Eco found during the translation process of his book into French in 1965) had taken a head start on the Italians. In 1957’s Mythologies, Roland Barthes wrote about popular culture in a new way.41 As a more classical aesthetician, Eco was not interested only in communicative functions and signs but tackled kitsch as a peculiar form of culture that was discussed too critically. He wrote critical notes about kitsch in art, for example, sleazy literature, but was at least a bit positive about some of its everyday aspects and wanted to think that if people enjoyed it, there was no reason to “ban it,” as it was not dangerous. He did not fancy the Canova-like tombs of fascist families at the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan.42 He noted how even Rainer Maria Rilke used kitschy fragments to create great modernist literature43 and went into discussing “wrong” colors for ties and presented a more subtle and understanding attitude toward kitsch, one where kitsch was nothing serious, just culture. At this point, kitsch was a concept widely used about

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all arts, and it still, at least a bit, connoted mass culture more broadly in a fashion resembling the thoughts expressed in Greenberg’s essay. But during the second phase, kitsch slowly became increasingly an issue of visual arts and visual culture only (which had already been the central tenet in the early twentieth century). And Eco’s bad taste was suddenly not just bad art. It was sentimentality (Eco did not call James Bond novels kitsch in his essay on Ian Fleming’s literature),44 something against the “rules” of good taste, and something that borrowed aspects from highbrow that created the reaction that this is kitsch. It was stereotypical, not the innovative aesthetic culture of the consumer society. Kitsch was here better defined than before—being stereotypical, using dead metaphors and allegories, and being a contender to art, which “forced” the art world to somehow react.45 When the second wave came to its end in Matei Calinescu’s and Tomas Kulka’s work, kitsch was already nearly totally a visual phenomenon, and the balance between everyday culture and art as territories for kitsch was closer to being of the same weight (the everyday then took over). Calinescu’s idea historical work made it clear where kitsch stemmed from in 1986, when Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch and Postmodernism was published—and the story even showed how right from the beginning kitsch also had an everyday aspect which was strong, as its etymological root even suggested the creative renovation of furniture, and discussed reactions to everyday art that people bought for their homes. Calinescu also showed how modernism adapted the term for its own use. In a way, one could say nearly appropriated it—as the original concept was more everyday-driven than how it looked at the time of high modernism in the early twentieth century. Right after his work, another East European philosopher, Kulka, published two classics in the discussion, “Kitsch” in 1989 and the book Kitsch and Art (1994). Kulka took up the challenge that Eco had written about in 1964 (i.e., defining kitsch, which Eco said was a sheer impossibility). Kulka mentions a broad array of everyday objects, like tourist kitsch, but the main interest lies in art and works that come close to being legitimate but do not hit the right button. Kulka’s work may be the latest, where a broad use of the concept sometimes pops up. At one point in Kitsch and

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Art, he suddenly discusses (in a Greenbergian fashion) television series as kitsch.46 As a second-wave author, Kulka also attempts to find some positive sides to the phenomenon. He writes, for example, that some of the stuff sold in the marketplaces is well-done, skillful work. Pseudo-artistic issues are at the forefront, like paintings of crying clowns, but postcards enter, too. And especially in Kitsch and Art Kulka discusses kitsch as a sensitivity, which connects to today’s discourse, where, in the aftermath of strong cultural hierarchies and elite aggression toward “worse taste,” what is left is in a sense the properties that raise a feeling of kitschiness. For Kulka, kitsch is about strong emotions, and again, continuing in the phase Eco and the others had started in the 1960s, the stress here, probably following a change in the use of the concept, accentuates female culture a lot more than during the first phase of kitsch theory. The “genderization” of the concept became even clearer later. This is due to the connection of sentimentality, cheesiness, and sugary sensitivities (the two last increasingly defining kitsch in later times) to culture and emotions considered more female. C. E. Emmer points this out well in his study “Kitsch Against Modernity” from 1998, where Emmer relates this to, for example, male feelings of superiority toward female culture.47 But why did kitsch start leaning more toward the feminine, or what was to be thought of as feminine culture? No one knows, it seems. The third wave analyzes this consciously (Emmer counted in). The concept of kitsch also gains formal characteristics, a bit like rules for what is kitsch—not exhaustive, but relatively strong ones. The old pseudo-art extension of kitsch never died out, but the new everyday kitsch experience, which also probably already became more flexible in the early 2000s, become less serious. At the time one could, or this is what we at least remember, start hearing someone say something was a bit “kitschy,” not clearly kitsch or not, which the old way of thinking accentuated. It was suddenly obvious that there were levels of kitschiness and that kitsch was somehow also a contextual issue. After simplified cultural hierarchies, in a world with so many commercial products that sensitivity to differences had probably also grown a lot, kitschiness increasingly gained ground in gold and pink, besides porcelain and plastic. Already the 1990s was a time when kitschy art in Jeff

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Koons’s and Takashi Murakami’s work became present in the contemporary art field (also the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum made a whole career by painting sentimentally and calling his work kitsch48). And although people possibly still recognized and sometimes had in principle the same kind of basic reaction toward kitsch, they did not necessary judge the object or the experience negatively. It is not that people would not have been able to think of it through polarities like good vs. bad, but a new way of seeing kitsch as its own category became the new norm. Robert C. Solomon, in his 2004 book In Defense of Sentimentality,49 attacked the way intellectuals could not accept sentimental emotions. According to Solomon, sentimentality has been a matter of ridicule since the end of the nineteenth century—this is also the moment when Peter Sloterdijk claimed that cynical attitudes took over intellectual culture and the arts in continental Europe,50 if not earlier. The roots, he claims, come from Western rationalist philosophy, where disdain for sentimentality took over, as displaying emotions makes one somewhat incapable of rational thought. According to Solomon, who here also displays a heuristic question about people criticizing the use of kitsch, the reason for fear of kitsch lies in the worry that it might leave them without emotions: “It is rather that sentimentality betrays the cynic, for it is the cynic and not the sentimentalist who cannot abide honest emotion.” Solomon writes that emotion is necessary, and expressing it may be awkward for someone not used to such emotional expressiveness. Solomon also writes that sentimentality has been too often associated with emotional overflow, a sort of “too much,” one could say,51 which connects to kitsch because it has also been called “too beautiful.” And there have been remarks about its aesthetically overflowing nature. But these connotations of “being too much” are the problem, not sentimentality itself, Solomon accentuates. Something can be kitschy just a bit, too. Solomon also takes up the gender issue, and he writes about sentimental literature, that women’s novels were ridiculed for their sentimentality, and how sentimentality became one of the main objects of criticism in the discourse about literary taste: “Not surprisingly, prime targets for such a charge were those same women’s novels—and the emotions they provoked—which were, and still are, dismissed as “trash” by the literary establishment.”52

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Erik Anderson’s “Sailing the Seas of Cheese” (which is republished in this volume) showed in 2010 a curious and positive attitude toward cheesiness, accentuating that cheesy acts are some of the most popular in today’s culture—including also, to some extent kitschy examples like Vegas Elvis (vs. Memphis Elvis), hotel lobbies, and Celine Dion. Anderson sees cheesiness quite as a topic on its own, but we see it as one branch of culture, like camp sensitivity, which has a clear connection to kitsch and overlaps a lot. (Anderson discusses the connection, too.) Although Hello Kitty is kitschy but not cheesy, and many acts in American Idol are cheesy but not something we’d call kitschy, Vegas Elvis, hotel lobbies, and Celine Dion are perfect examples of culture where these somehow converge.53 Anderson claims that one can enjoy kitsch consciously as kitsch, but not cheesiness as cheesiness—but this is the way we used to think of kitsch, too, that it was something that the people who consumed it did not understand. In our intuition, the same has already happened to cheesiness too. It is perfectly possible to say, “I love cheesy music.” It is a sensibility or sensitivity that can be appreciated as much as it can be noted to be what it is. Experiences are often dynamic and include even extremes. One can also love and hate Vegas Elvis at the same time—like one can love and hate dry modernism. Another contemporary classic is Celeste Olalquiaga’s book, The Artificial Kingdom: On Kitsch Experience,54 which inaugurates an analysis of the “aura” of old exotic or glistering knickknacks, showing how much aesthetic value we put on a lot of historical material that we label as kitsch. The reading is postcolonial but not moralizing; more of an understanding of the increase of value these older kitsch objects have gone through. The same kind of rise in value has been happening to old paintings for ages, and now not only kitsch but all consumer culture objects can to some extent become a bit like antiquities, appreciated for whatever their aesthetic is and whatever their role was in the original commercial context. Many other works show a new (not just curious and accepting) and appreciating attitude toward kitsch—and even note how kitschiness is quintessential for some cultural forms that we have traditionally labeled as art with a capital A. Music is sometimes called kitsch (Is there anything more kitschy than Andrea Boccelli’s records?), but we are mainly talking

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about a certain amount of kitschiness in it, not something that we’d see easily and what we’d necessarily react to as kitsch.55 Maddalena Mazzocut-­ Mis’s Il Gonzo Sublime: Dal patetico al kitsch deals with how sentimentality and exaggeration, especially in opera, easily produce an experience of kitsch together with the pompous and pathetic, and emotively appealing music.56 And, although Kulka claimed that a real landscape cannot be kitsch,57 already the mother in Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy’s Egyszerű történet vessző száz oldal—a Márk változat (2014) recalls people talking after the Second World War about sentimentally appealing landscapes as kitschy. Max Ryynänen’s “Kitsch Happens: On the Kitsch Experience of Nature” reminds us that some sunsets look kitschy, even if we know they are real, which should make us ask how much kitsch has also changed our gaze a priori.58 From today’s point of view, it feels weird how grumpy old-time intellectuals, artists, and critics have been so aggressive toward art that has not reached full aesthetic worth in their field—or about sentimentality, like it was something dangerous. It is weird that this kind of tradition of discourse and debasement of other people’s emotions developed into a phenomenon in Western culture. Geographically it is interesting how what is reacted to as kitsch changes when one moves on the map. If one takes the train from (forever boringly modernist) Helsinki, Finland, to Saint Petersburg, Russia, in three hours, there seems to be more kitsch than before—but at the same time, the art scene is immediately one step less accepting of kitsch, maybe following the number of rose paintings and glitter fashion around. Class-wise it is remarkable that working-class culture is not attacked as kitsch, or at least not the classical one. Maybe today’s commerce of fancy cheap objects is a thing of all classes, but if kitsch critics have attacked any class, it is the bourgeois and its taste. From the point of view of everyday life, it is also easy to see how much work there is to be done in understanding everyday kitsch. There is a period of Christmas kitsch that dominates Western culture and today many other cultural spheres, too. Children’s kitsch has become a thing with unicorns, Hello Kitty, and the increased glitter. Once again girls’ culture is at the front, with Barbie princess dresses that have become

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commonplace together even in cultures where gender has not traditionally been very differentiating (e.g., Nordic countries). There is, besides seasonal kitsch and kitsch related to certain phases of growing up, also regional kitsch. The Alps and Lapland produce their own kitsch—from Alpine pints to fur reindeer. The same applies to cities like Venice and Paris, which have their own kitsch, with their own kitsch symbols (like Eiffel Towers), and which are sold not far from the city anymore (if not at airports), and which often are not actually produced in the area, but in Thailand, for example. Anyway, the end of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century have brought to our classes students who say “I love kitsch,” shops openly selling kitsch. New perspectives on, for example, how European forms of kitsch and kitsch thinking have mixed with local culture and thinking, for instance, in Taiwan (Chang Jung-Wei writes about “innocent-­looking” Asian kitsch as a hybrid59), and new ideas on, for example, what kitsch could be, from colorful tropical knickknacks60 to something quintessential for today’s literature in a positive way have popped up in the research scene. In her introduction to Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, Justyna Stępień claims that “postmodern culture” marked a turn in our relationship to kitsch and camp—and she also notes that their position is no longer negative in cultural discourse. She believes that their hard-to-define nature (i.e., the hard-to-define nature of the high and low) has made this possible,61 but this is hard to accept, as even art is virtually impossible to define. Why would it matter that the high and low are not easily definable? Stępień also talks about the way the shallowness of the concepts and the change in their nature have made artists interested in finding inspiration in them, which might be true. Is this what haunts today’s art scene, where kitsch is commonplace—if not in political art or activist art, then at least in the art market, more than ever?

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2 The Artworld Has Gone Kitsch The art world has gone kitsch. It’s time to accept it. At this moment, we can’t but think of that great anti-kitsch apostle named Clement Greenberg and guess how disgusted he must feel in his grave with today’s massive colorful, candy-flavored and easily digestible art. As of today, kitsch is everywhere: from high art to low art, from the established to the emerging, from big names to unknown practitioners, and from mainstream New York to emerging Mumbai. Just think of Damien Hirst and Yayoi Kusama’s gorgeous dots, Jeff Koons’s adorable puppies, and KAWS’ nostalgic Smurfs that travel the globe looking to please millions of spectators. Whether this is good or bad is not our mission: we are not moralists. We rather want to understand how and why this has happened. If anything, the modern avant-garde feared producing kitsch. But the formation of the avant-garde, according to David Cottington, went hand-in-hand with the rise of commercialized popular culture.62 We can only deduce that the relationship was always somewhat convoluted. In a way, kitsch not only reflects our sensitive zeitgeist, but we would boldly go where no theorist has gone before and state that the art world has been the trendsetter for many a kitsch in modern and contemporary culture. After all, we are small, cute, and tiny. According to the recently released Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report 2022 referring to the total global art and antique market, aggregate sales in 2021 reached an estimated $65.1 billion.63 The well-known Belgian investment banker and collector Alain Servais reminded us of our insignificance in an email in which he compared the marginal art market to the pet food industry, which in 2020 totaled $102.6 billion!64 But being small has many advantages. One is that we function as a laboratory, an experimentation cube. And later other realms like advertising, design, fashion, architecture, film, and television copy it on a much grander scale. The art world functions as a kind of Trojan horse. We can conceive the weirdest, most daring, oneiric, utopian, or malefic worlds, but we rarely get maligned for that. The famous 1992 television moment of Sinead O’Connor destroying a photo of Pope John Paul II that ruined her

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reputation and career forever is hardly imaginable in the art world because we don’t have by far the same global audiences and following. So, hardly anyone was willing to destroy the reputations of artists like Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama, Kehinde Wiley, Jeff Koons, and Gerhard Richter, to mention a few, when they put on their high heels on the kitsch high art catwalk. On the contrary, what happened was that mega galleries, top collectors like Eli Broad, Mera and Don Rubell, François Pinault, Bernard Arnault, Dakis Joannou, and other high-net-­ worth individuals like Steve Cohen and Daniel S. Loeb, auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and museums like Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the New Museum, Tate Modern, the Louis Vuitton Foundation and the DESTE Foundation embraced the new pop, or neo pop, enthusiastically, starting a global trend. This herd attitude is perfectly understandable because, according to sociologist and arts writer Sarah Thornton, the art world loves what’s not conventional yet is at the same time steeped in conformism.65 What Danto candidly called the art world and what George Dickie described in his institutional theory of art—the guiding impact of theoretical thinking and art history and the institutions and communities that can distinguish between art and non-art—doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge it.66 Oops. Damien Hirst once poignantly said, “I make kitsch art, but I can get away with it!” Has this omnipresence of kitsch produced a division or rift inside the art world during these decades? Is or has there been an anti-kitsch movement? Not really. Or if it existed, it has not been very successful. British scholar and art critic Julian Stallabrass was among the first to attack today’s New World Order spectacular and easy art in High Art Lite (1999) and especially in Art Incorporated (2004): the dumbing down of art reduced it to the level of any other consumer product. “The remarkable feature of this scenario,” wrote Stallabrass, “is the convergence between academic interpretations of art and those more populist writings that recommend the untroubled enjoyment of beauty.”67 Now, we think that more than an anti-kitsch camp, we must acknowledge the absolute loss of power of art criticism in today’s art ecosystem and its zero impact on the art market. It’s what Hall Foster called the “post-critical” condition of art criticism: “And today there is little space

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for critique even in the universities and the museums. Bullied by conservative commentators, most academics no longer stress the importance of critical thinking for an engaged citizenry. Most curators, dependent on corporate sponsors, no longer promote the critical debate once deemed essential to the public reception of advanced art.”68 We are acutely aware that the art world represents everything kitsch is not. Remember, the nascent avant-garde was extremely iconoclastic! Or at least that’s what we always thought until recently. So, the question would be twofold: how has it been possible for kitsch to infiltrate the sophisticated high art realm, and secondly, how has it gone global? The first question merits a rather elaborate longue durée or historical perspective. Thus, we will address the second question first, as the answer should be shorter. We will look at the key artistic agents and the public. Postmodernism’s eclecticism had securely paved the path for the advent of kitsch since at least the beginning of the 1990s. We prefer to locate ourselves historically, choosing the pivotal year of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. While neoliberalism was already put in practice as a dry run in Pinochet’s Chile in 1973 by Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” theory of economics, Ronald Reagan brought the neoliberal doctrine home in the 1980s. Around that same time, Margaret Thatcher implemented it in the United Kingdom. It was precisely 1989 when neoliberalism or neocapitalism with Francis Fukuyama’s benediction, went global and conquered the confines of the Earth.69 This was the time of the new figuration in painting, with among others David Salle, Eric Fischl, Miquel Barceló, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Julian Schnabel, but also the rise of wunderkind Jean-Michel Basquiat and graffiti artist Keith Haring. In this period, Jeffrey Deitch joined Citibank to head up the art advisory program to cater to this new world that neoliberalism was opening—a world of fresh money that would be served fresh art.70 Keith Haring achieved rapid recognition with his recognizable rhythmic doodles of large hearts, barking dogs, and flying saucers that took him to participate at documenta. In 1986, Haring opened the Pop Shop, a store where he sold T-shirts, toys, posters, buttons, and magnets bearing his creations and allowing people to buy his products at low cost. In this period, Richard Prince also began to exhibit his famous Cowboys series: a rephotographed Marlboro

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man from a cigarette ad framed like high art. Here Prince recurred to a recognizable symbol of American culture that embodied individuality, adventure, and liberty. And, there is, of course, Jeff Koons and his Banality series: artworks made from ceramics, porcelain, and painted wood, among which Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), featuring the pop star with his pet chimpanzee, besides other icons of American mass culture, like stainless-steel flowers and rabbits. While having a clear kitsch aspect with its gold and shiny colors, it received ambivalent critiques. The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “He [Koons] may be the definitive artist of this moment, and that makes me sickest. I’m interested in my response, which includes excitement and helpless pleasure along with alienation and disgust … I love it, and pardon me while I throw up.”71 We find an early critic of the growing art market, and art became a commodity in Robert Hughes. His classic article “Art and Money” (appearing in Time on November 27, 1989) signaled the madness of rising prices and the proliferation of bad and speculative art.72 He concluded that the art world takeover by auction houses and large dealers at the expense of museums was inevitable. The inexorable march of kitsch would become global in the 1990s, with neoliberalism and its global markets, large-scale privatizations, and government deregulations. New players and emerging economies in India, China, Brazil, Russia, and the Middle East entered the scene. Everybody wanted to be present and wanted a piece of the cake. Globalization also brought with it an expanded idea of culture in the form, on the one hand, of global mass-distributed pop culture through movies, songs, books, and social media, and on the other hand, a more reduced high art culture through blockbuster museum exhibits, art fairs, biennials, auction houses, and mega galleries. Many products became global, efficient, homogenized, colorful, predictable, good-looking, and affirmative.73 But how did we arrive at this nice, gentle kitsch art that created a global boom? Art became extremely popular at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s: the heyday of neoliberalism. In the 1970s and 1980s, the art world was still small, intimate, and straightaway elitist. But with globalization lifestyle magazines, television channels and radios, and even traditional newspapers regularly reported on auction sales records, art fairs and

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biennials, blockbuster exhibitions, and celebrity artists. Isabelle Graw said, “Initially, this popularity of fine art in the media was based on the assumption by publishers that it was a popular subject. The huge increases in visitor numbers (achieved, incidentally, only by blockbuster exhibitions) were taken as a sign of an increased cultural significance.”74 And in particular, “Parties, dinner invitations, drinks and excess, fashionable scenes, eccentric characters, but also cultivation and connoisseurship, all contributed to the image of an attractive milieu that offered the additional promise or prospect of inclusion.”75 This high-voltage media attention contributed to the idea that art was trendy and that collecting art enhanced one’s status or social capital, as Pierre Bourdieu would have argued, offering a shortcut on the social ladder. Let’s hear it from mega-collector Charles Saatchi then: “However suspect their motivation [collectors], however social-climbing their agenda, however vacuous their interest in decorating their walls, I am beguiled by the fact that rich folk everywhere now choose to collect contemporary art rather than racehorses, vintage cars, jewelry, or yachts. Without them, the art world would be run by the State, in a utopian world of apparatchik-approved, Culture Ministry–sanctioned art.”76 According to Georgina Adam, an additional element explaining how art evolved from a modest market in the 1950s and 1960s to a sophisticated global market in the 2000s is its connection to the financial markets, which boosted the idea that art turned into some kind of big investment industry. “Until about ten years ago,” says London dealer Stéphane Custot, “modern and contemporary art collectors were mainly made of art enthusiasts and amateurs, they had a real passion, spending their money on what they liked, and they collected in order to simply enjoy the work in their home environment. This kind of client still exists, thankfully, but today you have to work with an increasing number of art funds or speculators buying art for investment.”77 It is precisely this volatile mix of lack of knowledge, lack of time, and art considered as an investment asset that makes the collections of these new collectors look similar but also very kitsch. Why? Because it has produced a crazy demand for a very limited number of star artists that produce easygoing, simple, and often colorful, spectacular artworks that flatter the eyes without needing any art historical knowledge. Is this good? Is this bad? It simply is.

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Now, was it that different from the past? Wasn’t the entente cordiale between the artist, the dealer, and the collector pushing the art market forward? And didn’t history’s major or most successful art movements revolve around these three artistic agents? This is what we want to explain now: how most art movements that achieved international or global status (impressionism, pop art, and neo pop) offered collectors easy, comforting, digestible visions that didn’t challenge their lifestyle in any critical way and that, as the twentieth century progressed, drifted away toward the soothing realms of kitsch. Today, academia is not kind to the real protagonists of art history. We get it. Doing so would entail the acknowledgment of how the forces of the art market truly shaped the progression of art and decided in each epoch what would triumph and what not! After all, art history is a story written post-event, which, as Hayden White would argue, adopts a verbal structure in the form of a narrative discourse that responds to the perspective of the author and the way they select, classify, and interpret the events.78 And that this is not very dissimilar to what happens with fiction. In other words: (art) historical thinking applies certain narrative strategies that conform to the ideological posture of the author. Whether we look at an art historical icon like Gombrich’s The Story of Art or a more recent collective endeavor by the October band of Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, et al. like Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, there is simply no room for the pivotal role performed by the artist-as-entrepreneur, the dealer, and the collector. We’re still stuck with wonderful morose, naïf, and kitsch academic interpretations of the past that revolve around old-fashioned dichotomies of art history versus the art market: “disinterestedness” versus commodification. So, most art histories keep shying away from the socio-economic frame in which artworks were produced because the idea of art as a commodity is still very conflicting and “unsexy.” We prefer to create biased histories in which, for example, an art critic like Clement Greenberg becomes the pope that made abstract expressionism triumph while we all (should) know by now that the real mastermind behind this international success was the collector and gallerist Leo Castelli. Charles S. Moffett offered a wise remark when he affirmed that “the evolution of art seldom describes the smooth trajectory that art

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historians, critics, and the public often attempt to impose on modern art in the effort to understand it and predict its course.”79 Honestly, once we have analyzed the history of the art market and its institutional systems, we can’t but conclude that the role of academics, art historians, curators, museum directors, and especially art critics have been until very recently of a very anti-artistic nature that has obstinately obstructed the advancement and progress of art.80 You only have to look at the fate of some of today’s considered master pieces like the unattributed The Nike of Samothrace (295–287 BC), The Birth of Venus (1484) by Sandro Botticelli, Mona Lisa (1503–06) by Leonardo da Vinci, Naked Maja (1797–1800) by Francisco de Goya, Luncheon on the Grass (1863) by Édouard Manet, Sunflowers (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso, Nighthawks (1942) by Edward Hopper, or Autumn Rhythm (1950) by Jackson Pollock, to mention a few, to confirm how museum directors, academicians, art critics, and curators considered these works inferior for a very long time. But let’s get back on track now we have pointed out this shocking inconsistency in the annals of art history. Although we want to focus in our narrative on the modern and contemporary art movements that achieved international “blockbuster” status, it’s mandatory to look a little further in time to another huge precursor in terms of massive market success: Realist painting in the Baroque between 1580 and 1650 in the Dutch Republic. Elizabeth Alice Honig signaled the advent of an art market in early modern Antwerp around 1470 with the naissance of capitalism. “This was an age,” recalls Alice Honig, “when commerce overflowed the boundaries of the marketplace and penetrated all aspects of life: the market, and its pictorial representation, were crucial grounds for testing how the new ideas could be made to fit into what seemed reasonable patterns of belief and behavior.”81 In this new society, the merchant or intermediary became the central figure in a capitalist economy with a new moral order that would slowly and progressively make profit, accumulation, and wealth socially acceptable. It was also important that painters no longer relied on the church and other state or municipal commissions: they had to compete in the market and develop selling strategies. The artist became the primary dealer of his work, slowly creating a very competitive market in which the

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artist applied sophisticated strategies of “specialization, waged labor” and “efficiently increased production” to make ends meet.82 Soon Antwerp and the southern lowlands lost their economic, artistic and financial primacy to Amsterdam due to the persisting Spanish occupation, the sea blockades, and a newly imposed tax by the Spanish authorities that caused many middle-class entrepreneurs, among which were many artists, teachers, and craftsmen, to flee to the northern lowlands.83 In this more tolerant religious climate that favored entrepreneurship, publishing, and artistic development, the market developed a very sophisticated genre specialization.84 The new patrons were merchants, bankers, and burghers, who started commissioning portraits and genre paintings, landscapes, and still lifes. Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet saw the emergence of one of the first truly modern art markets with buyers and sellers.85 So much so that the highly organized Dutch market and the trade in Netherlandish pictures soon overflowed the local European markets in alarming quantities. Ad van der Woude has argued that in the seventeenth century, there were around five million paintings in the Republic. Between 1580 and 1800, the number rose to 18 million paintings in Dutch households.86 Not only prosperous citizens but even peasants had several artworks hanging on the walls of their houses. What is now pertinent to our argument is that, unlike the elitist sophisticated Italian Renaissance painting with its extremely iconological program, these realist paintings that were bought in massive quantities both by rich merchants and bankers, but also by less-accommodated burghers and peasants, depicted realist scenes that were easy to grasp for the common citizen because they responded to and reflected their more realistic tastes and ambitions. So, we can rightly argue that the first massive art movement in history that had international resonance, Dutch Realism, represented scenes that were acceptable and easy to understand for the common citizen. It wasn’t kitsch, but they were, with Kulka, instantly and effortlessly identifiable objects or themes that did not substantially alter their beliefs or norms. And this is a key factor that all movements shared, as we shall see, that became internationally acclaimed: their effortless identification. We could speak of this early phase of “proto-kitsch.” We don’t have the full production capacity of the industrial age yet. But the sophisticated specialization by genre made it possible for dealers to supply both the

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higher and lower end of the market. Dealers demanded original artworks, but even more so cheap copies. According to Honig, the markets for cheap art had expanded dramatically and provided bigger profits.87 Dealers like “Balkeneynde, Blaeuw, Doeck, Volmarijn and Meyeringh made their living by buying and commissioning inexpensive paintings chiefly by obscure artists, some of whom probably sat for them in “the galley.”88 With this sudden shift from religious, mythological and illustrious heroes toward the quotidian, Hegel expressed his surprise: “No other people would have thought of creating artworks whose content were objects in appearance so banal and common like those that turn up in their paintings.”89 It’s precisely this want or glorification of the quotidian that these popular movements have in common (Image 1).

Image 1  Johannes Vermeer, “The Milkmaid”, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2014, C-Print. (Photo Courtesy Bruce Marshall (Belfast))

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If we believe Peter Watson, one of the main reasons for the advent of the modern art market is the rise of the impressionists in France, as “they revolted against the official salon and spawned an alternative system for selling their works.”90 And while we now accept impressionism as one of the most successful avant-garde movements in art history, if we consider the fame of their members and, especially, the staggering prices they keep commanding at auction sales today, their beginnings were harsh and unpromising. Claude Monet wrote in 1924, two years after Paul Durand-Ruel’s death, “Without Durand-Ruel, we would have died of hunger, all us impressionists. We owe him everything. He was stubborn and relentless, risking bankruptcy a dozen times in order to support us.”91 Derided by art critics and scolded as “lunatics,” their fuzzy representations of modern life were ridiculed, vilified, and abused. And all these vicious and sarcastic attacks were not only motivated because the impressionist canvases were unfinished, which was a capital sin in the eyes of the academicians who ruled the official Paris Salon, but also because their insignificant landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, and genre paintings had nothing heroic or official about them, and depicted not a trace of a battle, a national hero, a saint, or a Greek god. “Landscapes, portraits, and still lifes were all thought inferior,” recalled Ross King, “because unlike history paintings, they could not impart moral precepts to the spectator–and the teaching of moral lessons was, for most members of the Académie, the whole point of a work of art.”92 The official French salon between 1860 and 1880 was fiercely ruled by a small mobster of academicians under the leadership of the fashionable painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, whose paintings commanded record prices. To give you a more precise idea of Meissonier’s rockstar status, in 1860 he was commissioned to make a painting about Napoleon’s last days as Emperor by the banker Gaston Delahante for 85,000 francs.93 That was, as we can see from the prices annotated by Paul Durand-Ruel, 40 to 80 times what impressionist painters like Monet and Cassatt would fetch in the late 1870s.94 The French Academy of Fine Arts (1648) privileged history painting as the noblest form of art, the yearly salon awarded medals and commissions to the best practitioners, and the extraordinary prize of the Prix de

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Rome was the icing on the cake: a five-year fellowship to study art in Rome. Unlike Belgium, The Netherlands, and Great Britain, where the national academies hadn’t achieved a prominent position vis-à-vis the art market. In France, there was no life outside the academy and its rigid institutional system. Therefore, the impressionists with masochistic fervor tried again and again to access the official Salon because this was the only platform that could meet their middle-class bourgeois expectations and needs. The Académie even went so far as to display an anti-market mentality by prohibiting the participation of their members in commercial selling shows outside the official salon. To the academicians and art critics of the time, the fleeting, transitory, and unfinished experiments of Manet, Monet, and Degas, which had started in the 1860s, were considered no more than cheesy and unworthy. Deeply steeped in academic painting, the civil servants of the French state, the aristocracy, and even the new bourgeoisie squarely rejected the unfinished canvases by the impressionists. For these nouveau-riche collectors, the new men of business and industry, “the aristocratic domain of connoisseurship was unobtainable to them, they were said to pursue the most sensational and the most decorated artists of the Salon, and to prefer the most sentimental narratives and the most photographic styles of depiction possible.”95 The taste of the time of the public, the French collectors, and the art critics wasn’t ready for the en plein air revolution. According to Durand-Ruel, it took the impressionists more than 20 years to succeed. The economist William D. Grampp offered a very enlightened interpretation. He said, “Impressionism might have taken even longer to succeed if the established painters had allowed it to be shown in their salons. By excluding it, the prices of Impressionist paintings were reduced, and more may have been bought as a consequence.”96 Only a few members of French society, like the writer Stéphane Mallarmé, were aware of its radicality: “We must first affirm that impressionism is the principal and real movement of contemporary painting.”97 The fact is that impressionism only globally succeeded when Durand-­ Ruel achieved a breakthrough in 1886 in America. New American rich like Henry O. Havemeyer, Cyrus Lawrence, A. W. Kingman, Erwin Davis, William H. Fuller, Albert Spencer, James Sutton, and Berthe Honoré Potter Palmer took a huge interest in the fresh approach and

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expressiveness of these “impressions” that provided a new iconography of modern life. The commercial and industrial changes in the United States that followed the Civil War, argued Peter Watson, made America the strongest economy and its elite one of the instigators of the modern art market.98 For Americans with their high incomes, “the prices of the impressionist paintings were relatively low” compared to the prices of Old Masters,99 imposed with an iron fist by Joseph “Joe” Duveen, the most successful dealer in Old Master paintings, with the inestimable support of expert certificates signed by the art historian-dealer Bernard Berenson.100 This is also confirmed by Robert Jensen, who stated that Americans came to the rescue of Parisian modernists by “being among the first to buy their art, and to buy it for high prices and in volume” and then ceding their “collections to the new American museums.”101 And this is how the rise of the impressionist Weltanschauung came about. Yet, what was equally important was that these American buyers lacked the art historical knowledge (and at the same time the prejudices) of French collectors, greeting the reception of the French impressionists largely uncritically. They could admire the colorful impressionists with candid eyes and easily relate to the impressions and sensations of the scenes of modern life depicted on their canvases. As Peter Watson keenly argued: “unlike the [French] aristocracy, they did not inherit collections; instead, they formed them.”102 The style of the impressionists suited the simple tastes of these new American elites who were more comfortable with the present than the past and eager to find and buy European novelties. Many of these paintings, stated Paul Smith rightfully, “not only expressed but also helped consolidate the identity of that [bourgeois] class and its ideologies of leisure, conspicuous consumption, spontaneity, and individualism.”103 And most important, impressionist painting didn’t require a large investment in taste to be valued and bought. We have discussed how Americans bought impressionists and helped to collapse the French Salon system while bringing about the new commercial art system at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1950s, Europeans would first buy American Expressionism and, above all, pop art, that new massive art movement that would succeed impressionism in achieving international status. At this point of our narrative, we should

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briefly analyze the relationship between abstract expressionism and pop art, as it delineates once again the picture frame for how collectors determine the kind of art that sells and finally triumphs in each epoch, even if art historians afterward decide its fate in the canon. We should recall that provincial America was against modern art. While a small number of its elites had bought the gorgeous and colorful images of the French impressionists, what came after was much harder to bear for their candid eyes: The Armory Show in 1913.104 That was a true punch in the eye, whose lids didn’t open again until the Second World War ended. Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Suprematism, Surrealism, and Duchamp’s naked nude were too radical to a puritan and conservative American public and especially to the American art critics that manifested themselves loudly against the “lunatics” (again) of modern art. This time, only a shy part of the elite could accept this European madness. Later came Duchamp’s urinoir, Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme gallery, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s MoMA, and Peggy Guggenheim’s The Art of This Century gallery, but almost to no avail. Three and a half decades later, Katherine S. Dreier still admired the ground-breaking Armory Show: “What happened that this exhibition would have made such a lasting impression?”105 The avant-garde Arthur Jerome Eddy collection was rejected by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1920 and disbanded. And the same fiasco happened to the impressive John Quinn collection of Picasso, Matisse, Picabia, and Brancusi artwork auctioned off in 1927, fetching very low prices. Duchamp even bought a couple of Brancusi works at a bargain price. It still took America 50 years to accept Cubism! But was America ready for abstract expressionism? The American elites weren’t. The most venerable art institutions like MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney were not interested. The prophet of modern art, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., considered abstract expressionism third-rate compared to the European avant-garde of Picasso and Cubism. Peggy Guggenheim had given Jackson Pollock his first show in 1942 but hadn’t sold a sou.106 “Pop art,” according to Sophie Burnham, “rocketed to success so quickly in the early 1960s, and to such enthusiastic acclaim, in contrast to the slow, labored drag of abstract expressionism.”107

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In the 1940s and 50s, a small group of dealers promoted abstract expressionism, but neither collectors nor institutions gravitated around the movement. Art historians like to attribute the late success of abstract expressionism to art critic Clem Greenberg, but the historical facts say otherwise. The polemic Bernard Berenson of contemporary art, Greenberg wrote for minoritarian magazines like Partisan Review. Although he influenced some dealers like Sam Kootz, Sidney Janis, and even Leo Castelli, all of whom acknowledged he had “a great eye,” his writings, curating, and dark dealings with paintings that were given to him as gifts or that he took from an artist at their studio, had little to no impact on the overall sales and acceptance of the movement among the American elites. Another creative response from the art historical corner comes from the supposed connection between abstract expressionism, Nelson Rockefeller, the CIA, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its international promotion as a weapon in the Cold War against Soviet socialist realism. While this is certainly true, as Serge Guilbaut and Frances Stonor Saunders have admirably articulated, American collectors and leading art institutions were still not impressed.108 It was not until the end of the 1960s when abstract expressionism was retreating and the prices had already soared that serious institutions like MoMA, the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan, and the Guggenheim started to collect them. American collectors weren’t into Pollock, Newman, and Rothko and neither were art critics in the daily press. They didn’t want to read a manifesto by its exegete to appreciate the sublime of their strokes! So, how or why did abstract expressionism finally succeed in having albeit a minority but still international resonance in the art world that has lasted until today? There are two main reasons. Let’s start with the most conflicting but fascinating one that would make the very pope of anti-­ kitsch Greenberg shiver in his grave: between 1946 and 1955 it was mainly “women who bought abstract art, especially expressive abstraction, while men preferred representational art in the form of landscapes and figuration.”109 Titia Hulst’s collected data of 19,620 sales transactions between 1946 and 1969 leave no doubt about it. Women preferred Pollock, Rothko, and Newman because “they purchased art for decorative purposes,” with

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the number of purchases peaking from 1951–1954, which “corresponds to the boom in housing construction in the same period” in the United States.110 Albeit the “macho” rhetoric by Clem Greenberg and Harald Rosenberg, Hulst painstakingly reveals that the “female preference for abstract art that is revealed by the data calls into question the discourse that emphasized the masculinity of the abstract expressionist painters, their works, and their audience.”111 Now it seems that Pollock and other abstract expressionism members’ works were bought by women because they were considered decorative, and men preferred figuration! Secondly, abstract expressionism achieved international notoriety only because of Leo Castelli and his international network in Europe that included the-who’s-who of the continent: the Venice Biennale, the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery, Pontus Hulten’s Moderna Museet, Edi de Wilde’s Stedelijk Museum, Harald Szeemann’s Kunsthalle Bern, Gian Enzo Sperone Gallery, Rudolf Zwirner Gallery, Peter Ludwig, Guiseppe Panza di Biumo, and many, many others.112 When all these institutions started to buy up those large paintings by the new American expressionists in the 1960s, which were very cheap in comparison to European avant-garde masters like Picasso, Braque, and Mondrian, the tables turned. American institutions and collectors tried to catch up, but it was too late. The problem was that the paintings, as Sophy Burnham recalled, “didn’t speak for themselves” and the “feeling ran especially high among the general public, which did not like the work at all.”113 And we should add: neither did American collectors buy into it. The art was simply too sublime, too abstract. It didn’t speak to people requiring the services of an art critic like Greenberg or Rosenberg to be understood. And this was not the case with pop art, which from day one became an international movement under the guidance of the savvy operator Leo Castelli, the “Svengali of pop” according to The New York Times. What was so different now for pop art to become such a massive movement? Robert “Bob” Scull, one of the major collectors together with Emily Tremaine in the 1960s and 1970s, is a perfect example: taxi fleet owner Scull had been collecting abstract expressionism paintings for years with little media presence. Now pop art was quickly turning him into a media icon.

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Many critics were disgusted with the advent of pop art in the 1960s. “Greenberg,” wrote Alice Goldfarb Marquis, “ignored it as too kitschy for the moment.”114 Harald Rosenberg considered pop art boring. Barbara Rose was alarmed by the low-level discourse about it and “the irony that the public really does love it: they look at it, talk about it, enjoy it as they never have abstract painting.”115 And that was, and still is, the whole point for an art movement to become successful internationally: it has to be easy to understand for collectors and the public in general. And pop art then (like neo pop today) required no critics. It was the most genuine American movement that expressed the sophisticated emerging American consumer society. And the media loved it focusing, according to Goldfarb Marquis, “on the antics of the artists, the dress and demeanor of the celebrities who attended exhibitions, and speculation who was buying this art and how much they would pay.”116 Art critics became irrelevant, and their art theories were too. Rothko complained about pop art being “facile, easy to understand, and even easier to buy.”117 This time, both American and European collectors jumped immediately onto the bandwagon of Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and the like. Collector and insurance broker Leon Kraushar described why pop art was so appealing: “It was a timely and aggressive image that spoke directly to me about things I understood. The paintings of this school are today. The expression is completely American, with no apologies to the European past. This is my art, the only work being today that has meaning to me.”118 The movement peaked on October 18, 1973 at the Sotheby Parke Bernet auction. Works by Johns, Rauschenberg, and Warhol that Scull had bought ten years prior for $900 now sold for between $90,000 and $135,000.119 Bob’s investment had yielded unprecedented profits. Art was cool, provided social acceptance and was profitable. Art started to become a business. And the new businessman-collector had scant knowledge of art. He pursued, stated Goldfarb Marquis, “art that people are talking about, art that is accessible in non-art terms: a decorative design or innovative technique, familiar images or an easily recognized style.”120 And isn’t today’s neo pop quite similar in spirit? And what about the collectors?

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If Leo Castelli assumed the central role in the Americanization of the international art scene with his pop artists, the mega-dealers Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace, and Hauser and Wirth are globalizing today’s art scene by building vast galleries in different continents and promoting a select number of blue-chip artists. The dealer has become, as much as their artists, a prestigious brand. “The first,” says Shnayerson about Larry Gagosian, “to use that brand to maximize prices for buyers who trusted it more—much more—than the art itself.”121 Mega dealers don’t care if they sell their clients a sophisticated Tomma Abts or Joan Mitchell or a garish Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons; they’re there to fulfill the wishes of their clients. “Ultimately,” says Shnayerson wisely, “the collector might buy the dealer’s brand more readily than the artist’s.”122 “And possibly,” argues Georgina Adam, “one of the main reproaches leveled against today’s art market, particularly the higher-end segment, is that of over-production, with some well-known artists locked into producing more and more—often similar—works, just to satisfy the demands of all these events.”123 Originality is no longer at play, according to art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné, “You can only get so much out of a single artist, and the market wants repetition rather than innovation.”124 In the end, adds Shnayerson, the mega-galleries end up “taming the art and the artists”125 as their huge spaces need to be filled one way or another and not every artist has the ability to stand the pressure of producing good art in short periods of time. This brings us to the collectors that fuel the system. As Adam reminds us, these new non-connoisseur buyers “compete for a shrinking supply of name-branded artists, [while] the art market has become highly concentrated at the top.”126 High-net-worth individuals compete for the works of a small group of creators, including neo-pop artists Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama, Yoshitomo Nara, Banksy, KAWS, and Gerhard Richter. In other words: easy, safe, and colorful blue-chip or branded artists. And, we should add to this list several deceased stars like Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to mention a few, whose rocketing auction house prices confer on the buyer both

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celebrity and safety. “Artworks and branded goods,” writes Isabelle Graw, “both shape identity, then acting as central bearers of meaning for selfpositioning and outward demarcation.”127 “As of this moment in June 2017,” writes Michael Shnayerson in his sharp bestseller Boom: Mad Money, Mega dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art, “Jose Mugrabi and his sons reputedly owned more than 800 Warhols.”128 It shouldn’t surprise us that this former textile entrepreneur and a perfect example of the collector-speculator hoards branded and colorful Warhols! (Image 2). This brings about repetition, and kitsch is precisely based on repetition to meet the needs of the working classes in the modern city. Think now of how the show Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011 was exhibited at all Gagosian’s locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, with paintings being lent by 150 collectors from 20 countries. How Gerhard Richter’s colorful and easily recognizable abstract paintings became the “international house style” in any respectable collector’s penthouse and how when his

Image 2  Jeff Koons, “Tulips,” The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, 2016. (Photo Courtesy Robert Koo (Pasadena))

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“paintings come up for sale at auction collectors,” according to Doug Woodham, “are willing to pay more for red and blue over green and orange.”129 How Yayoi Kusama started using many studio assistants to cover the world with her red and white polka dots creating infinity rooms, like the one at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, has become a “major tourist attraction and a destination of choice for selfies.”130 How Jeff Koons’ Puppy, the small white glazed porcelain artwork released in 1998 in an edition of 3000, became a cozy decorative item among small and big collectors urbi et orbi. Isabelle Graw said of Koons, “The regressive, if not infantilizing vocabulary of his new sculptures, too, has largely lost its earlier disruptive potential. Koons’s endless preaching of reconciliation and self-confidence started to fit the prevailing idealistic-populist mood in a booming art market.”131 And Japanese superstar Takashi Murakami’s pop images of anime and manga shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2007, where he mixed visual arts, graphic design, fashion, and animation, and even set up a mini pop-up Louis Vuitton store in the exhibition. Unlike Western art, his “superflat” theory emphasizes the surface and the use of flat planes of color.132 His sexualized animated girls and his signature smiling flowers are glossy and cute. It’s a familiar global iconography based on recognizable subjects and images that lack complexity, in which kitsch, be it formally, aesthetically, or conceptually, assumes a key role. Flashy dots, balloons, and ballerinas represent the twenty-first-century neoliberal information society that imposes easy and legible narratives. We could mention many more famous artists like Elizabeth Peyton with her soft kitschy society portraits, Peter Doig and his impressionistic landscapes, or British-Nigerian Chris Ofili and his signature paintings with glitter, resin, and elephant dung. But we also find many lesser-known artists that have recourse to glossy and colorful pop aesthetics, confirming that kitsch has become a vital element in the four corners of the globe. Puerto Rican Melvin Martínez is a wonderful example. This Caribbean Jackson Pollock makes magnificent, passionate, bold, aggressive, and highly coloristic drippings with glitter, confetti, and beads (Image 3). Finnish artist Timo Vaittinen conceives highly hypnotical, kitschy, and spiritual images, like Meeting of the Spirits (2011), with psychedelic colors that speak to eternity and permanence,

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Image 3  Melvin Martínez, “Il Giardino Florentino”, 2014–2016, collage on canvas, 96″ × 180″/245 × 460cm. (Courtesy of the artist (San Juan, P.R.))

life and death. The wonderful installation Remembering a Brave New World (2020) by Indian artist Chila Kumari Singh Burman transformed the front of Tate Britain with a mix of Hindu mythology, Bollywood imagery, and pop culture with colorful neon, vinyl, and bling with which she addresses complex topics of colonial history and British imperialism. The pink and blue impressionist landscapes by Chinese artist Huang Yuxing also conform to this prevalence for nice images that use strong colors (red, pink, yellow, and blue) and familiar forms to produce identifiable and digestible images. In short: Art that can both be associated with high and low culture, art that is colorful and conforms to the tastes of the new “un-­arty” business people and hedge-funders, art that is provocative and spectacular, art that reflects the spirit of today. Marc Spiegler, Art Basel’s director, asked himself in 2015 whether the connoisseur collector was a dying breed, given the fact that collectors know much less about art today and are not spending time in galleries anymore: “The impression is that people are buying art not with their eyes but with their ears—following trends, rumors, a hot name. They have no idea what the work looks like; they just know that this is the artist to buy.”133 “The new wealthy and new collectors,” affirmed Spiegler,

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“have completely different mindsets from the old ones. They are actively running hedge funds and start-ups. […] They are really wealthy, but also really, really busy. […] These people move in packs. And the only thing that connects them is the fact that they are all super-wealthy. And thus, their collections often look very similar to each other.”134 A similar idea was conveyed by Don Thompson, author of the bestseller The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. Talking about the insecurity of today’s buyers in contemporary art he reminded us that, “for the wealthy, time is their scarcest resource. They are not willing to spend the time required to educate themselves to the point of overcoming insecurity. So, very often, the way the purchase decision for contemporary art is made is not just about art, but about minimizing that insecurity.”135 And we totally understand it. This idea of mass-produced artworks stemming from a very select number of brand artists is further enhanced by the fact that, according to Georgina Adam, “the art market seems to be growing ever closer to the luxury goods industry, increasingly producing works ‘made for the market’.”136 Here, let’s recall the successful collaborations of Murakami, Hirst, and Koons designing expensive bags for Louis Vuitton. Regarding Damien Hirst’s exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, which resembled a new product launch, Adam asked herself: “If this is the way art is going—with no attempt to create anything new, innovative, or challenging, but rather just making a marketable product—then what is the point of curation, scholarship, art criticism or art history?”137 It’s difficult to create anything original at this point, so originality can’t be a marker anymore. Besides, we know now that curators, scholars, art critics, and art historians hardly ever determine what will be the next successful art movement; the most they can aspire to is to give their judgment afterward and decide whether it should enter the art canon or not. The dealer-collector-curator entente represents today’s institutional art system. While the system revolves around the artist and artworks, the artist has left the equation, giving way to the curator (or curator as author) after the so-called curatorial turn of the 1990s. Globalization turned the traveling independent curator into a powerful intermediary that subsumed the role of both the artist and art critic in explaining, presenting, and contextualizing the artwork at biennials, art fairs, and museums. Yet,

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the curator is the less powerful and most fragile member of this triumvirate. They are the pawn of the dealer-collector tandem. In the 1990s, the former San Francisco Museum of Art director Henry Hopkins said about art dealers: “Dealer X convinces collector Y to buy the works of a particular artist. When three or four own the work, they spread the word among their peers.”138 “Soon,” added Goldfarb Marquis, “museum trustees, who now are mostly collectors, pressure curators to exhibit and perhaps buy works by the same artists.”139 Is there any difference today, 30 years later? The power of museum trustees has grown stronger ever since, not only in the United States but also in many public museums on the European mainland, where the state, in the last two decades, has been progressively reducing public funding, demanding more active private and corporate participation.140 Here the museum director and the curator traditionally yielded independent power and were not dependent on the wishes and pressures of collectors. Even at the Sydney Biennale, the whole board of trustees is composed exclusively of collectors now! Whether we like it or not, “People,” said collector and private dealer Ben Heller, “by their ability to buy works of art, get to think of themselves or their collection as more important than the works of art or the artists.”141 And this is the very reason why we speak today of the Rubell collection, the de la Cruz Collection, and the Margulies Collection. If we don’t let people tell us what to do in our personal lives, why would collectors need to buy what a curator or art critic tells them to buy instead of what they like? We are confounding here the collective artistic canon with personal pleasures. We can’t deny that cultural philanthropy has changed over the last three decades. Some wealthy private collectors have become more ambitious and aspirational by opening their own private museums and even competing with public institutions. This only shows, in our opinion, the complexity of today’s art system, which is, at heart, a reflection of the complexity of today’s neocapitalism. And what about the public? What is the role of the public in all this? Was it wrong that they liked Warhol’s bright color Marilyn Monroe print back in the 1950s and today’s Koons’ pink ballerina sculpture? They are both highly recognizable images. Both are bold, bright, and opposed to academic art. Both Warhol’s and Koons’ iconography deal with celebrity, consumer society, and nostalgia. They both challenge the basic

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assumptions of what good art is and confront art’s historical beliefs about beauty, originality, individualism, and the myth of the artist as a genius. Warhol said about a consumerist society that the poor could buy the same things as the rich. The same happens now with high art: the public can have the same artistic or aesthetic experience as Charles Saatchi or Mera Rubell. And what about Damien Hirst’s creamy and kitschy spin paintings made by his assistants? People seem to like them from an aesthetic point of view with their pop, strong ice cream color, and spinning mechanism. Do they get the idea Hirst wants to convey? Susie Hodge stated, “Hirst claims that if people were to attend art exhibitions as frequently as they watch films and advertisements, they would understand art more.”142 Probably. After all, an investment in knowledge is an investment in taste, as Bourdieu would have argued! The public also liked Warhol’s soup cans, Brillo boxes, and celebrities back then which, against the will of many art critics and historians, changed the course of modern art. Will the kitsch dots, ballerinas, puppies, and Smurfs by Hirst, Kusama, Koons, and KAWS change the course of contemporary art? It is too soon to affirm. Yet what we can confidently confirm is that kitsch is a key element of today’s contemporary art exhibited on a global scale in mega galleries and both private and public museums. Museums are temples of culture and always maintain an air of older ceremonial monuments. With the consolidation of democracies in the twentieth century worldwide, the museum acquired a protagonist role. The museum embodied this democratic access to culture as a right of all citizens. “To be sure,” argued Carol Duncan, “equality of access to the museum in no way gave everybody the relevant education to understand the works of art inside, let alone equal political rights and privileges; in fact, only propertied males were full citizens.”143 The museum model has shown its incapacity. The role of the citizen has been and still is extremely passive. Programs are too centered on the institution, while most non-­ expert visitors cannot relate critically to what they see. The European Commission through its Creative Europe program instigated the cultural sector in the 2010s to adopt audience-centric approaches to enlarge and diversify audiences. It identified audience development as one of the primary challenges for the future. It affirmed that those institutions that fail

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to adopt a “pro-active approach that fails to give people a more active role will be less relevant to society and less sustainable in the future.”144 Museums are still ritual elitist structures that affirm dominant values, as Carol Duncan has so admirably explained, in which “those who are best prepared to perform its ritual—those who are most able to respond to the various cues—are also those whose identities (social, sexual, racial, etc.) the museum ritual most fully confirms.”145 The more educated the visitor, the more able they are to respond to the symbolic challenges. Accessibility would mean collaboration, co-participation, and co-­ decision. In short, it would mean negotiating the artistic program to meet the needs and expectations of the citizen. This is not likely to happen in these strongly hierarchical institutions is which a top-down-­ attitude rules. Museum directors and curators simply lack the interest and the will to do anything different and go beyond the aesthetic, aseptic, and elitist “white cube.” Klaus Biesenbach, former MoMA chief curator, said about the museum as a place of participation, “We have more pictures taken at MoMA every day than pictures on display. That’s participation.” So, in the twenty-first century making a selfie and uploading it on Instagram is participation! Yet museums keep suffering pressure from governments in relation to their attendance figures, which in turn are irrefutable arguments for funding. This has been traditionally negotiated via the so-called “blockbuster” exhibition. The big Velázquez, Picasso, Matisse, Vermeer, and Van Gogh exhibitions are particularly illuminating examples of how to attract larger audiences and produce thousands of kitsch images in the form of posters, T-shirts, ties, mugs, postcards, notebooks, and so on. Is it weird that most (art-illiterate) visitors demand to see celebrity artists and familiar scenes they can confidently look at, enjoy, and talk about? Is it weird that they demand easy, flashy, and colorful pop culture images that relate to their lives providing them some solace? While the museum hasn’t become more participatory, as Nina Simon would argue, by “inviting people to actively engage as cultural participants, and not passive consumers,” it seems to us that artists have been able to resolve the riddle by using and incorporating (recognizable) pop culture images into the realm of high art.146

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Pop artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns had a rather ambiguous position toward society, neither overly critical nor affirmative. The position of today’s neo-pop artists—Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami—is not critical but extremely cooperative and affirmative of the neoliberal mantra. The idea of the avant-garde has always been closely linked to the concept of high culture, and in the last three decades, kitsch has gained acceptance and constitutes a basic element of it. High culture was usually associated with a particular kind of bourgeois middle and upper classes. Now, neo pop has exceeded its milieu, becoming a popular high art avant-garde, financed by mega galleries and corporations, that produces and disseminates pop culture products to global mass audiences. Quoting Diana Crane, we could affirm that there are in fact “no inherent differences between high and popular culture but that each is labeled as such, depending upon the nature of the settings in which they are presented and consumed.”147 Kitsch impregnates both high and pop culture. Most of today’s artists do not belong to a minority avant-garde culture that is attacking a majority culture which they oppose; on the contrary, they are an active part of neoliberalism’s cultural industries. While using the aesthetics of the avant-garde, neo pop is no longer about social commentary or changing in any sensible way the perspective of today’s citizen: neo pop is about creating artworks that have recourse to familiar and even clichéd images that can be easily digested and identified, artworks that affirm the neoliberal Weltanschauung and make you feel good with yourself and your world. The neo pop avant-garde has exhausted original premises like originality, innovation and genius and replaced them with kitsch as a way of maintaining the role of aesthetic innovator in a juicy global market with millions of potential clients. It’s a remix and revival of older aesthetic conventions, among which is pop art, that produces repetitive but attractive, colorful, pleasing, and, unlike the original avant-garde, very saleable artworks. Instead of a social critic, the artist has become a sophisticated mix of aesthetic innovator, communicator, and marketeer. And they are supported in their endeavor by a solid structure of galleries, biennials, art fairs, museums, private collectors, and corporations that disseminate their work. Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy state, “In the era of modernity, kitsch was stigmatized for being a corruption of art and taste; in the

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era of hyper-modernity, it has become an aesthetics and a state of mind both legitimate and disseminated.”148 The individual subject in today’s neoliberal society works themselves to death 24/7 while being exposed every day to an enormous number of conflicting images of wars, pandemics, and climate catastrophes. In this conflicting and shifting arena, we need beautiful images that help us overcome our hardships. Artists are responding to our kitsch zeitgeist and producing them, dealers are selling them, collectors are buying them, and the public—lower, middle, and upper classes—is enjoying them. While for more than a century, kitsch has always been the anti-hero. It’s time to be honest with ourselves and admit that kitsch simply makes up part of our DNA; that, depending on the topic, we can be prone to kitsch sentimentality—let’s not forget that the sublime always flirted with kitsch. We know that the untroubled enjoyment of cheesy beauty is an academic sin. But let’s not forget that kitsch has become mainstream and global: it has been exhibited at two of the most exquisite temples of contemporary art and culture, MoMA and Tate Modern. We must change the chip and accept kitsch as central to our complex and contradictory twenty-first-­ century lifestyle.

3 The Content of the Book We have divided the book into two parts: and kitsch and culture. The first part focuses on everyday life. The second part focuses on artistic practices. Part I, “Kitsch & Life,” starts with Gilles Lipovetsky’s and Jean Serroy’s “Kitsch in the Hyper-Modern Era,” where the authors discuss the contemporary kitschification of culture and the way kitsch is practically everywhere at the same time as the concept feels somewhat outdated. Lipovetsky and Serroy claim that homo kitschicus is today less neurotic and romantic but more ironic and post-conformist—in their hypermodern, increasingly dignifying attitude toward kitsch. They also write about the way kitsch has sneaked into the art system through the work of Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Damien Hirst, and the like. Kitsch is cool for many today.

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In “Sailing the Seas of Cheese,” Erik Anderson dives into the world of Vegas Elvis, Celine Dion, and hotel interiors—which we react to as cheesy. Anderson asks how cheesy things are criticized but loved at the same time—and how they are central to today’s popular culture. Erikson distinguishes cheesiness from the kitschy and the campy but discusses kitsch and camp as close concepts. All these concepts are, according to him, helpful “test cases” for aesthetics, “such as the paradox of negative art, and the contentious debate between intentionalists and anti-­ intentionalists.” The essay was originally published in Contemporary Aesthetics (Vol 8, 2010), and we are thankful to editor-in-chief Yuriko Saito and the journal for the permission to republish it. In “Kitsch in Relation to Loss,” Kathleen Higgins notes that the presence of kitsch is stronger in some areas of life than in others. For example, “aesthetic considerations factor into determining what kinds of gestures are appropriate both in paying one’s respects to the deceased and in expressing condolences.” Many gestures we use when we respect others can see the dead as “obtrusive and sentimental.” For example, some find memorial pages on social media suitable for honoring the dead, while some do not. Higgins asks, “how should we regard kitsch utilized in these contexts?” She claims that the use of kitsch is unavoidable in this context and that we should learn to live with that. “Verbal acrobatics do not further communication in contexts of mourning,” she concludes. Kitschy gestures are often the most appropriate ones for expressing sympathy. Alison Rowley’s “Old Tricks for a New Dog: Toilet Humor, Politicized Kitsch and the Trump Presidency” is a study on the history of and contemporary use of “buttons, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and lawn signs” in politics and the way this is a DIY culture today, as print-on-demand services have made DIY production very easy. Rowley analyses the toilet humor that has become one of the trademarks of kitsch and camp about Donald Trump. She claims that people who, for example, engage in this kind of practice have “a postmodern approach to kitsch,” use and see kitsch “as provocative and powerful rather than as banal and passive,” and so claims that historical theories about kitsch have got at least some of its uses wrong. Kitsch can function as a tool for political critique. Part II, “Kitsch & Culture,” opens with Andrea Mecacci, who in his “Kitsch and Architecture” discusses contemporary aestheticization and

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the way it has modified aesthetic experience. Starting with Charles Baudelaire’s critique of Belgium, Belgium Stripped Bare, and its notions of petty bourgeois taste, Mecacci continues to discuss pretentious, performative architecture, including the excessive version where grandiose copies of Venice or Paris have become new cities in China. Mecacci treats this architectural work as anthological and metalinguistic and discusses its relationship to traditional notions of kitsch. Maribel Castro Díaz’s “From Fashion as Kitsch to Kitsch in Fashion: Redefining Beauty and Taste Today” notes the historical change from the artistic debasement of fashion—seen to be kitsch—to the situation where fashion designers play around consciously with kitschy properties. The appropriation of kitsch into a critical visual discourse where conventional ideals about taste, originality, gender, and popular culture are questioned is a strong phenomenon in fashion today. Castro Díaz discusses them “through a selection of cases that are embodying the contradictions, debates and creative opportunities” in the fashion industry, and so, like Rowley, makes the point that kitsch can be used critically, too. Domenico Quaranta writes in “Digital Kitsch: Art and Kitsch in the Informational Milieu” about the role of kitsch in today’s digital media. Kitschy images are commonplace in digital media. Even more, kitschy looks are embedded in many creative tools (Photoshop) and environments (e.g., videogames and social media). Quaranta discusses the presence of stock images, augmented reality filters, memes, etc., and the response that visual artists have presented to this. Kitsch is inevitable in our every day in new ways, but it has also sneaked into digital art. Jozef Kovalčik and Michaela Pašteková write in their article “Kitsch, Beauty and Art Practice” how kitsch and beauty easily become synonyms in art theoretical discourse. This can be seen already in the work of Clement Greenberg, who, in his “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in a way, criticized both. Contemporary art might not have changed its attitude toward beauty since those days, although the discourse about kitsch is warmer, if not to some extent nonexistent. Kovalčik and Pašteková claim that the reason for this is that the concept of beauty and the concept of kitsch too are still associated and understood pretty much in

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nineteenth-­century fashion, which leads both the educated audience and the artists to be careful not to land in the category of beauty—although, for example. The sublime, ironic, comic, banal, and nearly every other tag word would be fine in the art scene. Kovalčik and Pašteková aspire to study some of the backgrounds of this to gain a greater understanding of the phenomenon. They also came up with the idea that the use of beauty in popular culture might offer a mirror for understanding art practices and a resource to reflect on beauty, as it is very much appreciated in popular culture. Laura Beloff writes in “Biokitsch in Art—and the Survival of the Prettiest” about how kitschy beauty has become commonplace in bioart, where biotechnology has opened countless new possibilities for aesthetic and other forms of modification of plants. She asks why certain aesthetic choices are made and how kitsch came into art through this practice in a very peculiar way. Kitsch seems to lend itself to many different uses—and finds its way into the arts in various ways. In bioart, however, the kitschy works have additional societal layers “which affect, challenge and play with kitsch aspects.” The themes that dominate the book include the following. Many authors ask in which ways have conscious or non-conscious use (or evasion) of kitsch become commonplace in today’s artistic production (Mecacci, Castro Díaz, Quaranta, Kovalčik, and Pašteková, Beloff). Some ask what kind of an overall presence kitsch and other phenomena (camp, the cheesy) have in today’s everyday culture (Lipovetsky, Serroy, Anderson, Higgins, and Rowley). Some articles speak against the old prejudices and conscious and critical use of kitsch (Rowley, Castro Díaz)—but in some, the authors claim that kitsch is still also a sort of an artistic failure, an aesthetic mistake, or its existence a total coincidence in a certain scene or context (Lipovetsky, Serroy, Anderson, Higgins, Mecacci, and Beloff). All the articles, anyway, show a change in the relationship to kitsch, which in some sense could be described as a positive turn in the use of kitsch or the concept of kitsch. Gathering notes from a wide range of issues in everyday culture and the arts shows us how manifold the changes are in this sense.

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Notes 1. Yü, Sung, “Populäritet,” in Kinesiska tänkare, ed. Alf Henriksson and Hwang Tsu-Yü (Helsingfors: Söderströms, 1952), 185–186. 2. Petronius Arbiter, The Satyricon (Paris: 1902), retrieved from The Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/satyriconpetron00arbigoog/page/n10/mode/2up. 3. See e.g. Virpi Hämeen-Anttila, “Intialaisen kirjallisuusteorian perusperiaatteita,” in Itämainen estetiikka, ed. Minna Eväsoja (Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2011), 103–128. Quote on page 5. 4. This differentiation was, though, not always based on value. For the history of the system, see e.g. Paul Oskar Kristeller “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” Part I, Journal of the History of Ideas, 12, no. 4 (Oct 1951): 496–527 and Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Six Ideas (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1980) (see the chapter on art). 5. John Dewey neatly shows his 1934 Art as Experience how this could really have formed the base for our thinking of the arts even “today.” Even if it is not that simple, at least this relation to the body is one of the idea historical threads, that stand behind our relationship to art and culture. See John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Pedigree Books, 1980). 6. Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 91. 7. See e.g. Shiner, The Invention of Art, 95. 8. Naomi Ritter, Art as Spectacle: Images of Entertainment since Romanticism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985); Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 9. See e.g. Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts”; Tatarkiewicz, History of Six Ideas; Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art; Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide; and, see also, especially on the Global (colonial, diaspora) outreach of the system and class, Max Ryynänen, On The Philosophy of Central European Art: The History of an Institution and Its Global Competitors (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020).

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10. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 47–48. 11. Aristotle, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885), 246–247. 12. Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 13. Shiner, The Invention of Art, 189. 14. Kathleen Higgins, “Beauty and its Kitsch Competitors,” in Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 87. 15. Umberto Eco, “La struttura del cattivo gusto,” in Apocalittici e integrati: Comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa (Milano: Bompiani, 1964). 16. Arto Haapala, “On the Aesthetics of the Everyday: Familiarity, Strangeness, and the Meaning of Place,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, edited by Andrew Light and J. M. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), see e.g. page 40. 17. E.g. Yuriko Saito’s approach is very much object-centered. See e.g. Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 18. See e.g. Higgins, “Beauty and its Kitsch Competitors,” 90. See also Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 229. 19. Again in Eco, “La struttura del cattivo gusto.” 20. Tomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 37–38. 21. Robert Rosenblum (ed.), The Jeff Koons Handbook (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1992), 100. 22. The essay “Kitsch and Modernity,” in Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, based on the text “The Benevolent Monster: Reflections on Kitsch as an Aesthetic Concept” (Clio VI, no. 1), is the main source of the history of kitsch, which we will here also use as the base for our historical notes. 23. Andrea Mecacci provides a rich and entertaining history of kitsch in his Il Kitsch (Bologna: Mulino, 2014). On the mud aspect, see Robert Solomon, “On Kitsch and Sentimentality,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49, no. 1 (1991), 1–14.

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24. This is how Eco ironically inaugurates his “La struttura del cattivo gusto”. 25. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 225. 26. See Friedrich Schiller, Vom Pathetischen und Erhabenen. Schriften zur Dramentheorie, ed. Klaus Berghahn (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970) and Johann Wolfgan Goethe, Italianische Reise (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1976), e.g. page 87. 27. “Culture Industry” (1944) attacks nearly all culture, actually, from Sibelius and Wagner to houses built with readymade bricks—and routinely produced radio programs. Only Schoenberg, Kafka and Beckett—or circus, as unpretentious entertainment sold as what it is, are saved from the intellectual dismissal. In Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1969 [1947]). 28. Jozef Kovalčik and Max Ryynänen, ”A History of the Aesthetics of Popular Culture,” in Aesthetics of Popular Culture, eds. Jozef Kovalčik and Max Ryynänen (Bratislava: Slovart, 2013). For a broader understanding of the historical debates, see Eugene Lunn “The Frankfurt School in the Development of the Mass Culture Debate,” in The Aesthetics of the Critical Theorists. Studies on Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, ed. Ronald Roblin (Lewinston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990). 29. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, in Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgements 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5–22. 30. Eco’s introduction to Apocalittici e integrati traces this route. 31. Gilbert Seldes, The 7 Lively Arts (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1924) and Gilbert Seldes, ”The People and the Arts,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White, 74–97 (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959). 32. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 33. Richard Egenter, The Desecration of Christ (London: Compass Books Band, 1967).; Oiva Kuisma, “Tertullianus teatterin ja urheiluviihteen turmiollisuudesta”, Synteesi 3 (1998): 19–31. 34. Ludwig Giesz, Phännomenologie des Kitsches (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1971).

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35. Pareyson discussed ersatz art at least in his Estetica (1954), discussing its “unreal” presence. See e.g. Eco, Apocalittici e integrati, 70–71 (footnote 4). 36. Hermann Broch, “Das Böse im Wertsystem der Kunst.” 37. Gillo Dorfles’s Kitsch: Antologia del cattivo gusto (Milano: Mazzotta, 1968). 38. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 275–292. 39. This is one early historical root for kitsch debates. Umberto Eco, Apocalittici e integrati, 16–17. 40. Jan Mukařovský, Aesthetic Function, Norms and Value as Social Facts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970). 41. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972). 42. These are absurdly interchangeable with film star tombs at Los Angeles Forest Lawn in the English translation of the essay for The Open Work collection in 1989. For the Cimitero Monumentale, see Eco, Apocalittici e integrati, 65–66. 43. To show how the whole mattered more than particles of the texts that had kitschy style, Eco borrowed a textual collage from Walther Killy’s Deutscher Kitsch (Göttingen: Van den Hock & Ruprect, 1962). 44. “Le strutture narrative in Fleming,” in Umberto Eco, Il superuomo di massa. Retorica e ideologia nel romanzo popolare (Milano: Bompiani, 2001). 45. See e.g. Eco, Apocalittici e integrati, 29. 46. Tomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art, 69. See also the article “Kitsch,” British Journal of Aesthetics 28, no 1 (1988): 18–27. 47. C. E. Emmer, “Kitsch Against Modernity,” Art Criticism 13, no. 1 (1998): 53–80, p. 58. 48. Following Broch’s view on romanticism and its impact on the development of sentimental kitsch Nerdrum also pays homage to the Romantic era. Nerdrum, Odd et al. On Kitsch (Oslo: Kagge, 2001). 49. Solomon, Robert C. In Defense of Sentimentality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 50. See chapters 1 and 2 of Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 51. Solomon, In Defense of Sentimentality, 4–8. 52. Solomon, In Defense of Sentimentality, 6.

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53. Erik Anderson, “Sailing the Seas of Cheese,” Contemporary Aesthetics 8 (2010). http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article. php?articleID=583. 54. Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 55. See Max Ryynänen’s and Eret Talviste’s analysis of the Estonian National uprising in the late 1980s as an uprising that used kitschy music, “Longing for a Place Which Does Not Exist: The Importance of Kitsch in the Estonian Revolution,” forthcoming in The Journal of Baltic Studies 2022. 56. Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, Il gonzo sublime: Dal patetico al kitsch (Milano: Mimesis, 2005). 57. Kulka, Kitsch and Art. 58. Max Ryynänen, “Kitsch Happens: On the Kitsch Experience of Nature,” in ESPES 2 (2019): 10–16. 59. Chang Jung-Wei, “Kitsch now! The Journey of Kitsch Spectacle,” MA Thesis (Espoo: Aalto University, 2021). 60. Max Ryynänen and Anna-Sofia Sysser, “Making Sense of Tropical Kitsch,” Contemporary Aesthetics Vol 19, 2021: https://contempaesthetics.org/2021/01/08/making-­sense-­of-­tropical-­kitsch/. 61. Justyna Stępień, ed., Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1. 62. David Cottington, The Avant-garde: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 77–78. 63. Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report 2022: https://www.artbasel.com/ about/initiatives/the-­art-­market?gclid=Cj0KCQjw_4-­SBhCgARIsAAl egrUVFXHPI6iMvlHr4OULHXfYoeO5c4M7EcFfcXLWAzHLTGtY01V31IMaAp6BEALw_wcB. 64. Email with the author on 29 March 2022. 65. Sarah Thornton, Siete días en el mundo del arte (Seven Days in the Art World) (Barcelona: Edhasa, 2010), 12. 66. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (Oct. 1964): 571–584. 67. Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 174; Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s (London: Verso, 1999). 68. Hal Foster, “Post-Critical,” October 139 (Winter 2012): 3–8.

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69. See Paco Barragán, From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-Liberal Biennial: On the ‘Biennialization’ of Art Fairs and the ‘Fairization’ of Biennials (Miami: Artpulse Editions, 2021), 222–225. 70. Michael Shnayerson, Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 108. 71. Quoted in Shnayerson, 128 (cursive is ours). 72. Robert Hughes, “Art and Money,” Time (Nov., 7, 1989): 60–62. 73. Ibid., 226–227. 74. Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), 109. 75. Ibid., 110 (cursive is ours). 76. Charles Saatchi, My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic (London: Phaidon, 2009), 67. 77. Quoted in Georgina Adam, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century (London: Lund Humphries, 2017), 132. 78. Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­ century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), ix. 79. Charles S. Moffett, “Introduction”, in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, ed. Charles S. Moffatt (Geneva: Richard Burton, 1986), 21. 80. It’s rather recently, we would say some time at the end of the 1960s, beginning of the 1970s, that art critics, academics, museum directors and curators started to have a more open and collaborative stand with artists, dealers and collectors. Although this exceeds the scope of this research, we will point out some poignant examples along our narrative. 81. Elizabeth Alice Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3–4. 82. Ibid., 15. 83. See Peter Spufford, “From Antwerp to Amsterdam to London: The Decline of the Financial Centres in Europe,” De Economist 154, no. 2 (June, 2006): 143–175. 84. John Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 85. Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century,” The Art Bulletin, 76, no. 3 (September, 1994): 460.

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86. Ad van der Woude, “The Volume and Value in Paintings in Holland at the Time of the Dutch Republic,” in Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, ed. David Freeberg and Jand de Vries (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991), 285–329. 87. Honig, 112–113. 88. John Michael Montias, “Art Dealers in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 18, no. 4 (1988): 167–168. 89. Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Elogio de lo cotidiano (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2013), 24. 90. Peter Watson, From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market (New York: Random House, 1992), xv. 91. Marc Elder, A Giverny chez Claude Monet (Paris: Bernheim-Jeune, 1924), 25. 92. Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 8. 93. Ibid., 10. 94. See Paul Durand-Ruel, Paul Durand-Ruel: Memoirs of the First Impressionist Art Dealer (1831–1922) (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), 73–139. 95. Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 21. 96. William D. Grampp, Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists, and Economics (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 114. 97. Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Impressionists and Édouard Manet”, in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, ed. Charles S. Moffatt (Geneva: Richard Burton, 1986), 33. 98. Watson, From Manet to Manhattan, xv. 99. Grampp, Pricing the Priceless, 114. 100. See for example the wonderful biography by Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 101. Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, 8. 102. Watson, From Manet to Manhattan, 100. 103. Paul Smith, Impressionism: Beneath the Surface (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 83. 104. For a larger explanation of The Armory Show and its radical nature, see Barragán, From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, 56–71.

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105. Katherine S. Dreier, “Intrinsic Significance in Modern Art,” in Katherine S. Dreier, James Johnson Sweeney, and Naum Gabo, Three Lectures on Modern Art (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 1. 106. See chapter 17 in Peggy Guggenheim, Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (London: André Deutsch, 1979), 314–320. 107. Sophy Burnham, The Art Crowd (Lincoln: iUniverse.com, 1973), 44. 108. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Frances Stonor Saunders, ¿Who Paid the Piper? CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 2000). 109. Titia Hulst, “The Vicissitudes of Taste: The Market for Pop,” Journal for Art Market Studies 2 (2017): 8. 110. Ibid., 7. 111. Ibid., 8. 112. See chapters 24 and 25 in Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo & His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli (New York: Alfred H. Knopf, 2011), 319–348. 113. Burnham, The Art Crowd, 105. 114. Alice Goldfarb Marquis, The Art Biz: The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museums, and Critics (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991), 145. 115. Quoted in Goldfarb Marquis, 145. 116. Ibid., 147. 117. Ibid., 152. 118. Philip Hook, Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the hidden Players in the History of Art (New York: The Experiment, 2017), 264. 119. Goldfarb Marquis, The Art Biz, 179–182. 120. Goldfarb Marquis, The Art Biz, 185. 121. Ibid., 390. 122. Shnayerson, Boom, 12. 123. Adam, Dark Side of the Boom, 34. 124. Ibid. (cursive is ours). 125. Shnayerson, 396. 126. Ibid., 136. 127. Graw, High Price, 130. 128. Shnayerson, Boom, 2. 129. Doug Woodham, Art Collecting Today: Market Insights for Everyone Passionate about Art (New York: Allworth Press, 2017), 88.

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130. Ibid., 79. 131. Graw, High Price, 54. 132. See “The Superflat Manifesto” in 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, ed. Alex Danchev (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2011), 430–431. 133. Marc Spiegler, “10 Questions every Gallerist should be asking themselves now,” in TALKING GALLERIES 04, ed. Llucià Homs (ed.) (Barcelona: TALKING GALLERIES, 2015), 22. 134. Ibid., 23–25 (cursive is ours). 135. Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (London: Aurum Press, 2012), 9. 136. Georgina Adam, Dark Side of the Boom, 194. 137. Ibid. 138. Quoted in Goldfarb Marquis, The Art Biz, 261–262. 139. Ibid., 262. 140. See Georgina S. Walker, The Private Collector’s Museum: Public Good Versus Private Gain (London: Routledge, 2019), 1–21. 141. Quoted in Goldfarb Marquis, The Art Biz, 263. 142. Susie Hodge, Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That: Modern Art Explained (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 92. 143. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 24. 144. Alessandro Bollo, Cristina Da Milano, Alessandra Gariboldi, and Chris Torch (eds.), “Final Report: Study on Audience Development: How to Place Audiences at the Centre of Cultural Organisations,” European Commission (January, 2017), 49. 145. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 8. 146. Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz, Museum ZO, 2010), i–ii. 147. Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1984 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 12. 148. Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, La estetización del mundo: vivir en la época del capitalismo artístico (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2015), 255.

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Bibliography Arbiter, Petronius. The Satyricon. Paris: 1902. Retrieved from The Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/satyriconpetron00arbigoog/page/n10/ mode/2up. Adam, Georgina. Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century. London: Lund Humphries, 2017. Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1969. Anderson, Erik. “Sailing the Seas of Cheese.” Contemporary Aesthetics 8 (2010), 3.3.2010. Archived at: https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/ article.php?articleID=583. Aristotle. Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972. Barragán, Paco. From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, from Olympia Festival to Neo-Liberal Biennial: On the ‘Biennialization’ of Art Fairs and the ‘Fairization’ of Biennials. Miami: Artpulse Editions, 2021. Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. London: The Women’s Press, 1989. Brollo, Alessandro, Cristina Da Milano, Alessandra Gariboldi, and Chris Torch (eds.), “Final Report: Study on Audience Development: How to Place Audiences at the Centre of Cultural Organisations,” European Commission, (January, 2017). Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinctions. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Broch, Hermann. “Kitsch.” In Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, edited by Gillo Dorfles, 49–76. New York: Universe Books, 1968. Burnham, Sophie. The Art Crowd. Lincoln: iUniverse.com, 1973. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernity, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, and Postmodernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. Cohen-Solal, Annie. Leo & His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli. New York: Alfred H. Knopf, 2011. Cottington, David. The Avant-Garde: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Crane, Diana. The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1984. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (Oct. 1964): 571–584.

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De Marchi, Neil and Hans Van Miegroet. “Art, Value, and Market Practices in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century,” The Art Bulletin, 76, no. 3 (September, 1994): 460. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigree Books, 1980. Dorfles, Gillo. Ed. Kitsch: Antologia del cattivo gustocattivo. Milano: Mazzotta, 1968. Dreier, Katherine S. “Intrinsic Significance in Modern Art.” In Katherine S. Dreier, James Johnson Sweeney, and Naum Gabo, Three Lectures on Modern Art. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949. Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Durand-Ruel, Paul. Paul Durand-Ruel: Memoirs of the First Impressionist Art Dealer (1831–1922). Paris: Flammarion, 2014. Eco, Umberto. Apocalittici e integrati: Comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa. Milano: Bompiani, 1997. Eco, Umberto. Il superuomo di massa: Retorica e ideologia nel romanzo popolare. Milano: Bompiani, 2001. Egenter, Richard. The Desecration of Christ. London: Compass Books Band, 1967. Elder, Marc. A Giverny chez Claude Monet. Paris: Bernheim-Jeune, 1924. Emmer, C. E. “Kitsch Against Modernity.” Art Criticism 13, no. 1 (1998): 53–80. Foster, Hal. “Post-Critical,” October 139 (Winter 2012): 3–8. Gans, Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Giesz, Ludwig. Phännomenologies des Kitsches. Münich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1971. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Italianische Reise. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1976. Goldfarb Marquis, Alice. The Art Biz: The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museums, and Critics. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991. Grampp, William D. Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists, and Economics. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Graw, Isabelle. High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, in Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgements 1939–1944, edited by John O’Brian, 5–22. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Guilbaut, Serge. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

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Guggenheim, Peggy. Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict. London: André Deutsch, 1979. Haapala, Arto. “On the Aesthetics of the Everyday: Familiarity, Strangeness, and the Meaning of Place.” In The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, edited by Andrew Light and J.M. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Higgins, Kathleen. “Beauty and its Kitsch Competitors.” In Beauty Matters, edited by Peg Zeglin Brand. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Hodge, Susie. Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That: Modern Art Explained. London: Thames & Hudson, 2012. Hook, Philip. Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and Occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the Hidden Players in the History of Art. New York: The Experiment, 2017. Honig, Elizabeth Alice. Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Hughes, Robert. “Art and Money,” Time (Nov., 7, 1989): 60–62. Hulst, Titia. “The Vicissitudes of Taste: The Market for Pop,” Journal for Art Market Studies 2 (2017): 8. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Hämeen-Anttila, Virpi, “Intialaisen kirjallisuusteorian perusperiaatteita,” Itämainen estetiikka, edited by Minna Eväsoja, 103–128. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2011. Jensen, Robert. Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Jung-Wei, Chang. “Kitsch Now! The Journey of Kitsch Spectacle.” MA Thesis. Espoo: Aalto University, 2021. Killy, Walther. Deutscher Kitsch. Göttingen: Van den Hock & Ruprect, 1962. King, Ross. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006. Kovalčik, Jozef and Max Ryynänen. “A History of the Aesthetics of Popular Culture.” In Aesthetics of Popular Culture, edited by Jozef Kovalčik and Max Ryynänen, 14–49. Bratislava: Slovart, 2013. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics”. Part I. Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 12 No. 4 (Oct., 1951): 496–527. Kulka, Tomas. “Kitsch.” British Journal of Aesthetics 28, No. 1 (1988): 18–27. Kulka, Tomas. Kitsch and Art. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994. Kuisma, Oiva. “Tertullianus teatterin ja urheiluviihteen turmiollisuudesta,” Synteesi 1998: 3, 19–31.

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Lipovetsky, Gilles and Jean Serroy. La estetización del mundo: vivir en la época del capitalismo artístico. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2015. Lunn, Eugene. “The Frankfurt School in the Development of the Mass Culture Debate.” In The Aesthetics of the Critical Theorists: Studies on Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, edited by Ronald Roblin. Lewinston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. Mallarmé, Stéphane. “The Impressionists and Édouard Manet.” In The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, edited by Charles S. Moffatt, 33. Geneva: Richard Burton, 1986. Mazzocut-Mis, Maddalena. Il gonzo sublime: Dal patetico al kitsch. Milano: Mimesis, 2005. Mecacci, Andrea. Il Kitsch. Bologna: Mulino, 2014. Moffett, Charles S. “Introduction.” In The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, edited by Charles S. Moffatt, 21. Geneva: Richard Burton, 1986. Montias, John Michael. Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Montias, John Michael. “Art Dealers in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 18, no. 4 (1988): 167–168. Mukařovský, Jan. Aesthetic Function, Norms and Value as Social Facts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970. Murakami, Takashi. “The Superflat Manifesto.” In 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, edited by Alex Danchev, 430–431. London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2011. Nerdrum, Odd et al. On Kitsch. Oslo: Kagge, 2001. Olalquiaga, Celeste. The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Ritter, Naomi. Art as Spectacle: Images of Entertainment since Romanticism. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Rosenblum, Robert. The Jeff Koons Handbook. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1992. Ryynänen, Max. “Kitsch Happens: On the Kitsch Experience of Nature,” ESPES 2 (2019). 10–16. Ryynänen, Max. On The Philosophy of Central European Art: The History of an Institution and Its Global Competitors. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. Ryynänen, Max and Anna-Sofia Sysser. “Making Sense of Tropical Kitsch,” Contemporary Aesthetics Vol 19 (2021): https://contempaesthetics. org/2021/01/08/making-­sense-­of-­tropical-­kitsch/.

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Saatchi, Charles. My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic. London: Phaidon, 2009. Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Secrest, Meryle. Duveen: A Life in Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Schiller, Friedrich. “Über Bürgers Gedichte,” in Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe. Bd. 22: Vermischte Schriften. Hrsg. von Hebert Meyer, 245–264. Weimar: Böhlau, 1958. Schiller, Friedrich. Vom Pathetischen und Erhabenen. Schriften zur Dramentheorie. Edited by Klaus L. Berghahn. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970. Seldes, Gilbert. The 7 Lively Arts. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1924. Seldes, Gilbert. “The People and the Arts.” In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White, 74–97. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959. Shnayerson, Michael. Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art. New York: Public Affairs, 2019. Shiner, Larry. The Invention of Art. A Cultural History. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992. Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, Museum ZO, 2010. Sloterdijk, Peeter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Smith, Paul. Impressionism: Beneath the Surface. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Solomon, Robert C. In Defense of Sentimentality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” In Against Interpretation, 275–292. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. Spiegler, Marc. “10 Questions Every Gallerist Should be Asking Themselves Now.” In TALKING GALLERIES 04, edited by Llucià Homs, 22. Barcelona: TALKING GALLERIES, 2015. Spufford, Peter. “From Antwerp to Amsterdam to London: The Decline of the Financial Centres in Europe,” De Economist 154, no. 2, (June, 2006): 143–175. Stallabrass, Julian. High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s. London: Verso, 1999. Stallabrass, Julian. Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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Part I Kitsch and Life

Kitsch in the Hypermodern Era Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy

The notion of kitsch, as we know it, is dated historically and lexically; it appeared in Germany around the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, it has been associated with a series of not particularly flattering words: copy, junk, imitation, show off, excess, and flashy. These features are still visible in certain contemporary productions, yet they embody a different status than their original one. Today, we’re witnessing a truly tectonic shift with regard to a kitsch culture that has translated itself into a 180-degree reversal from the common traditional approach. A new kitsch1 era affirms itself that takes over in the opposite direction of those grand models that represented bourgeois kitsch with its romantic origins, totalitarian kitsch from the fascist and communist dictatorships, and kitsch proper of the mass consumer society. In these moments of history, kitsch is unanimously vilified, deprecated, and considered an underproduction stamped with the seal of inauthenticity, soppiness, adulteration, and stereotype. “Kitsch is the evil in art’s value system,” argued Hermann Broch, adding that “it’s far from having finished its Translation: Paco Barragán.

G. Lipovetsky (*) • J. Serroy University of Grenoble, Grenoble, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_2

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victorious course.”2 In the same spirit, Greenberg underlined that kitsch, which is commercial art destined for the leisure of the masses, “is about to become the universal culture.”3 In this sense, we must agree with him, as, for some decades, kitsch has undergone a formidable expansion, a success that grows from day to day. Traditionally deprecated and judged as the height of mediocrity and bad taste, kitsch has become a “trend” that has infiltrated every realm of creativity and ornamentation, spectacle, and mass leisure to the point that it has “kitschified” mentalities and behaviors. This includes the new initiates, the billionaires—the leading class who has reclaimed and adopted this new style without complexity. Donald Trump emblematically shows this with the decoration of his New York apartment; his name displayed in huge golden letters on the frontispiece of his luxury building; the reality show that made him famous with television audiences; his impossibly undulated, orange-tainted hair; the fake Renoir in his jet; and the painting that hung behind his desk at the White House in which he appears surrounded by the most relevant Republican presidents. To explain this phenomenon, one needs to depart from the fact that kitsch, a contemporary to the industrial age and the rise to power of the bourgeoisie, is intrinsically tied to modernity. It’s consubstantial to it, like liberal democracy, industrial production, avant-garde art, and cinema. In this secular continuation, shocks have appeared that show a watershed change, a radical evolution of modernity itself; our societies have entered the hypermodern era. And kitsch, like anything else, bears witness to it. Our era is observing the advent of hypermodern, rich, and reflective meta-kitsch that becomes both the object and subject of creation, arousing institutionally-valued production and creations that lead to this long unthinkable oxymoron: a chic and legitimate kitsch that, while prolonging and using the unchanging conditions of permanent kitsch, opens up to new ways of thinking, creating, and valuing it. And selling it.

1 The Extension of Kitsch Domains In its inaugural state, historical kitsch reproduced existing, unique models made by artists and artisans by organizing their industrial production for a rising bourgeoisie that was offered products that were less expensive,

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more accessible, made with less noble materials, fake marble, fake earthenware, paper-mâché—an industrial reproduction that expressed itself through an aesthetic ornament of overload, saturation, and excess.

Hyperbolic Kitsch The novelty is that this excess now adds something to itself—the excess within the excess. The first characteristic of hypermodern kitsch is to push beyond the limits of that which was already protuberance and overload. Today’s prevailing kitsch accumulates overabundance, complication, outrageousness, exuberance, saturation, exaggeration, emphasis, heaping, and proliferation. It’s the hyper-hyperbolic register: anything flashy and ostentatious that hits, touches, awakens, shakes, and arouses the most immediate and vivid sensations;—in short, all that is characteristic of that which is spectacular—changes to a higher gear. This hypermodern kitsch regime can already be read in the spatial scale of its architectonic and urban realizations. This is the time of macro kitsch, of kitsch XL: no longer a reproduction of small decorative objects but, on the heels of the Nashville Parthenon erected in 1895, entire suburban areas, even European cities that have been reproduced identically in China. Or, as is the case of Dubai, artificial islands have been built in the form of a palm tree whose multiple branches form a true postcard city where 80,000 persons live in luxurious Hollywood-style buildings. At the same time, swarms of tourists squeeze against each other as if they were admiring a cinematic color print. We will meet tourists at a rate of more than 150 million a year in the 300 thematic amusement parks in Europe alone. At the top of the list is Disneyland Paris, an enchanted garden of 55 hectares soaked in sugared colors where the most disparate heroes and fairy tale characters live side by side and where architectonic styles and personages from all sorts of origins and all kinds of epochs blend in a good-natured stylistic incoherence, heterogenous promiscuity, and decorative and sentimental profusion. The universe of the small glass globes and other “snowballs” has been overtaken by the advent of this large-scale kitsch, of which Las Vegas offers the perfect evidence: an artificial city constructed in the middle of

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the desert along a central strip of neon, stucco and marble decor, water fountains, Egyptian pyramids, and an Eiffel Tower. And precisely this same change of scale of the phenomenon illustrated by the immense American malls and their ornamentation relate to a pastiche aesthetics in which water fountains, gondolas, villages, and Italian squares are identically recreated. But this also applies to tourist villages whose main roads and building façades are rearranged, embellished, and flourished like a light opera spectacle. Entire streets in high-end tourist venues are dedicated to selling souvenirs and “typical” products of mediocre quality produced in Asia or Eastern Europe. Under the logic of aesthetic artificialization and stereotype, even the roads in the countryside have been remodeled with traffic circles decorated with wheelbarrows, plows, and other utensils. The hypermodern era is characterized by a spectacular topographic extension of kitsch, leading to the construction of a neo-kitsch, which presents as an unreal reality, a simulacrum, a trans-reality.4 It’s the fake era, so dear to Umberto Eco.5 We see the same thing practically everywhere, the fantastic indoor landscapes, tropical forests, ski slopes in the desert, snowstorms, earthquakes, waves, and tropical beaches, or where, as kitsch on kitsch, they go so far as to reconstruct nature and countryside within central parks in huge artificial greenhouses in the very heart of nature and the countryside! This over-excess into the realms of artifice that always aims for more spectacle finds its acme in the music hall, which has always been fond of sequins, glitter, and “extravagant” decors; the tremendous pieces that represented the scenography of a Busby Berkeley musical, or the technicolor and loud acts enacted by the water ballet of Esther Williams staged in the middle of foaming cascades and alluring sirens, have multiplied through the upswing that technical advances allow. Nowadays, show business spectacles attest to the triumph of aesthetics that is constantly pushing the limits of kitsch. Concerts give way to excess with cascades of lights, smoke bombs, fountains of fire, gigantic screens, aerial acrobatics, and flying machines! As such, television varieties become super-kitsch with their blinding lights, their aggressive colors, their feathers and sequins, the outpouring of rhinestones and the decibels, their costumes, and their extravagant haircuts.

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Ultra-kitsch also resides in musical comedies that turn Notre Dame into a popular old tune, the Ten Commandments into a singing playlet, and Mozart into pop rock. To impress, the grand spectacle has entered the reign of the “always more and the never enough.” We have shifted from stucco to strass, from kitsch to hyper-kitsch. Far from declining, this “kitschization” annexes more and more domains: video clips with Christmas decorations, princely weddings advertised in the media, casino rooms with accessories, merry-go-rounds in cake shops, and Barbie dolls with rubber rings like flamingos floating in heart-shaped swimming pools. Even fashion shows indulge in this kitsch attitude by exhibiting, as is the case with John Galliano—against a backdrop of special visual and sound effects that transform the podium into a stage of a Baroque spectacle—models who look like they’ve just escaped from a curiosity shop, dwarves and gigantic creatures, homeless persons, and disheveled, spindly, or obese girls.

Design, Brand, and Store We are talking about domains that appear open and favorable to this overkill. The true novelty now is that, within this excess, kitsch penetrates domains previously foreign to and radically opposed to it. We are witnessing a real extension of kitsch domains. Stores display a remarkable image. The department store, which represents the emblematic home of kitsch, awards the prime spectacle value: a front with ostentatious style, caryatides, statues of reclining gods, and Orientalizing motifs; displays conceived as “show windows” presenting jolly skating scenes as well as the Sulpician evocation of the saintly figure of Joan of Arc; the ostentatious profusion of shop windows which act, thanks to electricity, on the visual effects, the contrasts, the shimmering of colors and forms; animation performed by singers and actors, parades and fashion shows, balls and party decors. Aristide Boucicault, the brilliant inventor of the commercial concept, had the ambition of turning the supermarket into a sort of fairy tale theater through the adoption of an aesthetic seduction strategy, with a view to the bourgeois in the big cities and the countryside that enabled them to progressively affirm their

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class identity through shopping. The department store, insisted Abraham Moles, was “the first and biggest servant of kitsch.”6 Today we are confronted with another phenomenon in stores. The apostles of visual merchandising and experiential or atmospheric marketing have appropriated kitsch as the most important agent of their commercial approach. We are witnessing the proliferation and expansion of boutiques and franchises where retro decoration, girly rose and candy box frames oversee the representation of the brand. It’s the proper shop that nevertheless makes the sale by imposing an instantly attractive, facile, and seductive image. The commercialization of kitsch, present from the beginning, diffracts and multiplies in the urban space. It’s no longer just the objects sold but the setting itself that creates a world inspired by kitsch. The Kitsch’n Swell Boutique, which reveals in its very name that which it promises, declares itself “proudly offering a unique and tropical universe inspired by the period ranging between the 1920s and 1950s” and invites its clients to “take a voyage back in time by visiting in Montreal the most beautiful Tiki and retro ambiance boutique,”7 where one can find vintage inspired objects and all kinds of curiosities. The Kitsch Boutique, another brand that points directly to its source of inspiration, adapts all sorts of sweet ornaments, cozy decors, extravagant accessories, and objects which, after pushing through the door, give the impression of an enchanted world. And let’s not forget the cosmetics domain, whose salons, cabinets, and boutiques reveal the ideal of softness, well-being, and cozy pleasure by employing pastel colors, ludic displays, and cocoon-­ esque layouts. They elevate the kitsch of which they are the herald into the true art of living: a world of sweetness and kindness, pink, syrup, which sees itself reflected in the common behavior, even in the way everyone, instead of the old and neutral “good morning,” wishes each other a “beautiful” day or when with attentive eagerness they tell their interlocutor “take care of yourself.” We’re witnessing the same expansion in the catering world. Every city around the world has seen a proliferation of Italian, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Indian, and Mexican restaurants that conform their identity through a decor that accumulates all the stereotypes and, as such, enhances all the clichés. It is exoticism within everyone’s reach, where a sombrero hanging from the wall guarantees the authenticity of the tacos.

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A cheap poster of a Vesuvian eruption does the same for the Neapolitan pizzas. Exoticism is no longer that of the Revue Nègre and Josephine Baker’s banana skirt; it has become the complete banalization, the exoticism of the quotidian. Even more surprising is the penetration of kitsch into a domain that was not only hostile to it but erected as a reaction against it: design. It has evolved following the rules dictated by Bauhaus: the orthogonal rigor, rational geometry, pureness, simplicity, and the sincerity of the object— all of which are loathed by decorative proliferation. Ornament—is the enemy; design imposes a universe of strictness and functionality. However, now we are witnessing a wedding of old adversaries. Design opens itself to the most unbridled kitsch and lends itself to contorted and comical forms. The Campana brothers give in to extravagant Baroque. Michael Graves imagines a kettle of a singing bird. Oscar Tusquets Blanca creates an Alibaba canapé. RADI Designers construct a fantastic garden covered with outsized plastic vegetables. Philippe Starck conceives a golden stool in the form of a gnome! It’s no longer the functional reason that appears as design’s horizon of expectation but creative, poetic, and ludic fantasy. Even fashion has grabbed hold of kitsch, which not only touches objects, decors, and images, but becomes a marker and a commercial tool. Brands have deliberately chosen a kitsch positioning. Desigual specializes in a hotchpotch of vivid colors. Gucci moves from porno chic to bohemian chic. Fiorucci presents collections that mix glitter and candy pink. Versace, Prada, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Vivienne Westwood take the liberty of doing any kind of madness: shoes with sequined platforms, sparkling rhinestone glasses, shell-shaped tops, T-shirts with pieces of meat, rustling ball costumes, dressers in the form of a puff, and pink dresses embroidered with ostrich feathers, like the ones that Valentino had Kaia Gerber parade in. Kitsch, considered from the beginning as an under-luxury, has become a trendy luxury, mixing excess and extravagance, funniness, and glamour. Neo-kitsch is no longer the antinome of the creative avant-garde, as interpreted by Greenberg; it simply merges with it. Kitsch once covered interior design, furnishing, objects, and trinkets. Today it has moved to street art, exposing itself in depth and breadth,

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provocative or ludic, mixing naïf designs, bubbles of colors, Rococo ornamentation, contorted graphism, and childish collages. Shepard Fairey illustrates his portraits with flower decorations, comic book faces, and pompous images. In contrast, Banksy gets polemic messages across through graffiti, staging Super Mario, Snow White, Steve Jobs, and The Raft of the Medusa.

2 Kitsch, Seduction Capitalism, and the Individualization of Consumption What does the extension of kitsch domains look like? Why has our civilization abdicated the modernist rejection of ornament unmistakably understood as a crime? Milan Kundera states, “kitsch is an aesthetics supported by a world vision, almost a philosophy. It’s beauty beyond knowledge. It’s the will to embellish things and to please. It’s total conformism.”8 But if kitsch pertains to the aesthetics of seduction, its amazing social expansion is heir to consumption capitalism, as this is no more than an economy of seduction, a system marked by an expansion of unprecedented seductive operations within the realm of production and communication, distribution, and culture. Given the indefinite development of mass consumption, we are indeed embedded in a system that confounds itself with industrialization and the mediation of seduction. Capitalism has turned seduction into an industrialized and mass publicized universe and a key principle of the functioning of economic and cultural life. Systematically combining economics and innovation, instrumental reasoning, and aesthetic process while mobilizing aesthesis, rational calculus, and emotional demand, consumerist capitalism functions as immense seduction engineering in which kitsch enjoys a privileged position. Because the goal of consumption capitalism, with a view to more sales, is to “please and touch,” how can we be surprised by the all-out exploitation of kitsch aesthetics that exclusively looks to seduce and entertain, to provide instant pleasure without making “a big fuss” about it?

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Consumption capitalism endeavors to please the public through attractive prices, well-being, novelties, and variety, but also images of enchantment, distraction, play, love songs, and dazzling and entertaining spectacles capable of immediately and effectively capturing the consumer’s desires. The reign of kitsch is democratic; it intends to provide the greatest number of distractive, aesthetic, and emotional pleasures. No longer art steered toward the social elites for their spiritual elevation, but a permanently renewed offer of access to the public of all continents without the need for their understanding a specific and scholarly training. On a grand scale, creative industries propose programs and devices of enchantment that flatter the taste of the general public—a kind of easy spectacular culture that fully partakes of the rapid expansion of consumerist civilization. Moreover, seduction capitalism is not only transformed by commercial offers. Since the mid-twentieth century, it hasn’t ceased distributing and legitimizing a fun morality: immediate consumption pleasures, easy entertainment, and enchanting leisure. It created an increasingly enthusiastic consumer of hyper-spectacles, aesthetic emotions, ludic evasions, daydreams, Hollywoodian romances, ambiance music, convened charms, and comfortable exoticisms. It has exacerbated and generalized the demand for kitsch. The social push of kitsch cannot be separated from the advent of a trans-aesthetic, hedonist, and ludic consumer in a world where you need to construct yourself without a model, constantly reinvent yourself and be performative in any kind of matter. Hence, increasingly heavy stress and ramped-up pressure are reinforced again by the dissolution of traditional references, the fear of an uncertain future, and the complexity of a progressively difficult world to master. In such a context, the marshmallow universe provides the relaxation of a gluttony moment: it relieves like a valve; it has the lightness of that which is futile, the taste of sweetness in the face of the heaviness and the bitterness of the quotidian. It appeals to aesthetic forms of fairy tales and naïf drawings, medley and technicolor, Baroque effects, and Rococo proliferations. It tastes itself in a voluptuous and wonderous abandonment that relieves us from the weight of our subjective freedom. The more a performative culture imposes itself, the more kitsch expands to alleviate

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the quotidian. Kitsch was traditionally associated with heaviness, heaping, and excess: today, it is relaxing laughter and ironic lightness. It expresses less contempt for the popular than a desire for the cheerful and distanced lightness. At the same time, with the erosion of the opposition between high and low, the commercial offer multiplies, collective control weakens with the extreme individualization of lifestyles, and the imposition of a “total look” underpinned by class conformists retreats. Individuals are much freer now, and so is their propensity for turning consumption into an instrument of subjective individualization. Within a culture dominated by an unrestrained process of individualization, that which escapes the standard of chic and legitimate beauty finds itself imbued with value, inasmuch as it represents a marker of individual personality not subject to impersonal “good taste.” As such, exhibiting objects or signs of “bad taste” at home can represent a refusal to be held prisoner by social norms, a sign of bigger freedom concerning taste. Introducing a garden dwarf into an ultra-chic interior functions like an audacious wink that projects ludic disrespect and subjective independence. Neo-kitsch taste shouldn’t be interpreted as a symbolic class imposition: it’s an expression of the culture of the hyper-individual, the unaligned and post-conformist, stirring subjective singularity. Paradoxically, the social legitimation and the penetration of the ethics of individual authenticity (the right to be yourself ) in our mores have rendered kitsch legitimate which, in the old days, was synonymous with the very idea of inauthenticity.

Second-Level Kitsch If there is pleasure in the manifesting of individual difference, this act sees itself more and more reinforced by a second-degree pleasure: the amusing distance that one takes; for example, when singing an old song by Dalida in front of a karaoke screen, introducing a rubber soap dish in the form of a crocodile in the bathroom, choosing a yellow plush as a WaterClosets (WC) cover or when installing a plastic couch with big red daisies

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in your living room. All this happens while mouthing this nineteenthcentury dandy formula: “My god! How mean am I to allow myself to be that stupid.” It is to this kind of spirit that advertisements resort when adopting an offbeat tone that deliberately plays into stereotypes and clichés, into what is old-fashioned and in bad taste, and into the tackiest possible ambiances. Overexposed and intentionally bad taste becomes cool; playing with it is a badge of taste freedom and individual autonomy. We have come to love spectacles of derision and excesses of vulgarity while experiencing a half-provocative, half-infantile pleasure in the consumption of the banal and bad taste as a way of ridding ourselves of codes and dictates of good taste. Hence, kitsch affirms itself as a value of and for itself. The “ugly,” or what traditionally has been felt like it, is full of flavor.9 “Ugly contests” are held in the United States. The World’s Ugliest Dog Contest celebrates man’s ugliest best friend, and ugly Christmas sweaters highlight that season’s most ridiculous second layer of clothing. Ugliness even succeeds in offering the specific pleasure of not being duped by what we appreciate and finding a supplementary satisfaction to amuse oneself. In the hypermodern era, where cultural hierarchies and class norms have eroded, where art no longer has a metaphysical ambition or a revolutionary vision, we see the development of a form of a kitsch spirit that we could frame, with Susan Sontag, as camp; an expression entailing second-­level sensibility, made from humor and ludic aesthetics, in relation to exaggerated things and “bad taste.” In societies defined by individualization in relation to the world, consumerism, and values, the outrageous, the extravagant, the banal, and the “ugly” become exhilarating objects; it’s “so bad that it’s good.” And the young generation, which sees nothing more than a funny theatricality in the imitation, the loud colors, and the aesthetic over-excess, gladly declares: “Kitsch, I love you.” The subjectivation of culture has enabled playfulness to triumph over seriousness, leisure over social distinction, and amusement over quality. By liberating norms and class cultures, the relation to things has become largely hedonistic and intimate. Henceforth, pleasure, fun, and ludic distance have been valorized; it’s less about signifying one’s membership in a distinguished social class by expressing that one has “good taste” and more about enjoying oneself, “having fun,” being independently delighted

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by the classical symbolic categorizations. As such, an entire public enjoys, without sulking, television series like Dallas, Spaghetti Westerns, and epic Hollywood movies, and it does so without shame or triggering the wrath of their entourage. The social acceptance of the right to be and freely disposing over oneself has opened the way to a world in which anti-­ conformism spreads and is no longer shocking, and where people look more to surprise than to dazzle and more to delight than to maintain a cultural honorability and a taste quality under the ascendency of the objective “good-bad” axis. In this sense, we should see an expression of emotional, relativistic, or perspectivist neo-individualism in the camp sensibility and the growing favor that kitsch enjoys these days. It translates less the nihilism and failure of culture and taste denounced by the nostalgic tenants of the traditional high culture10 than a new individualistic culture which, by turning every individual into its own referent, has liberated tastes, pleasures, and the whole of the artistic sphere from conventional frameworks and ancient elitist diktats. So much so that, as Broch argued, we can no longer purely and simply assimilate kitsch as a “neurotic” aesthetics and attitude of life dominated by sentimentalism, convention, and beautiful fake effects. It is the homo kitschicus of a new genre that unfurls. No longer a romantic neurosis, but an ironic play with things, images, and clichés; no longer grandiloquent and academic aestheticism, but cool detachment; no longer the conformism of appearance, but the freedom of pleasures that savors extravagant fantasies by itself; no longer the submissiveness of taste to social norms and constraints, but the tender and smiling joy of assuming its almost childish desire for marvelous and enchanted castle worlds.

The Kitschization of Subjectivity Beyond new objects and spaces are new attitudes, ways of being, and showing that signal the new age of kitsch. In the past, we could characterize the kitsch man by his sentimentality, conformism, and obsessive passion for material well-being. Nowadays, it is other types of behavior, and a new spirit expresses the kitsch sensibility.

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We have witnessed the growing success of tattoos (aside from ethnic traditions) previously reserved for sailors and “bad boys.” Nowadays, they are a fashion statement for men and women, young and old, backgrounds branches, and popular categories. More and more young people exhibit themselves as a way of playing with their bodies, overdoing them with colors, motifs, forms, and inscriptions that offer an impressive catalog of the heteroclite, the Baroque, and the excessive. The skin becomes kitsch decor, and the body reveals itself by staging it. While doing so, it sees itself reinforced by other ostensible manifestations of self, such as outrageous makeup, piercing, pendants, and other mixed ribbons that are hung around the neck, wrists, and ankles. The hypermodern man has come to “kitschize” his own body to singularize himself. This demand for individualization is even more at play in those spaces opened by new virtual communication mediums. La Toile11 has become overexposed with kitsch images: on social media, everyone attempts to show themselves, to exhibit themselves by all means possible, yearning for the approval of friends and followers. It is, above all, through posts and pictures, about telling that one exists by revealing his singular taste from the most classic to the funniest. Who cares about the content of the messages, the “good taste,” or the quality when what’s important is to show what one likes here and now? Who cares about the banality of the conversations, the sameness of the “posts,” the photos of the sunset, and all those clichés associated with the good and the emotional, because we love it, and it fills us with emotion? Who cares about the bottle of perfume as long as we get drunk? It’s about the emotion that prevails and is valorized, not the beautiful alone or the creation. It’s an emotionalized subjectivism that entertains our new relationship with kitsch. Within a culture that exalts pleasure and the individual being, the excesses of kitsch can triumph without any symbolic sanction. This once was the synonym of blind following and conventionalism: today, it appears as a way, among others, of expressing our emotional individuality. As it appears in its “neo” register, kitsch is also a way of affirming individual subjectivity, making fun of the norms of legitimate culture, escaping taste’s conformism, stereotypes of “seriousness,” and “respectable” appearances. With the selfie or the funniest pose, the most grimacing expression, or the silliest attitude worthy of shared curiosity, everyone

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enters the scene by showing themselves indifferent to the norms of beauty, which often doesn’t succeed without a kind of infantilism. With its all-­ full cute side, the kawaii spirit is very much like emoji signage, where the pictograms seem to stem directly from a Miyazaki movie and, on occasion, transform La Toile into a playground. Kitsch, formerly relieved of bourgeois conventionalism, becomes the favorite domain of the cool youth, “delirium,” offbeat and riskless style. While kitsch initially represented the conformism of imitation and the negation of autonomous individualism, today, it has shifted into small individual dandyism within everybody’s range. A bling-bling kitsch has indeed unfolded parallel to this subjectivized kitsch, the same one that translates, occasionally arrogantly, ostentatious logos onto clothes and bags with a have-you-seen-me attitude that thrives especially on “rich kids” websites. Henceforth, the “show off” spirit steeped in vanity culture can’t hide that which is most significant for our epoch: the rise of a distinctive will that does not respond to class or wealth but to a personal ostentation that enables one to assume the least noble and most eccentric, the least socially distinguished and most stereotyped signs; kitsch as high art.

3 On Kitsch Considered as one of the Fine Arts The Plural Aesthetics of Neo-Kitsch From its very origins, kitsch was excluded from fine art. It was seen as the dark side, representing degradation, negation, and perversion. In an absolute turnaround, what was once considered a by-product, a by-­ culture, now attracts more and more artists who appropriate it and work with and around it; through diverse registers, this bears witness to a veritable artificialization of kitsch. The most obvious and direct first register is what we could call le kitsch pour le kitsch, like l’art pour l’art. An ingenious, innocent, basic kitsch developed in all quietness—familiar and self-evident. Jeff Koons offers

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the perfect example: no transgression or second degree, but instead a way of turning everything aseptic, of embellishing the banal, of transforming everything into infantile happiness: a balloon, a rabbit, a bear cub, a pink panther, a bouquet of tulips. “One could see at first sight the irony in my work, but I don’t see any. Irony causes excessive critical contemplation,” declared Koons.12 It’s the assumed and free creation of an artificial carelessness, a paradisiacal and cozy universe. We have arrived at first-degree kitsch, without distance, made for arousing a re-comforting well-being, an immediate pleasure, the sensation which makes one feel at home in this stereotyped world, whether it’s the typical and blue flowered Paris of Amélie (Poulain) or the operetta court of Empress Sissi. The receipt is infallible: Sissi broke all television programming records, Amélie Poulain pursued her fabulous destiny on movie screens, and in 2019, the steel molding of the inflatable Rabbit sculpture by Jeff Koons sold for $ 91.1 million at Christie’s. Against this careless and light kitsch, a more ambiguous one developed that, while reserving a place for that which is bleak, invites one to call into question, at least partially, Milan Kundera’s entrenched position when he affirms that “kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”13 Given the new creations, this is no longer accurate; we witness today the deployment of kitsch artwork that is not unidimensional and does not reduce itself to a smooth and happy spectacle of wonderland or the “categorical agreement of being.”14 No longer a paradisiac well-being but the reflection of a world that carries within it threats and misfortunes. Damien Hirst indeed aestheticizes his dead head encrusted with 8901 diamonds. But, the bottom of the question is there: it’s a skull that, in its own way, recaptures the vanitas theme and the finitude of things detaching itself from this “art of happiness,” which, according to Abraham Moles, is what kitsch embodies.15 Cut and conserved in formol, the shark staged by Hirst offers the spectacle of particularly macabre contemporary art. Likewise, Gilbert and George compose motley photomontages that resemble windows with multicolored flowers in bloom, lightly dressed youngsters, and burlesque scenes where they include themselves in the staging in imaginary and funny postures. Yet, these lightweight visions are surrounded by diabolic masques, morbid scenes, and sanguine

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crucifixions. The religious imaginary developed by David LaChapelle is also steeped in intrusive shades that show individual and social misery, derision, dereliction, disaster, and apocalypse. This negative part affects even dark kitsch, illustrated by the distraught zombies that appear in Georges Romero’s movies, Michael Jackson’s cult clip Thriller, or the morbid compositions by Wim Delvoye: a Madonna with a dead head, a stained-glass window with skeletons, and tattooed pigs. For their part, Jake and Dinos Chapman create monstrous mannequins in synthetic fiber and mutant and deformed children’s bodies, as if they stemmed from a nightmarish cloning. A kitsch that tunes into the spirit of the times of transgender variations that accumulate gory clichés, bloody metamorphoses, and swollen and tattooed bodies; these transgender variations are the very trendy phases of the iron path that the main character of Titane must traverse to construct an identity. The movie earned a Palme d’Or in 2021 at Cannes and was shortlisted at the Oscars. In certain cases, it can lead to extreme provocations; this is the case with Paul McCarthy when he erects inflatable sculptures in the form of butt plugs in places of elegance and luxury, like the Place Vendôme, or in an exhibition titled Inflation! (not without malice). But it could more shrewdly imply a kind of game. And it is within the distance of this proper measure where kitsch, playing the game and getting played, finds in its more subtle variations a Janus side: an almost-but-not-absolutelykitsch attitude that seeks to make understandable both the lighthearted and the genuine, the ludic and the profound. A work of art like Joanna Vasconcellos’s appears as the perfect illustration.16 Far from Jeff Koons’ kitsch, the Portuguese artist impregnates the work with meaning and, far from conceiving art as a pure aesthetic game that eliminates the evils and the imperfections of the real, she creates a body of work admittedly seductive yet mixed with a social critique that plays out the contradictions of the world, makes sense, defends values, and expresses its disagreement with the present. The perfect union of the sublime and the derisory, the serious and the ironic, Vasconcelos makes the stellar figure of Marilyn Monroe shine by constructing a luxurious giant shoe, the very symbol of glamourous beauty, but completely composed of trivial saucepans reminiscent of women’s domestic condition. Likewise, she erects a luster monument,

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wholly of virgin whiteness, by laying out hundreds of hygienic tampons and an imposing red heart inspired by a traditional motif from Portuguese jewelry and a synonym of passion made from 4,000 plastic spoons and forks. Pain and the shadows of life dilute across an amusing and ironic fantasy achieving a masterful work, both ambivalent and subtle, where “almost” is more relevant than “too much.’ This also illustrates the universe of Pedro Almodóvar, a patchwork that defies good taste, a constant mix of genres: melodrama and comedy, masculine and feminine, diverted quotes, infantile pleasures, Sulpician Rococo, many-colored decor, romantic sentimentalism, and provocative sexuality. Almodóvar plays out all the pleasure and suffering of life at the same time, symbolizing a world of “pain and glory,” according to the title of one of his most recent movies in which he reflects on his own artistic career.17A third kind of kitsch has come to light: ironic, problematic, and critical. Inscribing itself within this atemporal vein of what Eugenio d’Ors defined as “permanent Baroque’18 or through an abundance of forms, it reads like a quest for elevation and sense.

The All-Art Dignification and kitsch consecration. Impossible in our eyes to understand such a symbolic reversal without a connection to the advent, from the 1960s on, of what we have convened calling “contemporary art.” With its chain transgressions, it called into question the notion of art, the profession of the artist, and the traditional criteria of artwork ending with its abolition, thus the hierarchical dichotomy of noble art-popular art, great art-minor art, and art-quotidian banality. Since the 1960s, pop artists have rehabilitated the serial supermarket object pushing into the limelight industrial products. By so doing, they have diluted the opposition between high and “low” culture, between the artwork and the industrial product, and between creation and mechanical reproduction. Hyper-realism later highlighted billboards, motorbikes, car bodies, and window shops. From then on, the original avant-garde problematics, praised by Greenberg, have been deconstructed; art no longer requires formal pureness, the crippling rejection of commercial kitsch, and the

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seductions of the world. Utilitarian everyday objects and images of media-market worlds have gained entry to the artistic city. With today’s common contemporary art standards, the hierarchical problematics of culture has jumped into the air. “Anything is art,” proclaims Fluxus artist Ben, well-known for his “writings” questioning the limits between art and non-art. Nothing is prohibited anymore. Nothing is to be excommunicated anymore. It comprises all that is considered commercial, infantile, media-driven, and “easy.” “Art is not only inscribed in a Van Gogh painting or a sculpture. For me, art is anything that excites or stimulates the spectator,” declared Koons.19 When an artistic hierarchy ceases, is there anything to prevent us from elevating a toy, a piece of earthenware, or a teddy bear to the heights of art? This reversal of the hierarchy is the process of the desacralization of the most profoundly made art by the modern imaginary of equality but also by the rapid expansion of image civilization, spectacle, and entertainment (publicity, Hollywood films, television series, comics, leisure theme parks, star systems…). The extraordinary expansion of the image society has contributed to dignifying kitsch taste for pastiche and iconic characters. She has given birth to a hyper-spectacle society that also embodies that of generalized entertainment. Through this process, the image society has allowed us to stop feeling guilty about our love of kitsch, spectacle aesthetics, shock images, and all sorts of subjective tastes, including those of commercial mediocrity and artistic banality. The hyper-image society has changed the relationship to kitsch and its social image.

The Institutional Acknowledgment of Kitsch This breakthrough of kitsch inside the art world, to which it was previously barred, reached a climax through its museum institutionalization. In 2000, the historically charged Bagatelle Château and Parc held a large exhibition of garden gnomes, and in 2008 and 2010, Koons and Murakami were exhibited at Versailles. Henceforth, kitsch has its perfect place in the museum: the acknowledgment of naïf art, acclaimed in 1937 by the large exhibition dedicated in Paris to the Les Maîtres populaires de

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la réalité (popular masters of reality), opened the door to other minor art forms which the institution formerly rejected. Today, Musée International des Arts Modestes, founded by Hervé Di Rosa, strives to showcase that “which has been forgotten, marginal (commercial or wild), hidden, or is peripheric to creation.”20 And in 2021, the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (Mucem Marseille), whose popular art collection contains up to one million items, presented the works by Jeff Koons from the Pinault collection in dialogue with works culled from its permanent acquisitions. The caution shown by great institutions thus provides a form of legitimation to the innumerable museums of lesser importance that can devote themselves to eminently kitsch objects: museums of hairstyles, jukeboxes, animated scale models, small-scale models, and dolls. The French city of Romans-sur-Isère has disseminated monumental, colored, and shining sculptures of kitsch shoes everywhere in its streets, announcing its International Shoe Museum. Such examples abound in the Museum of the Unusual at Loriol-sur-Drôme, with more than 10,000 items contained in a true curiosity cabinet: ex-voto, cigar rings, posters, sculpted pipes, and even a coffin in the form of a crucifix made by the painter-­ founder, Max Manent, and covered with the skeleton of a naked woman with arms outstretched. That which is pompier art and yet occupies a pivotal place in one of the most relevant museums in France is said to be kitsch, as is the case with the Musée d’Orsay. It is recognized, stirs exhibitions, and has been sought after by big collectors who open their collections to contemporary art. It rubs shoulders with art brut and ethnic art, with whom the non-­ expert spectator confounds on occasions, being the motifs and colors of the garments of Thai dancers or the ornamented Indian trucks felt by a Western eye as pertaining to the purest kitsch decoration. Also classified as a historical monument is the Palais Idéal (Ideal Palace) from the postman Cheval, where André Malraux saw the sole representative of naïf art whose inspiration’s syncretism and forms offer a super-kitsch blending. We must add the growing number of savvy books, colloquiums, large newspapers, and art magazines that have grabbed the subject. Like so many other instances of social recognition of the phenomenon, the

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subject has become “serious,” legitimate, and worthy of analysis. Via television broadcasts, press impact, photos, social networks, kitsch shines with all these lights: we live in the era of its artistic and media consecration.

Consecration by the Art Market: Kitsch at a High Price The explosion of “souvenir” boutiques in every tourist site on the planet, with their inevitable batch of trinkets, glass beads, derived products, and diverse crafts, bears witness to the symbolic consecration that unfurls against a background of tremendous commercial success. We no longer need to count the boutiques in the hearts of the cities with their kitsch posters, sweet color gadgets, junk jewelry, and useless, extravagant, derisory trifles. Everywhere an avalanche of postcards with incredibly rich kitsch clichés, Edenic sunsets, idealized and sentimental landscapes, romantic seasides, colorful decor, and pin-ups radiant with happiness. Yet the radical novelty is that parallel to this mass market, another ultra-elitist one is developing that serves as a guarantee; artwork that ostensibly surrenders to kitsch is among the most expensive, valued at dozens of millions of dollars. Damien Hirst appears among the 50 biggest British fortunes, and the creations by Jeff Koons continue to smash sales records at auctions; he has been consecrated as the most expensive living artist on the planet. It’s an economic sort of valorization that arouses somewhere else overtly commercial strategies: the creation of series that deploy the artwork by multiplying its copies, and thus profits; the multiplication of public commissions; partnerships with big brands to design furniture, watches, and design clothing; the production of complementary products accompanying exhibitions and events. And it is these astronomic prices that make headlines. Style is less emphasized than price; because of this, we speak of “art for the new rich.” A luxury market has thus replaced that which was only an infra-product and infra-luxury. Dignified, institutionalized, artificialized, and “luxurized,” kitsch can henceforth allow itself, through a supreme reversal, not only to be expensive but also prohibitive. For a very long time, fake has been the height of luxury.

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Notes 1. Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, Le nouvel âge du kitsch. Essai sur la civilisation du “trop” (Paris: Gallimard, 2023). 2. Herman Broch, Quelques remarques à propos du kitsch (Paris: Allia, 2001 [1955], 33. 3. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde et kitsch” in Art et culture. Essais critiques (Paris: Macula, 1989 [1939]), 18. 4. Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, L’Esthétisation du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 317. 5. Umberto Eco, La Guerre du Faux (Paris: Grasset, 1985). 6. Abraham Moles, Psychologie du kitsch (Paris: Denoë-Médiation, 1971), 92. 7. See www.boutiquekitschnswell.com 8. Interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, “Les grands entretiens”, Lire (Oct., 2021 [1984]), 563. 9. Alice Pfeiffer, Le goût du moche (Paris: Flammarion, 2021). 10. “Being able to watch what’s horrible, dreadful, hideous as something more than just fascinating and interesting, it means that you have passed the test that gives you access into the ‘inner sanctum’ of elegance of contemporary nihilism.” Marc Fumaroli, Paris—New York et retour (Paris: Flammarion, 2011), 642. 11. Translator’s note: La Toile de Jouy Museum is a Paris-based museum that manufactured “Toile de Jouy” designs with many mythological, nature and fabled patterns. 12. Quoted in David W.  Galenson, Conceptual Revolution in Twentieth-­ Century Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 176. 13. Milan Kundera, L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 357. 14. Ibid., 356. 15. Moles, ibid. 16. See our analysis in Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, Joana Vasconcelos ou o Reencatamento da Arte (Lisbon: Ediçoes 70, 2021), 156–169. 17. Pain and Glory, a movie by Pedro Almodóvar with Antonio Banderas, 2019. 18. Eugenio d’Ors, Du Baroque (Paris: Gallimard, 2000 [1936]).

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19. Videoconference Jeff Koons on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition at Mucem Marseille. See: https://www.mucem.org/programme/ exposition-­et-­temps-­forts/jeff-­koons-­mucem 20. See https://miam.org

Bibliography Broch, Herman. Quelques remarques à propos du kitsch. Paris: Allia, 2001 [1955]. De Gaudemar, Antoine. “Les grands entretiens.” Lire (Oct., 2021 [1984]). D’Ors, Eugenio. Du Baroque. Paris: Gallimard, 2000 [1936]. Eco, Umberto. La Guerre du Faux. Paris: Grasset, 1985. Fumaroli, Marc. Paris—New York et retour. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. Galenson, David W. Conceptual Revolution in Twentieth-Century Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-garde et kitsch.” In Art et culture. Essais critiques. Paris: Macula, 1989 [1939]). Kundera, Milan. L’Insoutenable légèreté de l’être. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Lipovetsky, Gilles and Jean Serroy. L’Esthétisation du monde. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. Lipovetsky, Gilles and Jean Serroy. Joana Vasconcelos ou o Reencatamento da Arte. Lisbon: Ediçoes 70, 2021. Moles, Abraham. Psychologie du kitsch. Paris: Denoë-Médiation, 1971. Pfeiffer, Alice. Le goût du moche. Paris: Flammarion, 2021.

Sailing the Seas of Cheese Erik Anderson

1 Introduction It would be difficult to understand many aesthetic assessments in popular culture these days without a good grasp of the concepts of cheese, cheesy, and cheesiness. Part of the reason is that the high art/low art distinction upon which aesthetic assessments in the modern tradition following Hume and Kant depend is not operative within contemporary popular culture.1 It would be a bit too strong to assert that there are no sets of “disproportionate pairs”2 of artworks at all to serve as standards by which to orient our aesthetic assessments. But this is precisely what makes the concept of cheese useful, and that is perhaps what explains its ubiquity. Cheesiness is relative, and the conditions of application of the term are subjective in just the right way to make it useful in a sea of relativity. I borrow the title from the 1991 Primus album of the same name, Interscope Records.

E. Anderson (*) Drew University, Madison, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_3

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My hope is that by shedding light on the nature of cheese and cheesiness, we will, indirectly, shed light on what it is for a work to be good art in contemporary popular culture.3 Consider an initial example. Bill Murray’s subtly brilliant bad lounge singer skits from early Saturday Night Live episodes are a beautiful parody of cheesy hotel-lounge entertainment. But Murray’s act itself is not cheesy at all. Rather, it is a parody of the cheese or cheesiness of bad lounge acts found across the United States—but probably most often associated with the ones found in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. There is something embarrassing, perhaps painful, and almost contemptible about such acts, even though they are completely and utterly harmless. They are harmless, and yet the parody works because of a shared sense of derision we direct toward the targets: real lounge acts. On the way out of a hotel hosting such a real act we might advise people on the way in: “Whatever you do, don’t go near the lounge. The singer in there is the biggest cheeseball we’ve ever seen.” Cheese abounds in popular culture. Consider a few obvious examples: Celine Dion’s over-the-top big-tent Vegas act that sold out nightly for over three years from 2003 to 2007; much of what appears on American Idol, the most popular show on American television; as well as just about anything by Barry Manilow, Pat Boone, Michael Bolton, and Kenny G, just to name a precious few. And cheese isn’t restricted to music. Cheese and cheesiness appear in all forms of popular culture: music, movies, books, painting, photography, sculpture, and architecture—and this list is certainly not exhaustive. Examples might include a pandering political speech, a gold chain on a hairy chest, the Rock and Roll McDonald’s in Chicago, some Anne Geddes works, many Hallmark greeting cards, special effects in some movies, precious photos of cute little baby tigers wearing hats, and so on and so forth. The purely aesthetic senses of “cheese,” “cheesy,” and “cheesiness” which I’m interested in are distinct from some other—perhaps related—senses of the terms. So distinguish this sense of “cheese” from some others. For example, someone might say, “Wipe that cheesy grin off your face” to

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indicate mock-disapproval of but wry appreciation for a shared in-joke. Of course one might also use that same expression to indicate genuine disapproval for an inauthentic or disingenuous smile. I’ve heard the term used in another alternative sense as well: “Cover up those cheesy legs; you’re blinding us!” This is an aesthetic sense of the term, but not the one I’ll be addressing here. Use of the term “cheesy” is widening rapidly. Witness a recent editorial in the New York Times, October 16, 2008: The nation still doesn’t know the full extent of President Bush’s obsession with eavesdropping on citizens, but here’s a cheesy new aspect: Phone calls home from American soldiers, aid workers and journalists in Iraq were reported to have been tapped and stored by military agents supposedly searching for terrorist intelligence leads.

I’m not even sure that this is a legitimate sense of the term “cheesy,” but in any case it is not the sense of the term I’m interested in. Further examples will help to clarify this point. A more legitimate use of the concept—and one much closer to the sense of the term I have in mind—appeared in USA Today, just after the election of Barack Obama. On the subject of Senator Claire McCaskill’s early endorsement of Obama: She was the first female senator to back Obama over Hillary Clinton. McCaskill said her daughter had pushed her to take a stand and not be “a cheesy politician who’s playing it safe.”4

A similar use comes from Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times, November 19, 2008, on involving the Clintons in his new administration: Obama is overlooking all his cherished dictums against drama and leaking and his lofty vetting standards to try and create a situation where the country can benefit from the talent of the Clintons while curbing their cheesy excesses, like their cash flow from foreigners.

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The point is fairly clear: cheesy politicians take the easy way out, securing their position by clinging to what is safe, refusing to take political risks that might constitute or precipitate genuine progress. Maureen Dowd, again, March 19, 2008: With the Clintons, we expect them to be cheesy on ethics, so no one is ever surprised when they are.

These examples shed some light on the seemingly odd use of the concept in USA Today, which we saw above: Bush’s obsession with eavesdropping on his own citizens can be seen as cheesy because a clear violation of civil rights is being defended, not in some subtle, innovative, or even devious way, but instead by invoking the tired and lame old excuse that “it’s in the interest of our national security.” Now, that’s cheesy. It’s not cheesy in the aesthetic sense, but we’re getting there. Here are some further examples of cheesiness. Pick-up lines are almost always cheesy. Cheating at video games, or at least winning unfairly over and over in the same mechanical way is cheesy. A friend of mine recently complained about how cheesy it was to hold a tropical-themed wedding reception at a chain hotel in the Poconos. Similar uses of the concept are ubiquitous in contemporary popular culture. “Did you see Burt Reynolds? He still has that cheesy porno mustache.” Cheese Whiz is cheesy, but not in the relevant sense. However, the contrast with cheese, the dairy product, is instructive. On the one hand, there is no food product cheesier than Cheese Whiz. On the other hand, there is nothing about Cheese Whiz itself that is cheesy in the aesthetic sense. Of course it might be strikingly cheesy to serve Cheese Whiz at a cocktail party or something like that—in which case, Cheese Whiz would be cheesy in both senses of the term. What it is to be cheese in the former sense is to be a sample of a dairy product of a certain kind, and what it is to be such a sample is a matter of its composition. Thus “cheesy” in this sense indicates something intrinsic; it expresses an intrinsic property. But what it is to be cheesy in the aesthetic sense is something relational. Thus to be “cheesy” in the sense I am interested in is a matter of the possession of a relational property. For this reason, to someone from a country like

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France, where much natural cheese is produced, Cheese Whiz might indeed seem strikingly cheesy in the relevant sense: as unnecessarily processed food, almost as a snack packaged for children and marketed to adults. Some object’s being cheesy, then, involves, obviously, its relations to other things—which may or may not themselves be cheesy. Take this piece of ripe Camembert I have in my pocket. It’s mine; I stole it fair and square from my friend Philippe, who made it. But it could exist without me, or Philippe, for that matter. Imagine now a possible world in which this piece of Camembert exists alone, not just in Philippe’s and my absence, but all by itself—in a “lonely world.”5 This is just a way of saying that the property of being (a sample of ) Camembert cheese is an intrinsic property. Things are different for the aesthetic sense of “cheese.” Cheesiness of this kind is relational. Something whose intrinsic properties remained the same might change in its aesthetic cheesiness, depending upon its relations to other things. Burt Reynold’s mustache would not have been cheesy had he lived in the civil war era, and it might not even be cheesy today, if he moved to, say, Baghdad. Cheesiness is also, obviously, a matter of taste. The popularity of KISS, Celine Dion and American Idol make this point almost too obvious to mention. However, although cheesiness is relational and a matter of taste, change with respect to cheesiness is still genuine change, and not mere, as they say, “Cambridge change.”6 To get a better grip on “cheese,” “cheesy,” and “cheesiness,” it will be helpful to distinguish them from some other some similar concepts that are easily confused with them.

2 Nearby Concepts Unpleasant People find atonal music unpleasant, but none call it cheesy, unless there are other things about it that make it so aside from its unpleasantness. So

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to say that something is cheesy is not simply to say that we dislike it because we find it unpleasant. Not all cheese is unpleasant anyway. Kenny G’s “Forever in Love” is moderately pleasant—in fact, it is this simple, or simplistic pleasantness that, in combination with other things about it, makes it cheesy. Obviously, not everything unpleasant is cheesy. Dentist office visits are not cheesy, although the décor found in dentist’s offices certainly can be.

Tacky Something can be tacky without being cheesy. For example, the use of fluorescent paints in a barroom or a dance hall can be tacky without being cheesy. During a KISS concert, when Gene Simmons spits blood out of his mouth, it’s certainly tacky, but it’s debatable whether it’s cheesy. A choreographer or set designer or costume designer might dress his dancers in overly revealing outfits, which we would call tacky but might not call cheesy. Similarly, something can be cheesy without being tacky. A cheesy picture of cute, little, cuddling, baby tigers hung on a dorm room wall is cheesy, but it’s not tacky, unless they are up to something vulgar.

Cheap/Chintzy We might complain about the cheesiness of some exurban Mexican restaurant, its frozen margaritas with mini-Sombreros, its gaudy piñatas, red vinyl booths, neon Corona Beer signs, looping vals mexicanos and wait staff dressed daily in outfits appropriate only for Cinco de Mayo. Certainly part of our complaint is that the restaurant is a cheap substitute for the genuine article, something built out of the easiest and chintziest stereotypical elements that exurbanites might associate with Mexico. But although we might want to say that something is cheesy in virtue of the fact that it looks poorly constructed or slapped-together—and hence looks cheap or chintzy—“cheesy’ is not synonymous with either “cheap” or “chintzy.” There are many examples of expensive, bloated-budget films that are prime examples of Grade A cheese. John Travolta’s Battleship

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Earth—a veritable feast of cheese—is a most obvious example. Nothing stands in the way of producing very expensive cheese. In fact, and Battleship Earth is a good example of this, something’s being costly might add to rather than subtract from its cheesiness.

Tasteless This is harder: judgments about cheesiness are judgments of taste, and cheesiness is intrinsically derogatory. So to describe something as cheesy in the aesthetic sense is to charge that the work, or the performers or producers of the work are lacking in taste. But it would be a bit too strong to say that something’s being cheesy makes it or its producers tasteless. Similarly, not everything tasteless is cheesy. Sexual jokes can make a screenplay tasteless without making it cheesy. Andrew Dice Clay’s act from the 1980s is a good example of tasteless non-cheese.

Trite What is trite is commonplace, stale, and tired; hackneyed, corny, and clichéd. At least that’s what my Word thesaurus says. “Trite” is certainly in the immediate neighborhood of “cheesy.” But it is too harsh. When Celine Dion breaks into her “air-guitar” routine, squinting her eyes and pouting her lips in an attempt to inject emotive force into her performance, the result is cheesy, certainly, but it would be overharsh to describe it as trite. It invites eye-rolling, but not the same derision we direct at something trite like playing “Stairway to Heaven” in a guitar store.

Crass For similar reasons, “crass” doesn’t capture what it is to be cheesy. What is crass is insensitive and is typically morally objectionable. The guy who insists on injecting, “That’s what she said,” at every opening in a conversation is being crass, not cheesy. Cheesiness is harmless, although objectionable for other reasons. The cute little baby tigers on the dorm room

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wall are cheesy, but not crass, because there isn’t really anything insensitive or morally objectionable about them.

Schlock People say that “schlock” is the Yiddish term for cheese. I can’t claim any kind of authority here, but this doesn’t seem to be quite right. “Schlock” implies sloppiness in construction. This is sometimes the case with cheese too. But it need not be; cheese can be very carefully crafted. Again, Kenny G is a great example of very carefully handcrafted, Grade-A Cheese. So something might be cheesy and yet fail to be schlocky. “Schlock Rock,” which applies to “Hair Metal” bands of the 1980s, such as Poison and Winger, as well as to contemporary acts modeled after the originals, provides a good example of the ground on which the two concepts converge: the big hair, the spandex, the three-power-chord-­ progressions, the fluorescent guitars with the acute angles, the smoke, the pyrotechnics, the towering banks of amplifiers, the twenty-five-piece drum kit … It’s all too much to take seriously, and this is surely some of the appeal. Aesthetic and artistic quality are sacrificed in order to make room for the grossly over-the-top presentation.

Corny The concept of corniness is obviously very close to the concept of cheesiness. First of all, there is the food connection, and there is certainly an overlap in application of the two concepts. What is cornball might just as well be described as cheeseball. In some cases, the two terms are interchangeable: corny special effects are cheesy special effects. Yet “corny” might have an application to certain cheap and silly jokes that wouldn’t typically be termed “cheesy.” The former is more playful than the latter, and the latter implies an inauthenticity not part of corniness. A speech at a wedding reception might be corny because of its sentimentality or silly humorousness, but fail to be cheesy because the sentiment or humor involved is not invoked for manipulative effect.

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Cliché A natural suggestion might be that we react negatively to cheesy art because “it’s so 1999.”7 But cheesy isn’t the same as cliché either. Consider the contrast between cool Memphis Elvis and cheesy Vegas Elvis. The problem with the rhinestones and the bellbottoms and the giant collars and the throwing of the sweaty scarves isn’t that it’s so 1950s. We don’t say, “I can’t believe Elvis wheeled out that old chestnut of an act.” The act is cheesy, but not cliché. Of course someone who covers his Vegas-era act now is almost doomed to cliché. But his own act, in 1972 Las Vegas, is not cliché. Similarly, cliché is not sufficient for cheese. An eight-year-old child at the school talent show might sing “Good Ship Lollipop” and it would be, of course, cliché, but not necessarily cheesy. If the act included in addition lots of make-up and American Idol-style over-singing and over-­acting, then it would be approaching cheesiness. But being simply cliché is not enough for being cheesy. In fact, if Elvis has simply recycled his 1950s act for the shows of 1970s Las Vegas, this would have been preferable simply in virtue of the fact that it would have been merely cliché, and not cheesy in addition.

Showy Cheese can result from something’s being overly showy. There is evidence that at one stage in the evolution of the use of the term, “cheesy” did just mean “showy,” descending ultimately from “the big cheese.”8 But the two concepts have diverged since. Memphis Elvis and Vegas Elvis are both showy, but only the latter is cheesy. For that matter, the Taj Mahal is showy, but it’s not cheesy. Similarly, not everything cheesy is showy. Neither Bobby Darin’s version of “Mack the Knife” nor Sonny Rollins’ “Moriat,” based on the same tune, is particularly showy, but only the former is cheesy. One especially revealing and instructive use of the concept of cheesiness I found listening to a recent playoff series on the radio. The announcer gleefully—but, paradoxically, also slightly peevishly—charged that “Tonight the pitcher has been painting the corners of the plate with

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cheese.” Here the term is used to indicate a pitch that has an allure similar to that of a specious argument. On the surface it looks good, but it is misleadingly good-looking. In the end, it’s what leads to the batter’s demise: “Struck him out with the high cheese!?”

3 Kitsch, Camp, and Cheese Kitsch If I give you a piece of kitsch art, perhaps as a gift, or a joke, what I give you is an inferior, tasteless copy which I know will produce in you an easy sentimental response. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s complicated. There is a voluminous literature devoted to kitsch and kitsch art,9 but apparently, the term was used originally to refer to cheap and sentimental imitative art, popular among the Nuevo Riche in mid-to-late nineteenth-­century Munich. Over time the term came to connote artwork of such poor construction, bad taste, pretentiousness and, especially, melodramatic sentimentality, as to be considered immoral. At least this is the conclusion drawn by Robert Solomon, One of several suggested etymologies is that the word is German for “smear” or “playing with mud,” and, toying with this, we might speculate that the “mud” in question is emotion and mucking around with emotions inevitably makes a person “dirty.”10

We might level an obvious objection here, pointing to the fact that lots of what goes by the name “kitsch” is, although certainly sentimental, nevertheless sweet and harmless. Pink Flamingoes, lava lamps and lawn jockeys are kitschy but, surely, are not immoral. There is a genuine dispute here. Some authors adhere to what Deborah Knight calls “the standard view” that kitsch objects are of such poor taste that they deserve our moral derision.11 Others attempt to deflate such claims, noting either that there are value-neutral instances of sentimentality or that there are genuinely morally laudable ones.12 The fulcrum of

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the dispute seems to be a matter of, first, the magnitude of the sentiments involved and, second, the manner and degree to which they are exploited for the purposes of manipulation of the intended audience. The complaint about kitsch art is that it traffics in reproduction, sentiment and cliché, and that this makes its appeal purely superficial, and potentially dangerous by making the audience vulnerable to easy manipulation.13 The purely superficial appeal of kitschy objects, it is claimed, fails to engage the intellect in the way needed for genuine art-appreciation. Of course Kitsch art and Kitsch art-appreciation are not much concerned with non-aesthetic-but-art-relevant properties—things like originality and genius. As kitsch-object, a pink flamingo purchased at Wal-Mart for $5 is just as good—just as valuable—as one handmade by Picasso.14 Because cheese is similarly wrapped-up in sentimentality, reproduction and cliché, an analogous and equally genuine dispute arises in the case of cheesy art. But cheese and kitsch are not the same things. “Kitsch” can be used as a term of aesthetic approval, as when applied to works of art that embrace the sentimentality for what it is. I might complain about the Velvet Elvis above your fireplace: “Why do you have that horrible, tacky thing up there? I thought you had good taste.” You might correct me: “No, it’s kitschy; I love it.” But “cheese” is a derogatory term. After I complain about your Velvet Elvis, “What’s that horrible tacky thing doing up there?” it would be a misuse of the concept to reply, “No, it’s cheesy; I love it.”15 So something can be kitschy but not cheesy. The Velvet Elvis on the dorm room wall, the lawn jockey in the front yard, the garden gnome in the back yard, the studiously retro décor in the corner café are some examples. Similarly, one and the same thing might be cheesy but not kitschy. Pick-up lines are like this. The music of Kenny G is another good example. Although unquestionably cheesy, Kenny G is way too uncool to be kitschy; someone might collect Kenny G music as a joke, but not for its kitsch value. To pick a different example, of course the music of Dean Martin is, or was at one time very popular, and a great number of people actually listen to it on purpose and for the purpose of enjoyment. Isn’t that a counterexample to the claim that “cheesy” is a derogatory term? No. The

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distinction with kitschiness supplies the difference. A person can enjoy kitschy art while at the same time recognizing that it is kitschy. But no one simultaneously enjoys cheesy art while recognizing that it is cheesy. If they thought it was cheesy, they wouldn’t enjoy it. The claim is simply that no one simultaneously enjoys and judges as cheesy, say, Dean Martin’s “Volare”—although one might find it kitschy and enjoy it that way. But mightn’t someone enjoy an artwork despite its cheesiness? What then? It is common to say things like, “I know it’s a little cheesy, but I still love it….” But this is not a counterexample either. Something’s being a little cheesy doesn’t make it cheesy. My grandmother is a good person even though she speeds occasionally. Nobody’s perfect. One possible suggestion is that cheese is unintended kitsch. In other words, the claim would be that cheese is tacky, unoriginal, tasteless, sentimental art that is intended to be refined, original, tasteful, and intellectually engaging art. There is something correct here, but although cheese involves a failed intention, this failure is not itself enough to make something cheesy. If it were enough, then all cases of failed art would be cases of cheese, and this conclusion is surely too strong. This fits with Milan Kundera’s famous remark about kitsch: 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.16

This does suggest an analogy or a least a similarity with cheese, but cheese is not mere sentimentality, not even a complex, self-reflexive sentimentality. Cheese lacks an authenticity present in kitsch. Kitsch is sincere, whereas cheese involves a kind of insincerity in that it aspires to a level of appreciation it does not warrant.17 So cheese cannot simply be unintended kitsch. That way of thinking about it gets the intention wrong. Cheese arises not from a lack of intention, but rather from a failed intention. Success or failure, of course, depends upon the receptivity of an

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audience. Thus, for example, whether a pick-up line is cheesy or not depends at least in part on the receptivity of the audience. Similarly, much of the dialogue in the recent teen book and movie sensation Twilight can be understood this way. For similar reasons, the accordion music of Weird Al Jankovic is kitschy but not cheesy. Although it is unoriginal, unsubtle, and showy, it is too self-aware to count as cheesy, and the intention is not right. The intention is subtle and self-aware, involving the equally self-aware, winking complicity of the audience, neither of which is involved in deceptive inauthenticity. Not all cheese is kitsch. Hair Metal from the 1980s is cheesy but not kitschy. Hair Metal trades in the “power ballad” designed to produce sentimentality of the amorphous sexual desire variety. It does produce in its audience an authentic response, as intended, and so its intention succeeds to this extent. There is nothing intrinsically cheesy about grown men sharing in the production and consumption of such sentiments, but when it is for an audience composed chiefly of teenage girls, the result is pure cheese—creamy Velveeta.

Camp Many consider Hollywood and Broadway musicals paradigm cases of either kitsch or cheese. All of that overly cheery singing and dancing and over-acting, the melodrama, the gaudy wardrobes, the ever-so-clever lyrics are really all too much to bear, and so people often consider the result cheesy or kitschy. But they are typically wrong. Similarly, Ru Paul’ outlandishly over-the-top drag queen act is neither kitschy nor cheesy, although it shares many of the elements of both. It certainly shares the winking self-awareness of certain kitschy acts like Weird Al Yankovic’s parodic accordion playing, and Paul’s studious frivolity resembles in those respects Gene Simmons’ spectacularly cheesy blood-spitting KISS routine. But in other ways Paul’s act itself, the audience’s response to it, and the intentions and expectations involved are distinct from those involved in kitsch and cheese. Paul’s act is more accurately described as “camp.”

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As with kitsch, there is a voluminous literature devoted to camp,18 but the locus classicus of camp literature is Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’”:19 Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.20

The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: artifice and exaggeration21: Camp arises when “we can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt” to create something serious or of high-quality.22

Many examples of Camp are things which, from a “serious” point of view, are either bad art or kitsch23: The ultimate camp statement: It’s good because it’s awful.24

Camp results from the presentation of what appeals to naïve, wholesome, middle-class sensibilities but in a way that exhibits an exaggerated degree of artifice, stylization, and extravagance, or even grandiosity to the point of frivolity. Camp sensibility involves the love of all of this—thus it requires, importantly, authenticity—but it also involves the appreciation of a dual-effect generated: the over-theatricalized earnestness makes way for an ironic sensibility. Campy performance thus involves a wry self-­ awareness, a winking at the audience who winks back: It’s good because it’s so bad. In this way, camp both enjoys and employs the gaudy and the flamboyant: Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman.”25

The best examples of camp, according to Sontag, come from Rococo and Art Nouveau,26 styles that employ the appropriate high degree of artifice and exaggeration. They are, she says, cases of “pure” camp, which tend to be more satisfying than the “deliberate” variety because of their naïveté:

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The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.27

Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.28 Classical works of the art nouveau genre are “dead serious,” and the camp effect achieved is more pronounced when the artist is working earnestly but producing camp unintentionally. Sontag here is not making a conceptual claim about camp, but is simply making a psychological observation: better examples of camp are produced unintentionally, when the performers or artists are utterly serious. It is a seriousness that fails in its pretentions to greatness, but succeeds, unintentionally, in producing something that can be appreciated in a wholly different way: as campy marginalia.29 This claim about the respective qualities of pure and deliberate camp may not hold up forty years after the publication of “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Consider the Australian sitcom, Kath & Kim, which has already become something of a camp cult-classic. Its over-the-top parody of suburban middle-class life in all of its lovable hypocrisy is pure camp fun; it is clearly intended to be such; and it can only be truly appreciated as campy satire. But it is nevertheless camp of the highest quality and it produces the most satisfying effect. Further examples of high-quality deliberate camp are easy to find. Steven Cohan makes the case that the classical MGM musicals starring Judy Garland are both textbook examples of camp and deliberately produced as such.30 Cohan’s claim, though not uncontestable, is certainly plausible.31 And it is not really that important anyway: in distinguishing between “pure” and “deliberate” camp, Sontag is not making a conceptual claim, but is instead, dividing up the evidence from empirical cases and drawing some evaluative conclusions. In any case, camp is not to be confused with cheese. Something can be campy without being cheesy. Again, although many elitist-types might be inclined to dismiss Broadway musicals like Hairspray as exercises in cheese, this would be a mistake because these productions are more properly

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understood and appreciated for their campy celebration of their own awfulness. Similarly, no one would mistake Monty Python’s “Camp Square-Bashing” sketch—another camp cult-classic—for an instance of cheese, although no one mistakes it for high art either. Conversely, something can be cheesy without being campy. The recent Baz Luhrmann film Australia, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, offers an interesting illustration. Its cheesy CGI backgrounds, just part of that film’s overall failed attempt to produce a grand epic on the scale of Gone with the Wind, does not result in camp. It is a failed attempt at seriousness which, although it does have a mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate and the naïve, nevertheless fails as camp, and results instead merely in cheese. Even Hugh Jackman’s softly lit, soapy, rippling-muscled shower scene fails as camp and simply adds to the net cheese effect. Similarly, the Sean Daniel and James Jacks cheese vehicle The Mummy series is an exercise in cheese. It is enjoyable cheese, to be sure, but not intellectually charged enough or flamboyant in the right way to count as campy.

Cheese Cheese, then, is closely related to but is distinct from both kitsch and camp. Unlike “kitsch,” “cheese” is a derogatory term, and cheesiness, unlike kitschiness, involves a failed intention to move an audience in a certain way. Cheese, like camp, is bad. But unlike camp, cheese is inauthentic and manipulative, in that it attempts to pass off its badness as something good, which it is not. Camp, although it certainly dwells in the land of complicated and multiple levels of meaning, does not suffer from this kind of inauthenticity. Thus some cheese can be seen as failed camp. As I mentioned earlier, there is evidence that the current sense of the term “cheese” descends from the expression “the big cheese,” whose source ultimately is the Persian or Hindi word “chiz”32: Originally it had nothing to do with cheese—the source is the Persian or Hindi word chiz, meaning a thing. Sir Henry Yule wrote it up in Hobson-­ Jobson, his famous Anglo-Indian Dictionary of 1886. He said that the expression “used to be common among Anglo-Indians” and cites expressions such as “My new Arab is the real chiz” and “These cheroots are the

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real chiz”. Another expression with the same meaning that predated the real chiz was the real thing, so it’s highly probable that Anglo-Indians changed thing to chiz as a bilingual joke. Once returnees from India started to use it in Britain, hearers naturally enough converted the unfamiliar foreign word into something more recognizable, and it became cheese. The phrase big cheese developed from it in early twentieth-century America, as a term to describe the most influential or important person in a group. The first written example we know about is in Ring Lardner’s Haircut of 1914. It followed on several other American phrases containing big to describe a person of this kind, most with animal or vegetable associations— big bug, big potato, big fish and big toad, of which the oldest is probably the British English bigwig of the eighteenth century (more recent examples are big shot, big enchilada and big banana). Like the others, big cheese was by no means always complimentary and often had derisive undertones, no doubt helped along by the influence of other slang meanings of cheese.33

Among the latter are “cheesed off,” “cheesed,” “cheesy grin,” and “cut the cheese.” Especially important for the present discussion, there is also evidence that the practice of saying “cheese” when posing for photographs indicates the disingenuousness of a forced smile—a “cheesy grin.”34 Let us now gather some examples of cheese as the concept is used in contemporary popular culture. Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife,” but not Sonny Rollins’ “St. Thomas”; Pat Boone’s but not Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”; Mario Lanza’s “O Sole Mio”; just about anything by Kenny G but just about nothing by John Coltrane; The Mummy series; pick-up lines; 1980s Hair Metal (to which 1990’s Grunge is a backlash); at least some of 1940s and 50s West Coast Jazz (to which 1950s and 60s Hard Bop is a backlash); Barbara Walters’ television specials; “You had me at hello”; “I can’t live without you”; “You complete me”; Dean Martin; pandering political speeches and commercials. What do these have in common? Here is an attempt at capturing the concept: Cheese is lacking in originality, subtlety, and authenticity, often showy to the point of showing-off, with the aim to induce an original, subtle and

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authentic response in an audience, but where the intention typically fails, in that the response induced is typically unoriginal, unsubtle, and inauthentic, such as cheap sentimentality or pathos.

One might object: “cheese” is not necessarily derogatory. Some of the dialog in the recent book and movie Twilight, for example, can only be called cheesy, and yet it is endearing of the characters nonetheless. “Sure it’s cheesy, but in a good way.” This is wrong. Either the dialog is merely sentimental, but not cheesy at all, and our speaker simply means to say that it is sentimental, but in a good way, or else it is cheesy, and bad for this reason, but its badness is overwhelmed by something else, such as how adorable the person uttering the cheesy lines is. Cheesy dialog might be forgivable if delivered by a dreamboat, especially for a teenage audience. His dreaminess more than compensates for his cheesiness. So why is Dean Martin cheesy and Frank Sinatra not, even though the two belong to one and the same musical and performance genre and share not some small number of similarities including a fan base? By now the answer should be quite apparent. Dean Martin aims for, but fails to achieve the level of originality; subtlety and authenticity achieved in Sinatra’s best works, even though Dean Martin employs similar performance techniques, works in similar musical styles and affects a similar persona. Another objection will be raised by anti-intentionalists, who are loathe to incorporate intentions into interpretive aesthetic assessments. For example, one might object: How can cheese arise from a failed intention? Surely Celine Dion succeeds in producing what she intends, for surely her audience responds appropriately by being moved in just the way intended. The flamboyant stroke of the air-guitar sends the audience into rapturous delight. The intention succeeds, yet the act is still cheesy. I have more to say about this below, but for now it is enough simply to point out that our judgments about cheese require that the thing judged to be cheesy is judged also to involve a failed intention in its production—just as we can’t judge that someone is being pretentious or presumptuous without assigning to them a certain kind of intention. Similar

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points can be made concerning how our judgments about cheese involve historical and/or cultural context, as well as background knowledge and experience of relevant categorical facts having to do with, for example, genre and style. I have more to say about these later. For now, it is important to at least make note of the culturally specific nature of the concepts of cheese and cheesiness. In this paper, I am concerned with an analysis of the concepts as they are used in Western popular culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It may be that use of the concepts does not occur outside of certain linguistic communities or sub-communities whose range is restricted by various geographical, economic, ethnic, or other factors. Something like this is surely the case, and so for what follows one must keep in mind that the discussion is culturally contextual in these ways.35 One rather clear example of the culturally sensitive nature of “cheesiness” can be seen in the case of the exaggerated over-acting prevalent in Latin American telenovelas. To North American viewers, the over-acting contributes to a cheesy effect, but presumably members of Latin American audiences register no such response. This is all as it should be. Perhaps for something to be cheesy it not only has to be considered bad by somebody, but also has to be liked by somebody, and in particular liked by somebody whom the original somebody thinks has bad taste. “Burt Reynold’s porno mustache? It’s so cheesy—I can’t believe he thinks it’s sexy!’ “Kenny G is so cheesy—my mom listens to that stuff.” Perhaps these mean that when I label something cheesy, I’m disparaging not only the work, but the people who like the work. This is all rather elitist, but none of it precludes my occasionally letting out my inner teenage girl and enjoying the special edition of Dirty Dancing, or singing along to “My Heart Will Go On.” It just means that I can’t do so and consider it cheesy at the same time. More on this below. The relational character of cheese and related concepts is shared by other kinds of aesthetic concepts, as is made clear by the discussions of kitsch and camp, above. Thus I do not want to give the impression that the important roles of historical/cultural context, artist’s intentions and

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audience receptivity are unique to cheese. To the contrary: they are shared by many fundamental aesthetic concepts.36 What I hope to do here is to show, rather, how the concept of cheese provides a good illustration and a test case for various debates in contemporary aesthetics.

4 Some Theoretical Points About Who Cares Intentionalism and Anti-intentionalism Cheesy art provides examples that help to illustrate the debate between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists, or what Stephen Davies calls “value maximizers.”37 With his highly influential work, “Categories of Art,” Kendall Walton convinced many aestheticians that proper art interpretation requires that artworks be perceived or experienced under the right categories.38 He claimed further, and quite plausibly, that it is sometimes the case that artist’s intentions supply some of these categories. Call such intentions “categorical intentions.” One fairly uncontroversial example of such an interpretation-determining categorical intention is simply the “for-public-consumption” intention, which is the artist’s intention to produce an artifact for public appreciation. Other interpretation-­ determining categorical intentions might include the intention to produce a work of one or another established artistic category, such as the intention to produce a painting, rather than a sculpture, or prose rather than poetry. Intentionalists and anti-intentionalists disagree about all of this in various ways and to various levels of vexation.39 Of course, evaluative intentions aren’t allowed by either side, since, for example, the mere intention to produce a great work is presumably irrelevant to matters of interpretation. Without attempting to resolve the debate here, I want to hold simply that the intentionalist position is a viable candidate position, and so any complaint that my account of cheesiness appeals objectionably to artists’ intentions is off base. Keeping this in mind, we can note that cheesy art is especially ripe for parody. Whether Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” counts as a powerful and emotional tour de force or a hilarious send-up of sappy,

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sentimental movie soundtrack ballads depends on the intentions of, or at least the hypothetical intentions40 of its performer. No one seriously maintains that Celine Dion was intending to produce a self-parody with her version of the song, and that interpretation should be rejected. She intended, rather, to produce a heart-wrenching power ballad. Such categorical intentions are relevant—indispensable—to the interpretation of artworks, because categorical intentions help to fix the identity, and thus the content, of the work.41 As Davies puts it, the interpretation needs to be true to the work, not merely consistent with it.42 Of course an artist’s categorical intentions might fail, if other requirements are not in place. To illustrate what I have in mind, contrast Celine Dion’s version of “My Heart Will Go On” with an instrumental version of the same song performed by Los Straightjackets, a Nashville band with a guitar-heavy style in the tradition of The Ventures. The Los Straightjackets version begins, following brief introductory sounds of lapping waves and a foghorn, with a relatively reverential rendering of the melody on electric guitar with tremolo effects, but then proceeds through a series of ridiculous clichés, including over-dubbed string and choral accompaniments, and onestring guitar solos employing overuse of the guitar’s “whammy-­bar” and needlessly exaggerated reverb effects. The key then modulates upward for dramatic effect as new parts are added to the mix, including over-dubbed and wholly gratuitous harp pluckings, and absurdly dramatic organ grindings. There is a pause for a guitar bridge done in a kind of 1960s-style “rave up,” which is followed immediately by a chorus of “aahs” that repeats the main theme. All of this continues to build until to a climactic tympani-filled grand finale, followed by the bubbling, gurgling sound of, evidently, the ship’s going down. The Los Straightjackets version is obviously a send up of a cheesy movie theme song. But it is not itself a work of cheese, despite the fact that it is composed entirely of a series of cheesy clichés. It would be impossible to appreciate the Los Straightjackets version of the tune without understanding that it is a parody, and this categorical property is something fixed by the intentions of the artists. Similarly, although the Celine Dion version is much more enjoyable understood as a kind of self-­parody, this way of appreciating it is not really a way of appreciating the work itself.

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So we might reason as follows: for the debate between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists, the tough cases involve situations where differences in interpretation arise depending on whether we are guided by our concern for the artist’s intentions (actual or hypothetical), or by concern for maximal artistic value. Cheesy art provides a host of easily understandable examples from popular culture that make this contrast particularly clear. Here are two of them. The movie Australia, understood as a sweeping epic love story in the tradition of Gone with the Wind, is facile, tedious, and rather embarrassing to watch, but understood as a self-­referential parody of such grandiose pretentions is a hilarious and biting satire that is rather enjoyable to watch. “My Heart Will Go On,” performed by Los Straightjackets, is a painful series of ridiculous clichés if heard as a reverential cover of the Titanic theme song, but understood as parody, it is a masterful employment of technical expertise and a brilliant send-up of a popular culture icon. Nevertheless, an anti-intentionalist might complain these are simply cases in which the artists’ categorical intentions decide the case by fixing the category to which the works belong, and anti-intentionalists as well as intentionalists can agree on this point.43 This objection is somewhat off the mark, for the intentions involved in works of cheese are importantly different from those involved in the ordinary case. With cheesy art, whether a categorical intention succeeds or not may still be something that is audience-dependent. To see what I have in mind, consider that there are further kinds of intentions relevant to cheesy art production, beyond the categorical ones. Especially important is the kind of intention that is involved in trying too hard. This intention is at least part of what is objectionable about pick-up lines and gold chains, and it is part of what makes them cheesy. Similarly, what makes an essential contribution to the cheesiness of Australia is that it is so clearly trying too hard, aspiring to a greatness it can never achieve. The same is true of another cheesy movie epic, Pearl Harbor. In such cases, our assessments of artistic value cannot escape reference to this kind of intention. Even the attribution of a seemingly intrinsic aesthetic property such as gracefulness can be influenced in the same way. Michael Brecker and John Coltrane often differ with respect to gracefulness, despite the fact that cheesy works of the former often incorporate non-cheesy elements of the latter.

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Of course all of this is, as it should be, largely subjective and audience-­ relative. Production of cheesy art involves a failed intention to produce something original, authentic, and moving, but the intention may fail only for the critically inclined. Consider what might be one of the great examples from the history of cheese: the French cheesy art of Francisque Poulbot, whose early twentieth-century works include paintings of weeping clowns and of little Parisian boys in rags, often depicted peeing in the street as sign of cute misbehaving.44 Poulbot, and other popular Montmartre artists of this time (the practice disappeared with the 1960s) who painted weeping clowns were driven by the idea that the paradox was interesting, and these pictures did find their proper audience. Thus, it is important to take into account the target audience that does enjoy the object and finds it, not cheesy, but tasteful, like American consumers of cheese whiz versus the foreign cheese lover. But the fact that judgments about cheesiness are always going to be audience-relative does not change the fact that some of the intentions involved in the production of cheesy art and essential to it are not merely categorical intentions. At the very least, given the level of contention between intentionalists and anti-­ intentionalists, it is not a decisive objection to my account of cheesiness that it appeals to artists’ intentions. Furthermore, cases of cheesiness in art provide nice illustrations of some important points in the debate between intentionalists and their opponents.

The Naïve Aesthetic Theory of Art Cheesy art provides straightforward challenges to the naïve aesthetic theory, according to which, artistically relevant properties are determined by, or supervene on, aesthetic properties. This is particularly interesting, as the naïve aesthetic theory is the one held, implicitly, by the average person on the street, and yet that same person easily grasps the challenges that cheesy art presents for that theory. Aesthetically identical works can differ with respect to a variety of artistically relevant properties, including semantic properties (reference and meaning) as well as certain metaphysical properties (artistic category, art-historical context, originality, forgery).45

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Bill Murray’s cheesy lounge singer parody is a hilarious mocking portrait of an imagined but aesthetically identical performance that deserves our derision. We laugh at the one, but not at the other, or at least not in the same way or for the same reasons. Murray pokes fun at an imagined performer who is trying too hard and failing, but Murray is neither trying too hard, nor failing. One act, but not the other, is cheesy because they differ in semantic content, despite the fact that they are, we may suppose, aesthetically identical. So two artworks may differ with respect to cheesiness and yet be aesthetically identical. Making the same point in reverse, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, is a classic of sci-fi cheese, not a brilliant send-up that cuts against the grain of Hollywood norms.46

The Paradox of Negative Art Cheese provides some beautiful cases relevant to the paradox of negative art,47 generating what we might call “the paradox of cheese.” Why, given its cringe-inducing properties, does cheese attract such huge audiences? One obvious solution would be to claim simply that a positive response compensates for the negative response produced by cheese.48 After all, we might say, Pat Boone’s “Tutti Frutti” has sufficient enjoyable qualities, aesthetic and non-, to overcome whatever cheesiness it exhibits. Similarly, the target audience of Twilight might find something compensatory in their response to the cheesy dialog in that book and movie series. But this seems wrong: the palpable cheesiness of Pat Boone’s rendition of “Tutti Frutti,” surely overwhelms the rest. Further, it would be implausible in the case of Celine Dion’s several years of sold out shows in Vegas that the members of her audience perceived any cheesiness at all. However, a more sophisticated, or Eudemonian, account might do: the negative response is genuine, we might say, but is part of a broader artappreciation picture involving deeper, cognitively driven satisfactions beyond mere pleasure. But this seems highly implausible in the case of cheesy art. It seems, rather, that the attitudes of cheese-inclined audiences of Twilight and Celine are better captured by the conversionary account, according to which the negative response is turned into a positive one. It

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is not so much that the cheesiness is overcome by other, more important qualities, but rather that it disappears altogether. It is sort of like joining a benign cult, given that no real harm is done, one converts. Upon conversion, one learns to love Celine Dion. If this is right, then the radical relativity of cheesiness becomes inescapable. The artwork can remain the same in all of its cheese-relevant properties, and yet audiences will differ in their responses. Enjoyment of horror films, which also have cringe-­ inducing properties, albeit, of a very different kind, might be explained in a similar way.

Postmodernism Finally, its ubiquity makes the concept of cheesiness an interesting test case for all kinds of aesthetic theories of popular culture. In particular, what I’ve discussed about the importance to cheesiness of the concepts “copy” and “reproduction” suggests implications for some themes of postmodernist aesthetics. For example, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Umberto Eco, among others, discuss a family of notions, including mechanical reproduction,49 the iterative and the repetitive, serial production of tokens of one type,50 sameness, and simulacra.51 Importantly, the paradoxical combination of the ubiquity of and aversion to cheese in popular culture appears to count both for and against claims that originality, authenticity, and reality no longer guide aesthetic assessments in the postmodern age. Ordinary use of the concept of cheesiness exploits these very notions and their dialectical counterparts. It is a concept impossible to apply without at least an implicit understanding of the importance of these various distinctions. Nor should it be claimed that the concept of cheese is simply a holdover from, hierarchical, elitist, modernist pretentions. Cheesiness doesn’t really have application inside of elitist culture. Vegas is the land of cheese, and the way to consume what it has to offer is to inauthentically immerse oneself in the not-so-expensive-but-

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not-so-cheap-either copies of real things—both artifactual and natural, original and copy. Every day is a veritable cheese-fest. And yet, everyone knows this about Vegas. It is an escapist paradise that no one would confuse with the real thing. Someone might enjoy what Vegas has to offer more than the real things themselves, but no one confuses Vegas with the genuine article either; they just don’t care. They’ve gone over to the cheese side.52

Notes 1. Of course, this is controversial already. For more on the high art/low art distinction, see John Andrew Fisher, “High Art Versus Low Art,” in Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut (New York: Routledge, 2001), 409–22. 2. See David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Four Dissertations (London: 1757). 3. This strategy applied to aesthetic value is not wholly unlike the one recommended in the case of ethical value by theorists who favor attention to “thick” ethical concepts like “cowardly” over “thin” ethical concepts like “bad.” See, for example, Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). Thanks to John Bigelow for this observation. 4. Susan Page, “Obama’s Win Ushers in New Group,” USA Today, November 11, 2008. 5. See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 60–63; see too Lloyd Humberstone, “Intrinsic/Extrinsic,” Synthese 108 (1996): 205–267. 6. Paul Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 71–2. 7. Thanks to John Andrew Fisher for this point. 8. See Michael Quinion, World Wide Words, retrieved February 4, 2010, http://www.worldwidewords.org/copyright.htm 9. See, for example, Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (New York: Universe Books, 1968); Tomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Clement Greenberg, ­“Avant-­Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press,

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1965), 3–21; and Robert Solomon, “On Kitsch and Sentimentality,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49, 1 (1991): 1–14. 10. Solomon, “Kitsch and Sentimentality,” 4. 11. Deborah Knight, “Why We Enjoy Condemning Sentimentality: A Meta-Aesthetic Perspective,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, 4 (1999): 411–20. Knight cites Anthony Savile, “Sentimentality,” in Arguing About Art, eds. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995), 223–7, and Joseph Kupfer, “The Sentimental Self,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 20, 4 (1996): 543–60, as advocates of the standard view. 12. See, for example, Robert C. Solomon, “In Defense of Sentimentality,” Philosophy and Literature 14 (1990): 304–23, and Kathleen Higgins, “Sweet Kitsch,” in Philosophy and the Visual Arts, ed. Philip Alperson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 568–581. 13. Not all sentiment is bad. Part of Tolstoy’s greatness lies in his capacity to induce in his readers a genuine emotional response, as when Anna Karenina throws herself in front of the train. See Colin Radford, “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. Vol. 69 (1975): 67–80. 14. Although here is a seeming counterexample: a pink flamingo made by Don Ho might enhance the kitsch value. 15. I shall ignore for the moment cases of ironic locutions analogous to, “I love bad art,” and “I love it, because it’s so bad.” These can be ironed out by some fairly straightforward reinterpretation. More on this below. 16. Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere, quoted in Robert Solomon, “On Kitsch and Sentimentality,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (1991): 4–12. 17. This is close to what Mark Booth says about camp: “To be camp is to present oneself as being committed to the marginal with a commitment greater than the marginal merits.” Camp (London: Quartet Books, 1983), 18. More on the concept of camp below. 18. See, for example, Booth, 1983; Fabio Cleto, Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); and Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 19. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 275–92. 20. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 277.

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21. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 275. 22. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 285. 23. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 278. 24. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 292. 25. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 280. 26. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 279. 27. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 282. 28. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 283. 29. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 283. 30. Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment. 31. One reviewer, Jennifer Judkins, concurs: By registering an emotional intensity that overwhelms the song’s lyrics or narrative placement (a Judy specialty), we have a super-theatricalized authenticity; that is, camp. See her review, Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 64, 4 (2006): 491–493; ref. on 492. 32. Another source has it that the origin is Urdu. “Cheese,” Online Etymology Dictionary, retrieved February 8, 2010, http://www.etymonline.com 33. Quinion, World Wide Words. 34. Oxford English Dictionary, retrieved February 8, 2010, http://dictionary.oed.com 35. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for drawing this to my attention. 36. Kendall Walton makes an especially convincing case for this in his classic “Categories of Art,” Philosophical Review 79, 3 (1970): 334–367. 37. Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), chapter 8. See too his The Philosophy of Art (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), chapter 5. 38. Kendall Walton, “Categories.” For his criteria of correctness, see 357–358. 39. Among the great deal of recent work on the subject is an excellent exchange between Robert Stecker and Daniel Nathan. Robert Stecker, “Interpretation and the Problem of the Relevant Intention,” 269–81, and Daniel Nathan, “Art, Meaning, and Artist’s Meaning,” 282–293, in Matthew Kieran, ed. Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2006). 40. For a well-known discussion of the position, see Jerrold Levinson, “Intention and Interpretation,” The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 175–213. 41. Kendall Walton defends this claim about the importance of categorical intentions for the proper interpretation and understanding of artworks in “Categories,”; see 364.

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42. Davies, Philosophy of Art, 123. 43. But perhaps not. Daniel Nathan denies the indispensability of even categorical intentions. See “Art, Meaning, and Artist’s Meaning.” 44. See Jan Carew, Poulbot of Montmartre: Artist and Philanthropist (New York: Sterling Press, 2006). 45. See Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61, 19 (1964): 571–584, and The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); George Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1, 1 (1964): 56–65, and Aesthetics: An Introduction (Indianapolis: Pegasus, 1971). 46. I take this well-known example from Noel Carroll, “Art, Intention and Conversation,” in Intention and Interpretation, ed. Gary Iseminger (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 97–131. 47. Kendall Walton, “Fearing Fictions,” Journal of Philosophy 75, 1 (1978): 5–27, and Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990). 48. For a concise discussion of this and other responses, see Davies, The Philosophy of Art, 153–163. 49. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hanna Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jonovich, Inc., 1968), 217–252. 50. Umberto Eco, “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-­ Modern Aesthetics,” Daedalus 114, 4 (1985): 161–184. 51. Jean Beaudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983); and Simulacra and Simulations, trans. S. Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 52. I wish to thank two anonymous referees at Contemporary Aesthetics, as well as David Beaujon, Richard Grimaldi, Tanya Nolte, Jean-Jacques Poucel, Joseph Romance, Denise Vigani, and especially Philippe Willems for their many helpful comments, criticisms, and suggestions.

Bibliography Beaudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Beaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. Translated by S. Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

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Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hanna Arendt, 217–252. New York: Harcourt Brace Jonovich, Inc., 1968. Booth, Mark. Camp. London: Quartet Books, 1983. Carew, Jan. Poulbot of Montmartre: Artist and Philanthropist. New York: Sterling Press, 2006. Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990. Carroll, Noel. “Art, Intention and Conversation.” In Intention and Interpretation, edited by Gary Iseminger, 97-131. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Cleto, Fabio. Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Cohan, Steven. Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61, 19 (1964): 571–84. Danto, Arthur. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Davies, Stephen. Definitions of Art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Davies, Stephen. The Philosophy of Art. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Dickie, George. “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude.” American Philosophical Quarterly 1, 1 (1964): 56–65. Dickie, George. Aesthetics: An Introduction. Indianapolis: Pegasus, 1971. Dorfles, Gillo, ed. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste. New York: Universe Books, 1968. Eco, Umberto. “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics.” Daedalus 114, 4 (1985): 161–184. Fisher, John Andrew. “High Art versus Low Art.” In Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, edited by Berys Gaut, 409–22. New York: Routledge, 2001. Foot, Philippa. Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978. Geach, Paul. God and the Soul. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965. Higgins, Kathleen. “Sweet Kitsch,” In Philosophy and the Visual Arts, edited by Philip Alperson, 568–581. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Humberstone, Lloyd. “Intrinsic/Extrinsic.” Synthese 108 (1996): 205-267. Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Four Dissertations. London: 1757.

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Judkins, Jennifer. Review of Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical, by Stephen Cohan. Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 64, 4 (2006): 491–493. Knight, Deborah. “Why We Enjoy Condemning Sentimentality: A Meta-­ Aesthetic Perspective,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, 4 (1999): 411–20. Kulka, Tomas. Kitsch and Art. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Kupfer, Joseph. “The Sentimental Self.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 20, 4 (1996): 543–60. Levinson, Jerrold. “Intention and Interpretation.” In The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, 175–213. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Lewis, David. On the Plurality of Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Nathan, Daniel. “Art, Meaning, and Artist’s Meaning.” In Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Matthew Kieran, 282–93. Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2006. Online Etymology Dictionary. “Cheese.” Retrieved February 8, 2010. http:// www.etymonline.com. Page, Susan. “Obama’s Win Ushers in New Group.” USA Today, November 11, 2008. Quinion, Michael. 2010. World Wide Words. Retrieved February 4, 2010. http:// www.worldwidewords.org/copyright.htm. Radford, Colin. “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. 69 (1975): 67–80. Savile, Anthony. “Sentimentality.” In Arguing About Art, edited by Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, 223–7. New York: McGraw Hill, 1995. Solomon, Robert. “In Defense of Sentimentality.” Philosophy and Literature 14 (1990): 304–23. Solomon, Robert. “On Kitsch and Sentimentality.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49, 1 (1991): 1–14. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. Stecker, Robert. “Interpretation and the Problem of the Relevant Intention.” In Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Matthew Kieran, 269–281. Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2006. Walton, Kendall. “Categories of Art.” Philosophical Review 79, 3 (1970): 334–67. Walton, Kendall. “Fearing Fictions.” Journal of Philosophy 75, 1 (1978): 5–27.

Kitsch in Relation to Loss Kathleen Higgins

To the claim that there is no disputing over taste, Nietzsche’s character Zarathustra retorts, “But all of life is a dispute over taste and tasting!”1 He might have gone further. Disputes over taste extend to death as well, at least in so far as the living have anything to do with it. Death may be the great leveler, reminding us of our common fate as human beings, but this does not result in general agreement about appropriate practices in mourning and commemoration. This was already evident in ancient China. The ancient philosophical classic the Zhuangzi depicts a dispute between Zhuangzi himself and his mentor Huizi over the former’s behavior after the death of his wife. Zhuangzi’s wife had died. Huizi went to offer his condolences, only to find Zhuangzi squatting on his heels, beating on a clay pot, and singing. Huizi admonished him, saying, “She has shared your home, raised your children,

K. Higgins (*) University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_4

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and grown old with you. Not weeping at her passing is more than enough, but beating on a pot and singing—this is too much!”2

The ancient Confucians, among Zhuangzi’s frequent targets, considered even listening to music inappropriate during bereavement, so Zhuangzi’s crude performance flies in the face of Confucian propriety. Huizi was not a Confucian, but even he is put off by Zhuangzi’s defiance of customary mourning observances. Inevitably, mourning practices involve aesthetic considerations. Funerals and the behavior of the bereaved are observed by other people, and they involve elements of display which are evaluated on their fittingness and on the manner in which they are conducted. Aesthetic considerations factor into the determination of what kinds of gestures are appropriate both in paying one’s respects to the deceased and in expressing condolences. That the deceased person is an implicit witness to one’s gestures is suggested by the very idea of “paying respects” to the person, but typically these gestures are seen by other living people as well. And there’s the rub. Those who witness gestures directed toward the deceased and toward those who mourn may have doubts about these gestures’ propriety. Mourning practices, accordingly, are potential sites of conflict—and sometimes sites of actual conflict among those who do not share the same aesthetic sensibilities. Consider some examples of contemporary disagreements over practices associated with mourning. Informal roadside shrines at sites of fatal automobile accidents strike some people as moving; others find them obtrusive and sentimental.3 The use of newfangled technology, such as QR codes on headstones to provide information about the deceased, may seem offensively hip to those over a certain age.4 Many people seem to find memorial pages on Facebook suitable means for honoring the dead, but others find them objectionable. A Brazilian court ordered Facebook to remove a memorial page that the mother of the deceased found upsetting and undignified.5 My purpose here is to examine a particular kind of aesthetic issue in connection with mourning: how should we regard kitsch that is utilized in these contexts? I will contend that circumstances in which someone has died might be particularly prone to the use of kitsch, but gestures that

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are arguably kitschy can be among the most appropriate ways to express sympathy. Although showing respect for the deceased and the bereaved does require some concern for aesthetic suitability, kitsch may be virtually unavoidable in these contexts, and we should learn to live with that.

1 Characterizing Kitsch Before proceeding further, I should say something about what is meant by “kitsch.” The term has been variously defined, and although many such definitions are arguably applicable to questions about tastefulness in mourning, they bring different features of objects and behavior into view. Usually it is applied to objects that are deemed aesthetically lacking in some way.6 Etymologically, the word has associations with sketchiness and cheapness in quality, although it need not be either cheaply made or technically unaccomplished.7 But however further specified, “kitsch” implies for most commentators a particular type of bad taste. Further characterizations of what makes something kitsch vary, but a  few themes are fairly common. One is that kitsch trades in atmospheres.8 The object that appeals is only vaguely in view. Kitsch yields a generalized pleasure, based not on the details of the object itself, but on the emotional tone it suggests. “What constitutes the essence of kitsch,” Matei Calinescu proposes, “is probably its open-ended indeterminacy, its vague ‘hallucinatory’ power, its spurious dreaminess, its promise of an easy ‘catharsis.’”9 Thomas Kulka goes into some detail in explicating the content that helps to generate the atmospheric aspect of kitsch. He characterizes kitsch as depicting objects or themes that are (1) highly charged with stock emotions, (2) effortlessly identifiable, and (3) not associatively enriched by the presentation.10 Only the general gestalt needs to be evident because “[t]he effect of kitsch is totally parasitic on its referent.” This is why it is compatible with both well-made and shoddily produced  artifacts.11 Kitsch trades in the predictable and encourages the belief that one’s expectations are justified. Kitsch is often condemned on moral as well as aesthetic grounds, as we might observe in connection with Kulka’s suggestion that kitsch involves

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laziness. The idea that kitsch is a lazy means of achieving transcendence or satisfaction is a common theme among kitsch critics, one that has been seen as a ground for condemnation at least since Clement Greenberg.12 Calinescu, however, observes that the desire for unchallenging aesthetic content is one of the appeals of kitsch, particularly among those who are in pursuit of relaxation. Other critics condemn kitsch as being fundamentally dishonest. Mary Midgley, for example, claims that it involves both self-deception and a “flight from, and contempt for, real people.”13 Calinescu defines kitsch as “a specifically aesthetic form of lying” that involves the falsification of reality.14 Milan Kundera, too, contends that kitsch trades in falsity, criticizing it for obscuring all objectionable reality. Kitsch, he tells us, denies the existence of “shit” and asserts “a categorical agreement with being.”15 Kundera pays particular attention to kitsch that is geared to provoking maudlin sentiment, taking the hallmark of kitsch to be the arousal of feelings of self-satisfaction at being the kind of person who can be moved along with the rest of humankind. 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.16

Kundera sees the sentimentality of many instances of kitsch as dangerously prone to propagandistic uses. This adds a layer to its dishonesty, for besides whitewashing the appearance of whatever it brings into view, kitsch promotes overly simplistic views about the goodness of one’s party, society, or other group.17 Despite the chorus of critical disapproval, kitsch has its fans. Lyell D. Henry, Jr., describes himself as something of a connoisseur. He argues that kitsch can exemplify different degrees of achievement as kitsch, and with some even being “spectacular.”18 As he sees it, kitsch often aims at improving the pedestrian appearance of the merely functional but often misfires, so “form at odds with function” is common in kitsch. “True kitsch,” he observes, “never fails to combine things that we somehow

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don’t expect to see combined or that conventional judgment continues to insist don’t belong together.”19 Henry sees the incongruities that result as lending a certain charm to kitsch (as in the case of a representation of the Venus de Milo with a clock in its abdomen). Besides dressing up utilitarian objects, kitsch is used to “embellish the elemental sentiments,” including those related to life’s “Big Moments,” including death. He offers the example of “a ‘Gone But Not Forgotten’ wall hanging made from the hair of a departed ‘loved one.’”20Although his characterization and assessment of kitsch is different, much kitsch that Henry prizes seems to fit Kulka’s model. Kitsch that embellishes “big moments,” at least,  evokes stock emotions, represents easily identifiable objects or themes, and does not enrich of the themes invoked. But Henry’s stipulation that “true kitsch” involves incongruity leaves out a lot of what Kulka would include in the category.21 Kristin G. Congdon and Doug Blandy also take a rather enthusiastic view of kitsch, which they take to be a broad classification that they refuse to define. We recognize kitsch as having clusters of meaning associated with aesthetic, socio-cultural, economic, and political points of view. Kitsch can appeal to all of the senses, and has been closely linked with fakery, depravity, sentimentality, vulgarity, crassness, and the formulaic, but it is also about parody, irony, and satire. Kitsch has been associated with low art, the uneducated, and it is economically cheap, mass-produced, and often considered tacky.22

Approaching the phenomenon as educators, they celebrate the growing popularity of kitsch, seeing it as a manifestation of “liberating pluralism” and a means for resisting aesthetic and political hegemony. Interestingly, they consider kitsch as a mode of memorializing that is often connected with the “spontaneous outpouring of grief ” in response to catastrophes and tragedies. They point to September 11th tattoos by way of example, suggesting that these afford people a more personal way of situating themselves in relation to the event than could be accomplished by any official memorial. People can use these tattoos to relate themselves to an important historical event. Such employments of kitsch

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in response to world events “may have to do with people taking images and objects manufactured for the general public and using them to generate a cultural response of their own.”23 The ready availability of kitsch images in relation to this historical event is an advantage, one that figures in the use of kitsch in connection with mourning more broadly, as we shall see. I’m inclined to adopt the kind of non-pejorative interpretation of kitsch that Congdon and Blandy encourage, though I will later consider the merits of accepting certain proposed moral objections in connection with the kinds of objects I will be considering. Adopting this approach to kitsch, I am inclined to categorize as kitsch many objects that meet some of the various proposed criteria I have discussed, particularly those involving cliché topics and treatments of subject matter and self-directed emotional gratification. But I do not think a checklist of properties determines what is and what is not kitsch. Where I draw the line between kitsch and non-kitsch is idiosyncratic, but I suspect the same is true of other people’s placement of that line. I am a kitsch relativist. I think kitsch is in the eye of the beholder and that whether a given object or gesture is kitsch depends on the function it serves in a person’s life. If we use an object to achieve certain kinds of self-indulgent emotional effects, such as the self-congratulatory approval of our own response that Kundera describes, it becomes kitsch for us, even if the object was not designed to generate this reaction.24 If an object appears to be designed to encourage responses along these lines, I will see it as kitsch, but this may not track its status as others see it. It may have been designed for a different purpose than I envision, and others may use it in a variety of ways. Kitsch is also historically relative. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before embalming was a widespread practice, postmortem photography was popular as a way of preserving a memory of the deceased. John Troyer observes that the goal was to make the deceased appear “as alive as possible.”25 Sometimes this involved arranging corpses in rather contrived positions, sometimes along with family members. Troyer illustrates with a reproduced photograph of a dead child seated and propped against its mother’s knee.26 Such production of pretty pictures of dead people by arranging cadavers as though they were part of

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charming domestic scenes may at present seem both macabre and extremely kitschy. We may even by somewhat shocked that the focus was so much on constructing sentimental images that belie the ugly side (or even the actuality) of death that manhandling cadavers for the purpose was taken to be acceptable. Nevertheless, Bethan Bell casts the practice in a different light when she points out that during the era in question, “the first time families thought of having a photograph taken” of a child was often after its death. Having a postmortem photograph made was understood as way of creating a memorial and keeping a lasting likeness of a child.27 Beautified photos of dead children in cradles surrounded by toys and flowers may look like kitsch to many of us today, but it is far from clear that they were used as kitsch when they were made. This example leads us directly to my topic, what to make of kitsch that is related in some way to mourning.

2 Kitsch in Mourning Because I am a kitsch relativist, I do not think we can objectively establish that specific items used in connection with mourning are kitsch. Some mourning-related objects and events nevertheless exhibit some of the characteristics that have been associated with kitsch, and I will focus on them in what follows. Gillo Dorfles has no compunction in claiming that mourning-related kitsch abounds. Today death is a candied affair, swamped in sentiment and pathos. We have death disguised as life; death concealed, adulterated and masked […] Everyone is familiar with the forests of “realistic” mourning statues, chapels, baby temples, catacombs and modern dolmen and menhirs in certain cemeteries […] practically all the so-called “works of art” which multiply year by year in our cemeteries […] are decisively kitsch.28

Although Dorfles published this passage many decades ago, the contemporary scene surrounding mourning in the industrialized world continues apace. The current range of available urns allows for the expression of diverse aesthetic sensibilities, including some that I see as kitschy. His

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and her urns in the form of intertwining swans may appeal to the romantic sensibilities of some, but it is fair to say that they are maudlin. An urn designed to resemble the head of the deceased strikes me as a pretty convincing candidate for kitsch. The very idea of urn jewelry is rather kitschy, if not ghoulish, and this goes even more emphatically for jewelry made from cremains. And even those who acknowledge the propriety of acute grief over the loss of a pet may find some of the thematic cat and dog urns on the market a bit much. If kitsch is, as I allege, a relative matter, we lack objective criteria that would establish decisively whether a particular service or display falls into that category, and this leaves us without a clear basis for adjudicating disagreements on the matter. An article in the Daily Mail in 2011 included numerous images of grave site decoration that offend traditionalists. Some gravesites are festooned with lanterns, toys, and teddy bears, and some incorporate effigies of deceased children (or in one case a statue of Bart Simpson). In response to the growth of such displays, the Essex Council established a one-month limit for items placed on graves. Author Bel Mooney concludes, Certainly, there are few things sadder than a deflating balloon, a pile of dirty and sodden soft toys, and a tumble of windblown plastic trinkets nobody has bothered to set straight. I fear that piling it all on the grave is actually inadvertently piling on the agony, if not for the family of the deceased then for others who must walk past these decaying symbols on their way to mourn their own loved-ones.29

On the other side of the issue, family members have sued cemeteries when decorations some considered in poor taste were removed.30 Tracy Chevalier managed to make two families’ diverging tastes in grave monuments the premise for a novel.31 Those who think they have situated their loved one’s remains in a tasteful setting can become upset if not enraged by a nearby grave embellished with what they see as tawdry decoration. Certain funeral practices themselves are arguably kitsch. Although embalming bodies in life-like poses is uncommon, certain funeral homes in New Orleans can take credit for some rather innovative displays of remains. Their “extreme embalming” has led to displays of cadavers

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relaxing with snacks after a basketball game, entering a boxing ring, riding a motorcycle, and sitting at a table with a menthol cigarette in hand and a beer at the ready.32 Themed funerals, which are becoming increasingly popular in Great Britain and the United States, can be somewhat dumbfounding to those with more traditional expectations, and some of the thematic flourishes strike me as kitschy. Funerals staged by The Golden Gate funeral home in Dallas became the subject matter of a short-lived reality TV series on the TLC network in the United States, Best Funeral Ever. Among the funeral themes featured were Christmas, barbecue, bowling, breakfast, an “urn wedding,” and a relay race complete with a medal ceremony.33 The show managed to offend sensibilities far and wide, judging by the op-eds it inspired.34 Common motifs on sympathy cards and many materials related to etiquette in connection with a death seem atmospheric and to that extent consistent with one purported criterion of kitsch. The idea of atmosphere is literalized in the case of certain cliché images in these context, such as clouds, foggy environments, and lights at the ends of tunnels. Other reassuring images include flowers, birds ascending, butterflies, non-specific nature scenes with rays of light, and a sailboat moving into the distance.35 These images are certainly trite and perhaps also kitsch, though as I will argue, this is no reason to shun them. Henry’s formulation of “form at odds with function” seems an apt description of certain urns that draw so much attention to themselves that their usefulness as reminders of the person whose remains they contain may be undermined. A Pinterest page devoted to “Quirky Cremation Urns” presents images of an urn shaped like a brontosaurus for a child, an urn designed to look like a cowboy boot, one in the shape of an ice cream cone.36 Another site shows urns made to look like a Nokia phone, a colorful martini glass (a double!), a sewing machine, a teddy bear, the Star Trek insignia for the Starfleet, and a handbag, among others.37 While these strike me as kitschy, however, I can imagine a person for whom the urn did direct attention to memories of the deceased because of strong association between the person and the represented object. Perhaps the idiosyncrasy of these urns contributes to my considering them kitschy, for they seem aggressively unconventional, though this seems strange given that card images strike me as kitschy in part because

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they are trite. Perhaps I should simply acknowledge that individuals’ judgments, including my own, about what is kitsch may not entirely cohere with each other. However, I see a difference between the cases. The trite card images are generic and fit Kulka’s criteria quite well. The urns in question draw so much attention to themselves that it is hard to simultaneously see them and be sensitive to their role as repositories for cremains. Their form also seems to be at odds with the emotional aim of dignified funerary rituals. In both respects, Henry’s formula of “form at odds with function” seems relevant. For similar reasons, I regard the Pinterest urns as kitschy, but not the fantasy coffins of Ghana, which are made in the shapes of items associated with the professions of those who are buried in them. These coffins strike me as whimsical and exuberant, but not as kitsch. I do have a principled basis for differentiating in this case, however. I see the fantasy coffins as distinguished them from kitschy urns in that they draw attention to the deceased and what that person did in life, and they have become customary in some communities and are carried in procession as a part of the funeral rituals. When used, coffins are also buried, so the distinctive shapes are not themselves conspicuous long after the funeral, as the urns may be if they are displayed. And the potential clashes between form and function I envision in the latter case has to do with the urns being displayed, since the point of that would seem to be to remind one of the person, while a shape that seems too unusual (or even outlandish) draws attention to itself.

3 The Inevitability and Aptness of Kitsch Most of us overwhelmingly rely on conventional forms in connection with mourning, and some of them involve kitsch, at least by Kulka’s criteria. As we observed in connection with sympathy cards, a staple set of images that refer to death and loss are used, and they are designed to prompt stock emotions, often by way of some standard tropes that put a consoling spin on the decedent’s transition. Many artworks involve thematic development of material concerned with death, loss, and

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transcendence, but the images and gestures used in mourning practices tend to be simplistic. However, we should not be critical of this reliance on obvious, uncomplicated, emotion-laden images when we are honoring the dead and expressing grief or sympathy. Using customary forms and stereotypical images has many benefits. Consider the person seeking to offer condolences to a bereaved individual. In this situation, standard gestures seem fitting. In fact, it is hard to see how one might improve on them. For the bereaved, typically in an emotionally fragile state, the predictable is often soothing. By contrast, innovative gestures could be jarring. Offered with the aim of consoling the grieving person, they may well be self-defeating. Conventional forms also recommend themselves to the bereaved party who is notifying people, arranging the funeral, and making decisions about burial. Traditional forms are unlikely to cause distress, either to oneself or to other people. Commonly, a person grieving for a loved one may desire to find ways to honor the deceased that are “just right.” Yet with the pressure of needing to make timely arrangements and the deficit of energy bereavement typically brings, the best realistic option may be to adhere to standard practice while adding a few individualizing touches that reflect the decedent’s personality. The bereaved person may well find it challenging to make satisfactory arrangements, feeling that no gesture can really do justice to person who has died or convey the magnitude of the loss. In light of this, the bereaved is well advised to use traditional forms, for reasons indicated by that another ancient Chinese philosopher (this one a Confucian). Xunzi, writing in the third century B.C.E., points out that while mourning, everyone is at times visited by sudden feelings of depression and melancholy longing. A loyal minister or filial son who has lost a parent, even when he is enjoying himself among congenial company, will be overcome by such feelings. If they come to him and he is greatly moved, but does nothing to give them expression, then his emotions of remembrance and longing will be frustrated and unfulfilled, and he will feel a sense of deficiency in his ritual behavior. Therefore, the former kings established certain forms to be observed on such occasions so that men could fulfill their duty

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to honor those who deserve honor and show affection for those who command affection.38

Xunzi’s argument is that anyone who experiences loss is flooded with sadness and longing for the person who has died. Emotions need some kind of expression, and a bereaved person also feels an obligation to do something in order to do right by the dead. However, given the tumult of intense emotions bereaved persons typically feel, on their own they would have difficulty coming up with an effective and fulfilling way to express them. If left to their own devices to determine whether they had done right by the dead, moreover they would most likely be perpetually frustrated, since they would never feel that they had done enough. Rituals have been established, therefore, to provide the grieving person with a definite procedure for expressing emotion and honoring the dead. Because the steps that should be taken are specified, the person will not be left with any doubts as to the adequacy of what has been done (at least as far as the funeral and burial are concerned). A similar line of reasoning applies to conventional expressions in mourning and in offering condolences. By using the established forms, those who sympathize with the bereaved can be somewhat confident that they are acting appropriately for present purposes. They cannot but feel that words and gestures fall short in such circumstances. But they resort to established modes so as to have definite ways that are sanctioned by custom to show appropriate caring and concern. Kitschy gestures are, of course, not required in contexts of mourning, but they should hardly be condemned. A card with clouds or a banner on a wreath saying “beloved partner” is not intended as a summary statement, but as a gesture indicating much that is left unsaid. Hegel claimed that by a certain era in history, humanity had developed such a complex view of reality that no artwork, being sensuous, could present a full impression of the collective understanding of reality that had been attained up to that point. From then on, art could at best gesture beyond itself. We might draw an analogy with Hegel’s point when we suggest that no image, gesture, or presentation can really show the complex feelings and reflections we want to communicate when dealing with a loss. We must content ourselves with what amounts to a gestural sign language

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that only gives hints of our thoughts and feelings. Many of our signs are trite and kitschy in form, but for that very reason, they get the general point across.

4 What of the Moral Objections? Earlier, we touched on moral objections that have been directed at kitsch. It is said to be dishonest, escapist, self-indulgent, and lazy. To round out my defense of kitsch as acceptable in mourning, I should touch on this line of criticism. If we consider the kind of self-indulgent reaction that Kundera describes to be indicative of kitsch, kitsch responses in in connection with a death are certainly possible. Self-satisfaction at how moved one is by someone’s death seems to be involved in the kind of sentimental reaction to the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop that has struck some critics as objectionable (among them Oscar Wilde). Little Nell’s death is fictional, but nothing in principle precludes this kind of response to the death of an actual person. In the case of a real death, however, such a response is probably more likely in cases in which one does not feel particularly close to the deceased than in those in which one is in the throes of grief oneself. It may be fair to interpret certain advertisements by charitable organizations as promoting self-satisfaction at one’s own sensitivity to the plight of strangers (which might be reinforced if one is moved to make a donation). Perhaps a person could also enjoy thinking of oneself as a fine person after having expressed sympathy to someone who is grieving. This unattractive reaction, however, seems independent of whether or not the expression took the form of kitsch.39 The criticisms that kitsch promotes escapism and covers up objectionable aspects of reality are a bit more on the mark in connection with uses of kitsch in contexts of mourning. The common images on sympathy cards might be deemed as distracting from reality, and contemporary mortuary products, which are often geared to euphemism, might merit a similar judgment. This is particularly evident in some of the themed funerals showcased on Best Funerals Ever, which distract attention from the death to the unusual proceedings and the antics of those who are

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participating. The extreme embalming discussed earlier avoids acknowledging the objectionable by making the deceased appear to be pursuing ordinary activities. Even the far more routine positioning of an embalmed corpse in a cushioned coffin itself seems to underplay, if not to deny death’s reality. The project of evading harsh reality is also apparent in a floral company’s online advice for composing sympathy messages, which includes the suggestion, “Avoid using the words dead or died,” [sic] although I do not see this suggestion itself as being kitsch.40 Moreover, although a steady diet of escapist kitsch may be unwholesome in many circumstances, this is hardly an objection to gestures of sympathy that deflect attention from the stark reality the bereaved person faces or the sadness of the circumstances. Those who offer condolences (assuming they are sincere) aim to remind the bereaved person of reality’s kinder aspects at a time when its harsh side is all too apparent, and this is as it should be. The bereaved person’s own indulgence in kitsch could involve denial of reality. The person might find a kitschy urn or headstone with a mawkish slogan or phrase, for example, supportive of the fantasy that the relationship with the deceased was ideal. Yet this could add to the sense of loss by making the deceased person and the relationship with that person seem more perfect than they were, thus failing as an escapist effort. Denial of the complexities of the relationship and overvaluation of the deceased, if sustained as long-term projects, could be symptoms of a lack of resiliency. However, relatively soon after the loss, bereaved people tend to experience shifting emotional states, some of which may encourage such oversimplification and exaggeration, and kitsch objects that reinforce such attitudes are unlikely to do more than amplify them for a while. Given the emotional instability typically experienced in bereavement, their effect seems limited. In general, I think deference is virtuous in these matters. As a matter of etiquette, I think the wishes of the bereaved should generally be respected, even if they prefer to milk their own maudlin moods. Their opting for kitsch in public memorials can lead to conflict, however, as is the case when it leads to conflict such as those over decorations in cemeteries, so they would often do well to avoid them (though this may be far from their minds when decisions are made). Kitschy or not, the

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bereaved should perhaps defer to known tastes of the deceased. Objections to a next of kin opting for a kitschy monument that would have offended the tastes of the deceased might be justified. However, interfering with memorializing projects undertaken by a deceased person’s next of kin may be objectionable in itself. The conflict over grave decoration that opens Chevalier’s novel involves the clash of tastes between the family that has positioned a large angel sculpture on a monument and one that has an elaborate urn in a non-­ figural setting. The contrast may prompt the question of which approach is better. If we consider a memorial’s effectiveness to be a function of its moving those who encounter it to reflection, avoidance of kitschy images might seem desirable, since such images may be sufficiently distasteful to many to interfere with their emotional and reflective experience. However, use of non-figural forms is not the key to effective memorials, and the non-figural can also function as kitsch. It can be too opaque to be moving, and it can encourage self-satisfaction on the part of those who consider their ability to find then affecting to be a mark of their own high level of culture. Non-figural forms and obvious kitsch can both gesture toward more than is explicit and thus can function symbolically when used in memorials. But either strategy can convey the impression of aesthetic laziness. The allegation that kitsch is a mode of aesthetic laziness is probably the most damning of the lines of moral criticism that I have indicated. A vague gesture that employs images of flowers and butterflies seems the course of least resistance, overtly unobjectionable, but not obviously selected with care. Donald Keefer draws attention to a use of a product that seems designed for those wanting to take a lazy approach, computer websites that produce “personalized” eulogies to deliver.41 I can imagine the results being kitsch, and it is hard to imagine them being heartfelt. Laziness in interpersonal gestures may always be objectionable, but particularly so in response to a death. The deceased deserves gestures of respect from the living, and paying one’s respects requires personal investment, not behavior that is merely routine. Moreover, awareness that any gesture will fall short does not justify negligence. To pay one’s respects requires attention to the deceased person’s particularity and an effort to do justice to the person as unique. The generic is the opposite of what is

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called for, and the strong motivation to try to do justice to the deceased, though unachievable, demands resistance to the temptation to resort to gestures that appear “one size fits all.” But are seemingly kitschy gestures a sign of aesthetic laziness? Not necessarily. I can imagine a sympathetic person spending considerable effort in attempting to determine the best way to convey sympathy, only to conclude that an innocuous card with butterflies is the way to go. The effort cannot be seen in the card, which seems superficial on its surface. But sending the card may be an instance of what Nietzsche describes as being “superficial out of profundity.”42 He develops this concept in explaining his disagreement with those of his contemporaries who took the ancient Athenians to have a naïve approach to life, a judgment based on the seeming cheerfulness of the Greeks’ devotion to beautiful forms and the rambunctiousness of their mythological stories. Nietzsche’s response is that these myths and the love of beautiful form do not indicate naïveté. Instead, they are compensatory, constructed in the face of the darker insights that are evident in the Greeks’ tragic dramas. The lightness of their stories and their preference for images of youthful perfection are a sign not of innocence and shallowness, but of experience and depth. Nietzsche reminds us that the apparent shallowness of gestures can mask the depth of feeling behind them. They are like an unperturbed appearance that hides the fact that one is greatly affected. That one appears collected may only show that one has mastered one’s demeanor or calmed oneself, perhaps in order to be able to respond attentively to others’ needs in the situation. The composure of a doctor in an emergency does not betray a lack of concern. In contexts involving mourning, self-control can enable one to register nuances of feeling expressed by others, or it can be politely assumed in order to spare others from feeling the need to attend to the upheaval one is experiencing. Sometimes, says Nietzsche, one chooses a superficial mien precisely because one is experienced with the darker side of life. Far from being shallow, a person may rejoice in life’s lighter moments precisely because of an awareness of what contrasts with them. The slogan “Say it with Flowers” originated as a marketing effort in 1910. It made reference to the employment of the newly developed

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telegraph by a network of florists so that a person in one town could send flowers to someone in another. Kitsch, which exploits networks of culturally ingrained images and meanings, can similarly serve as a means for sending gestures of love and thoughtfulness to those who are at some distance, whether physical or emotional. Like the telegraph, its messages tend to be short, unfiltered, and to the point, banal but potentially as powerful as “I love you” or “I care.” Verbal acrobatics do not further communication in contexts of mourning. Simply sitting with a grieving person can be eloquent. You need not say anything at all. But if you have to say something, say it with kitsch.

Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), II: 13, 101. 2. Zhuangzi, 46/18/15; translation slightly modified from Angus C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 123–124. 3. Robert Bendar observes, in connection with roadside memorials, that “many people see them as effective memorials, tributes or warnings, but others find them kitschy and sentimental, and many find them morbid and ‘creepy’. Others may see their utility, but are embarrassed or offended by them because they consider them ‘out of place’ in the public right-of-­ ­ way.” Robert M.  Bednar, “Placing Affect: Remembering Strangers at Roadside Crash Shrines,” ed. Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson, Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art, and Everyday Life: Memory, Place and the Senses (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 63. 4. Tony Walter, “Communication Media and the Dead: From the Stone Age to Facebook,” Mortality 20, no. 3 (2015), 226. 5. See Jefferson Pull, “Brazil Judge Orders Facebook Memorial Page Removed,” BBC Brasil, Sao Paulo, 24 April 2013, accessed December 4, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­latin-­america-­2286569. 6. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 236.

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7. Indeed, one alleged etymology for the term links it to a term in the dialect that means “to make cheaply.” See Calinescu, 234. But see also Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 82. 8. See Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, 79. 9. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 228. 10. Tomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 37–38. For my own, somewhat similar analysis, see Kathleen Marie Higgins, “Sweet Kitsch,” in The Philosophy of the Visual Arts, ed. Philip Alperson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 568–581. 11. Kulka, Kitsch and Art, 78–79. 12. See Greenberg, Clement, “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” The Partisan Review 6 (1939): 34–49. 13. Mary Midgley, “Brutality and Sentimentality,” Philosophy 54, no. 209 (1979): 386. 14. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 229. See also Hermann Brock, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (New York: Universe Books, 1969), 49–67. 15. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 248. 16. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 251. 17. He is not alone in objecting to sentimentality on political grounds. Mark Jefferson similarly argues that in so far as it encourages belief in absolute innocence or other characteristics that are totally unobjectionable, sentimentality promotes the idea that anything that would threaten such perfection is absolutely evil and merits destruction. See Mark Jefferson, “What Is Wrong with Sentimentality?” Mind 92 (1983): 519–529. 18. Lyell D. Henry, Jr., “Fetched by Beauty: Confessions of a Kitsch Addict,” Journal of Popular Culture 13 (1979), 207. 19. Henry, “Fetched by Beauty,” 206. 20. Henry, “Fetched by Beauty,” 203. 21. A commonplace view is that when appreciated ironically, kitsch becomes camp. On this view, Henry is a connoisseur of camp rather than kitsch, although he apparently thinks otherwise. Susan Sontag popularized the idea that ironic kitsch consumption results in camp in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1961), 277–293. Kristin G.  Congdon and Doug

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Blandy interpret Sontag as holding that a considerable amount of kitsch is sometimes camp, though depending on one’s attitude, an object would be one or the other, but not both (at least at the same time). See Kristin G.  Congdon and Doug Blandy, “What? Clotheslines and Popbeads Aren’t Trashy Anymore? Teaching About Kitsch,” Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education 46 (2005), 198. 22. Congdon and Blandy, “What? Clotheslines and Popbeads Aren’t Trashy Anymore? Teaching About Kitsch,” 200. 23. Congdon and Blandy, “What? Clotheslines and Popbeads Aren’t Trashy Anymore? Teaching About Kitsch,” 207. 24. My characterization of this emotional response is intended to echo Kundera’s, which I consider below. 25. John Troyer, Technologies of the Human Corpse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 7. 26. Troyer, Technologies of the Human Corpse, 10. 27. Bethan Bell, “Taken from Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography.” BBC News. June 5, 2016. Accessed: September 13, 2020. https://www. bbc.com/news/uk-­england-­36389581. 28. Gillo Dorfles, “Death,” in Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (London: Studio Vista, 1969), 135. 29. Bel Mooney, “Modern Face of Mourning: The Colourful ‘Poundland’ Shrines Across Britain That Councils Are Trying to Wipe Out,” The Daily Mail, March 18, 2011, accessed: December 3, 2021. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-­1 353815/Colourful-­ poundland-­graveyard-­shrines-­British-­councils-­trying-­wipe-­out.html. 30. See, for example, Dennis Owens, “Dispute over 8-year-old’s Grave Decorations Lands in Court,” 24 News, May 31, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021. https://www.abc27.com/news/dispute-­over-­8-­year-­ olds-­grave-­decorations-­lands-­in-­court/. I thank Yuriko Saito for drawing my attention to cases of this nature. 31. Tracy Chevalier, Falling Angels (New York: Dutton, 2001). 32. See Drew Schwartz, “Inside the Funeral Homes Posing the Dead Like They’re Still Alive,” Vice, July 30, 2018, accessed December 1, 2021. https://www.vice.com/en/article/9kmqy7/inside-­new-­orleans-­ extreme-­embalming-­funerals. 33. See George Sanders, “Themed Death: Novelty in the Funeral Industry,” Consumers, Commodities & Consumption, A Newsletter of the Consumer

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Studies Research Network 10:1 (2008), accessed February 6, 2018. http:// csrn.camden.rutgers.edu/newsletters/10-­1/sander.htm. 34. See, for example, Clinton Yates’ “‘Best Funeral Ever’: Most Frightening Reality TV Show to Date?” The Washington Post, January 7, 2013, accessed February 6, 2018. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/best-­funeral-­ever-­most-­frightening-­reality-­tv-­show-­to-­date/ 2013/01/07/8106d82a-­58ed-­11e2-­9fa9-­5fbdc9530eb9_blog.html. 35. If kitsch can be defined partially on the basis of presenting reality in an entirely positive light, American sympathy cards tend more toward kitsch than do German ones, according to Birgit Koopmann-Holm and J. L. Tsai. They found that German cards tended to be fairly direct in expressing condolences, while American cards tended to suggest ways of seeing the loss in some positive light, suggesting that the person is in a better place, for example, or that the person will live on in our memories. Birgit Koopmann-Holm and J.  L. Tsai, “Focusing on the Negative: Cultural Differences in Expressions of Sympathy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(6) (September 2014): 1092–1115. https:// doi.org/10.1037/aa0037684. 36. “Quirky Cremation Urns,” Pinterest, accessed December 3, 2021. https://www.pinterest.com/outoftheboxurns/quirky-­cremation-­urns/. 37. Cremation Resource, “11 Odd and Unusual Cremation Urns That You Have Never Seen Before,” 2019, accessed: December 3, 2021. http:// www.cremationresource.org/urns/11-­odd-­unusual-­cremation-­urns.html 38. Hsün Tzu, “A Discussion of Rites,” in Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 109. 39. Donald Keefer suggests a possible case of this sort when he comments, “Engagement with a eulogy can be completely derailed when the author is perceived to be more interested in creating an artwork than praise for the dead.” “Speaking Well of the Dead: On the Aesthetics of Eulogies,” Sophia 50:2 (2011), 305. 40. Lily Calyx, “10 Tips for Sympathy Messages,” Pollen Nation by Serenata Flowers, October 24, 2014, accessed December 3, 2021. http://www. serenataflowers.com/pollennation/sympathy-­messages-­tips/. 41. Donald Keefer, “Speaking Well of the Dead: On the Aesthetics of Eulogies,” Sophia 50:2 (2011), 305. 42. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 38.

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Bibliography Bell, Bethan. “Taken from Life: The Unsettling Art of Death Photography.” BBC News. June 5, 2016. Accessed: September 13, 2020. https://www.bbc. com/news/uk-­england-­36389581. Bendar, Robert M. “Placing Affect: Remembering Strangers at Roadside Crash Shrines.” In Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art, and Everyday Life: Memory, Place and the Senses, edited by Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson (49–67). Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015. Brock, Hermann. “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch” (1950). In Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, edited by Gillo Dorfles (49–67). London: Studio Vista, 1969. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. Calyx, Lily. “10 Tips for Sympathy Messages.” Pollen Nation, by Serenata Flowers. October 24, 2014, accessed December 3, 2021. http://www.serenataflowers.com/pollennation/sympathy-­messages-­tips/. Carovillano, Brian. “Diocese Says ‘Danny Boy’ Isn’t Appropriate at Mass,” Providence, Rhode Island (AP), Standing Stones, October 24, 2001, accessed March 6, 2018. http://www.standingstones.com/danny3.html#mass. Chevalier, Tracy. Falling Angels. New York: Dutton, 2001. Congdon, Kristin G., and Doug Blandy, “What? Clotheslines and Popbeads Aren't Trashy Anymore? Teaching about Kitsch.” Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education 46, no. 3 (2005): 197–210. Cremation Resource. “11 Odd And Unusual Cremation Urns That You Have Never Seen Before.” 2019. Accessed: December 3, 2021. http://www.cremationresource.org/urns/11-­odd-­unusual-­cremation-­urns.html. Dorfles, Gillo. “Death.” In Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste, edited by Gillo Dorfles (133–138). London: Studio Vista, 1969a. Dorfles, Gillo, ed. Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste. London: Studio Vista, 1969b. Graham, Angus C. Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant Garde and Kitsch.” The Partisan Review 6 (1939): 34–49. Harries, Karsten. The Meaning of Modern Art. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Henry, Lyell D., Jr. “Fetched by Beauty: Confessions of a Kitsch Addict.” Journal of Popular Culture 13, no. 2 (1979): 197–208.

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Higgins, Kathleen Marie. “Sweet Kitsch.” In The Philosophy of the Visual Arts, edited by Philip Alperson (568–581). New  York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Jefferson, Mark. “What Is Wrong with Sentimentality?” Mind 92 (1983): 519–529. Keefer, Donald. “Speaking Well of the Dead: On the Aesthetics of Eulogies.” Sophia 50:2 (2011): 303–311. Koopmann-Holm, Birgit, and J. L. Tsai, “Focusing on the Negative: Cultural Differences in Expressions of Sympathy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107, no. 6 (September 2014): 1092–1115. https://doi. org/10.1037/aa0037684. Kulka, Tomas. Kitsch and Art. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University, 1996. Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Midgley, Mary. “Brutality and Sentimentality.” Philosophy 54, no. 209 (1979): 385–389. Mooney, Bel. “Modern Face of Mourning: The Colourful ‘Poundland’ Shrines across Britain that Councils Are Trying to Wipe Out.” The Daily Mail, 18 March 2011. Accessed: December 3, 2021. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-­1 353815/Colourful-­p oundland-­g raveyard-­s hrines-­British-­ councils-­trying-­wipe-­out.html. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Owens, Dennis. “Dispute over 8-year-old’s Grave Decorations Lands in Court.” 24 News, May 31, 2017, accessed December 3, 2021. https://www.abc27. com/news/dispute-­over-­8-­year-­olds-­grave-­decorations-­lands-­in-­court/. Pull, Jefferson. “Brazil Judge Orders Facebook Memorial Page Removed.” BBC Brasil, Sao Paulo, April 24, 2013. Accessed December 4, 2021. https://www. bbc.com/news/world-­latin-­america-­2286569. “Quirky Cremation Urns.” Pinterest. Accessed December 3, 2021. https://www. pinterest.com/outoftheboxurns/quirky-­cremation-­urns/. Sanders, George. “Themed Death: Novelty in the Funeral Industry.” Consumers, Commodities & Consumption, A Newsletter of the Consumer Studies Research Network 10, no. 1 (2008). Accessed February 6, 2018. http://csrn.camden. rutgers.edu/newsletters/10-­1/sander.htm.

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Schwartz, Drew. “Inside the Funeral Homes Posing the Dead Like They’re Still Alive,” Vice, July 30, 2018. Accessed: December 1, 2021. https://www.vice. com/en/article/9kmqy7/inside-­new-­orleans-­extreme-­embalming-­funerals. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays (277–293). New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1961. Troyer, John. Technologies of the Human Corpse. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2020. Yates, Clinton. “‘Best Funeral Ever’: Most Frightening Reality TV Show to Date?” The Washington Post, January 7, 2013. Accessed February 6, 2018. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/best-­funeral-­ever-­ most-­f rightening-­reality-­t v-­s how-­t o-­d ate/2013/01/07/8106d82a-­5 8ed-­ 11e2-­9fa9-­5fbdc9530eb9blog.html.

Old Tricks for a New Dog: Toilet Humor, Politicized Kitsch, and the Trump Presidency Alison Rowley

In the 2016 US presidential election, an enormous amount of politicized kitsch focused on an imagined romantic relationship between candidate Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, with many of the raunchier items referencing the size and performance of the two men’s genitalia.1 Constant media scrutiny concerning the so-called pornographication of American politics meant that a parallel stream of material objects using toilet humor—which connected President Trump with the acts of defecating, urinating, and passing gas as part of their political messaging—has received much less attention. That omission is rectified in the pages that follow. This chapter argues that, while toilet humor has a history in Western political commentary that stretches back hundreds of years, the forms that it is presently taking are reasonably new. Central to the story are the ways in which ordinary citizens, engaged in what scholars have referred to as “participatory” or “DIY politics,” have embraced online print-on-demand services in order to create a range of kitschy

A. Rowley (*) Department of History, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_5

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material objects in order to express their political opinions.2 What these actors have done is render some conceptions of kitsch obsolete. For example, it is difficult to see how the politicized objects that will be discussed in this chapter fit with scholar Monica Kjellman-Chapin’s statement that kitsch often “acts upon its (passive) spectator gently, without confrontation; it is digested easily, and requires no additional thought on the beholder’s part.”3 Instead, as we shall see, kitsch in this context fits much more closely with the ways in which it is being used by postmodern artists, in other words, “as a provocative gesture full invested with the gravity of cultural critique.”4 It seems facile to say but political kitsch is always a product of the technological capabilities of its era. In the United States, the first campaign buttons—items that noted historian of material culture Laurel Ulrich suggests carry broad appeal “because they remind us that ordinary people…drive political and social change”—date from the election of George Washington as president.5 Invented by button makers in New York and Connecticut, these brass buttons were issued to celebrate the results once the election was over and they featured designs such as the new president’s initials or an eagle and sunrise.6 Not until the nineteenth century did Americans take to wearing buttons that showed their support for a particular candidate in advance of an election, but the practice soon caught on. The kinds of buttons being created evolved as new technologies made them easier to produce and in much greater quantities as well. The 1860s saw the first buttons which held tin-type photographs of those running for office; these were superseded in the 1890s by celluloid covered campaign buttons. By 1920, lithograph pinbacks had been invented. Even as radio and television advertising, to say nothing of digital media, emerged to shape the American political landscape, older forms of political kitsch continued to circulate in vast quantities. Indeed, they were so normalized that campaigns would have appeared strange without buttons, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and lawn signs. For example, the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign distributed 20 million buttons and 9 million bumper stickers (made easier to use by the early 1950s invention of self-adhesive backing), even as it spent heavily on television advertising.7 This rather detailed digression into the history of campaign buttons is important because it underscores the way in which the

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phenomenon of politicized kitsch adapts to new technologies and this chapter is as much a story about that as it is about the use of a particular kind of humor—associated with bodily functions—that was employed to critique a particular individual. In other words, the only difference between the buttons discussed above and those created by people seeking to unseat US President Trump in 2020 is that the newer campaign materials were often created without any direction from the opponent’s campaign or even from companies that had traditionally produced election kitsch. Instead, they are products of the digital age—one where online print-on-­demand services allow anyone to create (or adapt) a meme and thereby enter into political discourse with millions of others. The past 15 years or so have seen the intrusion of print-on-demand services into the American political arena, and these internet businesses have done two things: dramatically increase the number and kinds of material objects that can be politicized—and it should be noted that it is not the form of the items that render them kitsch but rather the images that are now being reproduced on them—and reduce the control that politicians, and the image-makers behind them, have over their own likenesses. The process began in the 2008 US presidential election, specifically when supporters of Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who was seeking the Republican nomination, began to use CafePress—a print-on-demand business that had been founded almost a decade earlier in California—to make their own campaign materials. Paul’s supporters did not confine themselves to reproducing the campaign’s official “Ron Paul Revolution” logo, but instead created an array of designs for themselves; these were then made available on bumper stickers, T-shirts, and buttons. The materials caught the attention of the public and eventually the media, which led to the candidate being taken much more seriously. Paul’s polling numbers spiked. Yet, as one of his volunteer’s noted: “The official Ron Paul Campaign had nothing to do with any of it and all this activity went on below the radar of the mainstream media.”8 Since that time, CafePress has been joined by dozens of other print-­ on-­demand sites such as Zazzle.com (founded in 2005) and Redbubble. com (founded in 2006). Their business model is relatively simple. Designers, who create profiles and sometimes storefronts, upload images to the sites. They get paid a portion of the purchase price every time

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someone buys an item featuring their design and the site keeps the rest of the monies. Sometimes designers can select what kinds of products that their designs may be printed upon, and an astonishing array of items are now on offer—everything from old standards such as postcards and buttons to yoga pants, flip flops, and sunglass frames. In 2015 Amazon entered the foray by launching “Merch by Amazon,” a T-shirt print-on-­ demand and order fulfillment service of its own, although it should be pointed out that one can find CafePress shirts available for sale on Amazon.com as well. In the “Merch” program, vendors upload their designs but, in exchange for a fee of $9.80 per T-shirt sold, Amazon handles subsequent logistical matters. The company prints and ships the shirts, and deals with any customer service inquiries, which means that sellers face no upfront costs; nor do they have to store their own inventory.9 The service proved to be so successful that Amazon eventually moved to institute an application process and control the number of sellers using it. The volume of sales for print-on-demand sites continues to be strong, although admittedly not all of the products that they offer are pieces of politicized kitsch. Zazzle.com, to give but one example, saw its sales increase by 50% in 2020, the year of the last American presidential election and the first year of the global Covid-19 pandemic.10 A notable feature of the politically driven kitsch found on such sites is its responsiveness to news stories. As this chapter will show, new designs frequently offer an almost immediate reaction to events in the news cycle, which also means people are required to have a knowledge of political affairs in order to understand the context for the images. But before that subject is addressed in more detail, it is necessary to understand the background for the particular vein of satire—toilet humor—that became so prevalent during the Trump presidency and that will be analyzed by this chapter. For hundreds of years, history has been littered with moments when people resorted to toilet humor to critique political events or their leaders. Since, in the words of scholar Naomi Stead, the “toilet is placed squarely in the category of taboo object through its close association with bodily fluids and the process of excreting them,” it offers an ideal way of expressing discontent.11 She also notes that many of the hundreds of euphemisms that humans have created for the word “toilet” are meant to be funny. Discussing one of them provides an example of how toilet

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humor became intertwined with politics hundreds of years ago. In 1596, The Metamorphosis of Ajax was published anonymously. On the surface, this book, which was actually written by Sir John Harington, a godson of Queen Elizabeth I, described the benefits of flushable toilets and offered technical specifications for building them. The book’s title hinged on pun Ajax/A-jakes, which people at the time would have recognized since “jakes” was a slang term for toilet as well as filth or excrement.12 In addition, Harington’s work was full of, to quote literature professor Rick Bowers, “joke and anecdotes covered by classical allusion and related satirically to Elizabethan life, manners, and politics.”13 The queen was most definitely not amused by this book that, via its humor, suggested that contemporary politics needed cleaning up, and she banished Harington from court. The Harington episode is far from the only example one can find in the historical record. Roughly 50 years after the publication of Metamorphosis of Ajax, Rembrandt van Rijn, for instance, turned to toilet humor to offer his opinion of contemporary art critics. In a pen and ink drawing titled “Satire on Art Criticism (1644),” he not only depicted a critic with donkey ears, but showed the artist whose work was being evaluated in the process of squatting and defecating in the corner of the scene. The description that accompanied the drawing when it was recently exhibited in Ottawa, Canada said the artist was showing his “appreciation” for the critic’s opinion via this bodily act.14 Later still, another famous artist, Jacques-Louis David, produced about a striking comment about French politics during the early 1790s. His etching, “Gouvernement anglois,” featured a crowned devil whose bottom has been replaced by the head of the French king, Louis XVI. The latter blows smoke (in essence farts from his mouth) at a crowd of ordinary people.15 In more modern times, dozens of different picture postcards from the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) also employed this farting motif since they showed Japanese soldiers dropping their pants to break wind in the direction of their Russian enemies. Then toilet-related ridicule went on to become a notable feature of postcards from the First World War, some of which again resorted to jokes about farting at the enemy, including one that was captioned “Wilhelm’s Artillery,” which suggested that all the Germans had to launch at their Triple Entente enemies was the bodily

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gasses produced by eating Strasbourg sausages. Other postcards from the same time depicted Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose rather distinctive helmet was frequently reworked into an obvious chamber pot. Finally, World War II-era postcards also resorted to toilet humor. The cartoon on a notable example from the “Slam the Axis” series created by D. Robbins & Co, showed a stylized Uncle Sam undertaking “A Royal Flush!” as he gets rid of America’s enemies (Hitler, Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito) by flushing them down a toilet. Such satirical treatments all relied upon toilet humor to both make one’s wartime enemies appear less personally threatening and to denigrate their fighting capabilities. Moreover, the examples described in the last few paragraphs demonstrate how easy it is, in the words of scholar Joe Thorogood, to collapse “distinctions between high and low culture, reducing politics to the excretions of the human body.”16 As he goes on to note, “[t]his is a powerful method of negotiating and contesting geopolitical debates by linking them to the corporeal vulnerability that all individuals share.”17 As these historical examples demonstrate, toilet humor has been a common feature in political discourse across the Western world and it continues to be a weapon of choice when people wish to express their displeasure with, or opposition to, a leader and their actions. For example, when Dutch populist politician Rita Verdunk, who was a proponent of more direct democracy, used a wiki as a debating platform in the mid-­2000s, the site was often hi-jacked including in one case by someone who used it to advocate for the distribution of free hemorrhoid medicine.18 A decade later, in 2014, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine in order to annex the Crimean Peninsula, an army of computer trolls created Russian-language memes meant to denigrate Ukraine and/or the European Union by connecting them with excrement and urine.19 Now, as I complete the final revisions to this chapter, Russia is again at war with Russia, and my Facebook feed contains images such as Putin’s likeness being used to decorate a Poo Box (where dog owners are meant to deposit any feces after walking their dogs) at a park in London. In addition, Dominic Murphy, an artist in Herefordshire in Britain who is known for producing paintings that reference Alice in Wonderland, was so angered by Russian actions that he made a portrait of Putin from his dog’s feces and donated the money from its sale to UNICEF.20 As these examples

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clearly demonstrate, toilet humor remains alive and well as an avenue of political discourse. With that said, it is time to turn our attention to the Trump presidency, which was replete with moments that referred in one way or another to the excretory systems of human bodies. Outlining them, however briefly, is important because the cumulative effect of these episodes was to render toilet humor a credible avenue with which to critique the president while he was in office and as he stood for re-election in 2020. Indeed, as soon as he initially announced his candidacy in June 2015, Donald Trump was dogged by accusations that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a compromising dossier of information about him. Rumors persisted that Russian officials possessed a tape of Trump engaging in “golden showers” with a group of prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.21 The story soon became fodder social media; by January 2017, when Trump was inaugurated, Twitter had roughly 70,000 jokes about the alleged incident.22 All kinds of kitsch featured on print-on-demand websites referenced it too. CafePress listed stickers and fridge magnets for sale, and Amazon.com sold an adult colouring book titled The PeePee Tape: Exclusive. Four years later, pieces of kitsch were still associating the president with urine; I ordered a Trump card with the caption “Will you pee my Valentine?” one month before the 2020 election.23 Information on the website revealed that the US-based designer of that card, “Political Theatre,” specialized in presidential election memorabilia but did not have a preferred political party. “Instead of focusing on one party or one candidate,” the designer’s blurb read, “our gear is made for all United States political parties because we believe that every citizen has a right to express their opinion and support whichever candidate they choose.” With that said, it is still hard to see how the greeting card reproduced here could be viewed as anything other than a critique of Donald Trump. A year later, at the end of January 2018, the “golden toilet” episode briefly captured headlines around the world. When staff at the White House asked the Guggenheim Museum if the President and his wife could borrow Vincent van Gogh’s Landscape With Snow for their private quarters, the museum’s chief curator, Nancy Spector (who was apparently no fan of Trump’s) refused.24 She did, however, offer a more contemporary piece of art in its place: Maurizio Cattelan’s “America,” an 18-karat

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gold toilet that had served as a commentary on the excesses of wealth in the United States when it was installed as an interactive exhibit in the museum’s fifth-floor public restroom. The irony was, of course, that Trump was known for installing gold-plated fixtures in many of his residences and on his private plane. Or perhaps the story gained so much traction because it was released so shortly after the president’s inappropriate statements about immigrants from what he termed, “shithole countries.” Trump made those remarks in a meeting at the Oval Office on 12 January 2018, immediately sparking an international firestorm once word of what he had said leaked out. Professor Ibram X. Kendi has argued that the moment was so significant because of “the racial hierarchy Trump constructed with that language. He placed whites over Asians, and both over Latinos and blacks from ‘shithole’ countries.”25 Certainly, one enterprising vendor on Zazzle.com thought to link the two episodes. According to his profile on the site, the designer (beardiethor123) is based in Arkansas and donates a portion of his sales to autistic and environmental causes. His design, which is printed on the button shown in Fig. 1, shows the president with his face firmly planted in the bowl of a golden toilet, while the caption references his offensive remarks. Six months later, when the US president paid an official visit to Great Britain, protestors greeted him with the “Baby Trump” balloon. The 20-foot inflatable plastic figure was created by artist Matt Bonner, and it premiered, so to speak, at a 13 July 2018 mass protest in Parliament Square in London. The balloon has appeared at many events since then, including ones held in France, Argentina, Denmark, and Iceland. Copies of “Baby Trump” were also created, which led to their being flown on a number of occasions in the United States as well. Recently the inflatable was acquired by the Museum of London for its collection related to civic protests movements.26 Given that Donald Trump’s visual public persona hinged at least in part upon him wearing in a business suit and red or blue power tie, the balloon undermined that image by presenting the president clad only in a diaper. Moreover, that meant his sole article of clothing was linked to bodily functions, thereby making each “Baby Trump” episode—and the host of memes, videos, and kitsch that it engendered—a moment when toilet humor was again used to express displeasure with Trump and his policies.

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Fig. 1  Photograph showing button referencing both the “golden toilet” and “shithole countries” episodes. Taken November 2019. (Courtesy of the author)

In the year and a half that followed, it is may be hard to believe but Trump provided even more toilet-related fodder for the media. “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times as opposed to once. They end up using more water. We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms, where you turn the faucet on in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where it rushes out to sea because you could never handle it. And you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water.” This statement, delivered in his typical blustery manner by the president on 6 December 2019, was connected to Trump’s ongoing efforts to weaken environmental regulations in the United States.27 While the story did not catch fire in a sustained way like the episodes described earlier (although

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it did generate a few listings on Zazzle.com), the idea clearly did not disappear from Trump’s mind. Indeed, he returned to it during a campaign rally in Nevada in October 2020.28 By then, the public’s attention was focused elsewhere, notably on the Covid-19 pandemic which had taken root in March 2020. The pandemic triggered a shortage of toilet paper in the United States, something which offered a new avenue with which to attack the president’s performance as a leader. During his final year in office, Trump ardently denied the severity of the pandemic and did little to assist states as they struggled to deal with the public health crisis. The disappearance of toilet paper—and it should be pointed out that by the third week of April 2020 more than half of US grocery stores were out of stock of this now precious everyday commodity—eventually became conflated with his lack of leadership in a more general sense, and the subject was addressed regularly in the designs listed on print-on-demand websites.29 As has been noted, each of the episodes outlined above generated related items of kitsch for sale on print-on-demand websites, but it is important to mention that these materials fit into a larger, persistent discourse that connected toilet humor, the creation and use of kitsch, and the Trump presidency in a more generalized fashion as well. Closely examining a couple of the products marketed on the handicraft website Etsy.com, as well as the comments left in reviews by purchasers, gives some sense of the ways in which kitsch did, in fact, act as political discourse. For example, the Donald Trump Pooper Scooper was introduced by the Political Poop storefront on Etsy in 2019. The device let users make a statement while performing the necessary task of collecting their pet’s waste for proper disposal. As one reviewer raved, “What a wonderful product! Sturdy and picks up poop in mass quantities. When it’s [sic] jaws are opened and the poop comes out it’s as if you are watching a press conference in the Rose Garden.” Similarly, Dumps for Trump brought out a line of dog poop bags with the president’s face on them. Introduced in 2016, the line grew to include “Poos for Pence” and “Kraps for Kavanaugh” bags as well. A month before Americans went to the ballot box in 2020, the bags had 92 five-star reviews on Etsy.com. One reviewer simply said, “Best gift ever for Father’s day,” while another wrote “It expresses my feelings for you know who!” A third reviewer offered a more

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graphic response to the bags, saying “I’ve VERY MUCH enjoyed grinding my pooch’s poop into The Devil Incarnate’s stupid face and can’t wait to do it some more!” Other purchasers revealed that they used the poop bags as gifts. “OMG I just loved it! I gave some to like-minded friends, it’s a big hit!” wrote one person. But not everyone used these gifts as a way of strengthening ties with people of the same political persuasion. Sometimes the Trump dog poop bags were employed more provocatively, as was the case in the story left by this final reviewer: “We loved these and brought them to Wyoming for a family reunion amongst MAGA peeps. Quite effective.” Lest anyone think that these purchasers represent only a small, isolated fringe group, in December 2017, CNBC.com ran an article describing how much money could be made from selling Trump pet waste disposal bags. The man featured in the story had annual sales worth $150,000.30 These products for pets were developed alongside other items intended for humans. Toilet paper featuring any number of unpopular world leaders—from Trump to Putin to Kim Jong-Un—has been available for years. I bought my Trump toilet brush in San Francisco in November 2019, but the same item could easily be purchased through major online retailers (such as Amazon.com and eBay.com) at the same time. Such brushes openly mocked Trump’s well-known coiffure by having his “hair” serve as brightly colored sponges or bristles meant to scrape the sides of soiled toilet bowls. Apparently, these pieces of kitsch proved to be particularly popular in China, where they were sold by Taobao, China’s equivalent to eBay, during the country’s 2019 trade war with the United States. One enterprising seller even threw in a roll of Trump toilet paper every time someone purchased a brush from them.31 The same year pranksters left Trump urinal screens—products that are meant to reduce the odor in men’s restrooms and can easily be purchased through Amazon. com—on display in a restroom at the Will Rogers’ World Airport in Oklahoma City. After a traveler complained, airport officials quickly removed the items but not before the story made the local news.32 Nor was this an isolated moment that connected urinals with the American president. A cursory Google search brings up stories from across the world where Trump’s likeness has somehow been incorporated into an actual urinal. In February 2016, for example, District Stop

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Nightclub in Winnipeg, Canada revealed a black and white mural by a local artist in its men’s washroom; the mural showed a close-up of then candidate Trump’s face surrounded by some of his most controversial statements. One of the club’s co-owners told the media that they had not received any negative feedback about the installation. Instead, people “come out of the washroom with big smiles on their faces.”33 At the end of the same month, the Three Stags pub in the Kennington district of London, in conjunction with a British satirical television program, put cardboard cut-outs of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio above three urinals and asked users of the restroom to “vote” for their least favorite candidate by urinating into their mouth. The pub’s owner was reported as saying that he did not include any Democratic candidates in the experiment as the poll was meant to highlight “the shock horror of the lunacy of the Republicans.”34 Then in July 2016 the Adelphi Bar in Dublin, Ireland joined the foray by installing a photograph of Trump in its urinal. The manager was quoted as saying that the American presidential hopeful’s colorful statements had sparked much debate amongst the bar’s patrons, so the new decoration was intended to offer “a way for some people to express their feelings towards Mr. Trump’s views and to make their trip to the bathroom a ‘wee’ bit more entertaining.”35 Interestingly, the picture was stolen shortly afterward when an American firm hosted a corporate event at the bar; the managing director of the company apparently wanted to put the picture in the personal bathroom in his office.36 Eventually the image was returned to the pub and reinstalled in its original position. When the Raglan Road pub in Nottingham, UK also installed an image of Donald Trump in its urinal, its manager referred to the act as “a bit of fun.” She went on to say that no complaints had been logged; instead, customers “think it is brilliant,” and had been taking selfies with the display.37 Acts like these persisted right until the eve of voting in the 2020 US presidential election, as the case of the Mighty Duck pub in Brighton, UK illustrates. There an artist named Keo painted three images of Trump in the trough-like industrial urinal in the hopes that the display would make people laugh. She noted that response to the new décor had been positive, saying “A lot of people have been telling me how satisfying it is,” presumably to urinate on the unpopular American president.38 Decorating urinals with a likeness of a political

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figure is definitely an eye-catching and bold statement that reworks traditional power structures by letting everyday people use their bodily functions to symbolically school an elected official, although it must be admitted that the message being conveyed was completely connected to the particular politician being scrutinized. As one of the reviewers of this chapter noted, the connotations would have been completely different had it been President Obama’s likeness being used in the urinal. Had that been the case, the bold political statement would undoubtedly have been viewed as a sign of blatant racism instead. The fact that the pub in Brighton was erecting its urinal display right as Americans went to the polls to vote in early November 2020 should not be surprising, however. As this chapter has described, kitsch featuring toilet humor was a persistent form of commentary throughout the Trump presidency, and it was also notably visible in the campaign materials for sale on print-on-demand sites in the months leading up to the election. Before addressing some specific examples, it is worth considering the following figures: on 27 October 2020, in other words one week before voting began, searching “Trump poop” on Etsy.ca garnered 155 results; “Trump toilet” brought up 220 results; and “Trump turd” led to 539 listings. One of the most interesting of those items was a pattern for an amigurumi (a 3D figure made from crochet stitches) called “Trump Dump,” which let those talented enough with a crochet hook create a small figure of Trump that was shaped like a pile of feces.39 Only a few days earlier, searching Zazzle.com brought up dozens of different designs—spanning more than three pages of listings. In that instance, it was not even necessary to add the word “Trump” to the search box before finding the kitsch that mocked the candidate. In fact, it must be admitted that the 2020 US presidential election was a dream scenario for fans of puns and meme-makers. Not only did one of the two candidates, Donald Trump, have a name that rhymed with “dump,” a slang term for the process of defecating as well as for feces in general, but if one removed the “T” from his last name, that left “rump,” a slang term for a person’s buttocks. In addition, voting was scheduled for 3rd November—a date that rhymed with “turd,” another term associated with feces. In other words, the election offered seemingly endless linguistic possibilities for toiletbased humor and kitsch.

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Figure 2 shows a collection of the kinds of things that were available for sale in the days leading up to the election. Their forms—a bumper sticker, a postcard, and several buttons—are quite traditional and familiar, but there is no way that any official campaign would produce items bearing messages like these. All of the items came from Zazzle.com, one of the print-on-demand sites that has been mentioned frequently throughout this chapter and the images speak largely speak for

Fig. 2  Photograph showing a sample of the toilet humor-related items available during the 2020 US presidential election. Taken September 2021. (Courtesy of the author)

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themselves. Some of the kitsch, like the bumper sticker that reworks President Trump’s well-known “Make America Great Again” slogan so that it references flatulence, or the postcard that reimagines Auguste Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker as “The Stinker,” thereby possibly suggesting that Trump does his best mental work while engaged in the smelly process of defecating, is rather playful and creative. Other examples are cruder and blunter, particularly when they associate Trump directly with feces. These tend to be created by designers who make their partisan political sympathies known in the information they provide about themselves on the websites. Drawing only on the materials shown here, for instance, the image on the “Dump Trump” button, which superimposes the president’s face on a roll of toilet paper, was created by “AntiTrumpShop,” a vendor whose logo features a picture of Trump with a line through his face. And the seller associated with the “Dump Trump Pence Kushner” button was “Democratic Politics,” who as a “proud Democrat” says “In this time and era of Trumpism, I just felt the need to somehow get out my feelings on politics. I hop [sic] some of you share them.” Donald Trump did not exit the American political scene gracefully and quietly after he was defeated in November 2020. Instead, the now-former president contested the results of the election, arguing that mass voter fraud had “stolen” victory from him. As he worked to convince the public, he also pressured officials in a several key states to support his efforts. During one lengthy phone call with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, Trump farted.40 This was not the first time that cameras and microphones had captured Trump having a flatulent moment; YouTube has any number of videos purporting to reveal him farting at inopportune times, as well as several compilations that show how persistent the problem apparently has been for the former president. Prior to the election, it was even possible to buy a stuffed Christmas tree ornament called the “Fartin’ Potus” on Amazon.com. Perhaps the $9.95 item is a fitting piece of kitsch with which to commemorate a man who made so many remarks about defending that holiday  during his presidency, since the ornament farts the tune “Deck the Halls” when one pushes the “squeeze here” button on Trump’s exposed buttocks. Of course, Trump’s latest, now post-election, problem with gas was quickly noticed by people

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who then uploaded content to print-on-demand websites, which, in turn, led to more politicized kitsch possibly joining the items already in circulation. As this chapter has argued, toilet humor has been used to critique political affairs and school public figures for centuries, and it is not likely to disappear any time soon. What has changed, however, is the way in which it circulates and how closely associated toilet humor has become with politicized kitsch in the past decade or so. This chapter has demonstrated those things via examples created during the Trump presidency. Collectively, they show how print-on-demand services allow people to be politically informed and shockingly vulgar at the same time. The astonishing array of kitsch created in the Trump era speaks to the power of the internet to shape contemporary politics. It also makes the words of Joe Trippi, who served as the campaign manager for Howard Dean when he sought the Democratic nomination in the 2004 US presidential nomination, all the more powerful. “In fact, it was the opening salvo in a revolution,” Trippi wrote as he discussed supporters’ efforts to use the internet to create more buzz for their candidate; it was “the sound of hundreds of thousands of Americans turning off their televisions and embracing the only form of technology that has allowed them to be involved again, to gain control of a process that alienated them decades ago.”41 Adding toilet humor to the mix only makes the power inversion seem even more total.

Notes 1. On these materials, see Alison Rowley, Putin Kitsch in America (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). 2. See Henry Jenkins et al., eds. By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (New York: New York University, 2016); and Matt Ratto and Megan Boler, eds., DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 3. Monica Kjellman-Chapin, “The Politics of Kitsch,” Rethinking Marxism, 22, no. 1 (2010), 34. 4. Kjellman-Chapin, “Politics of Kitsch,” 38.

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5. Quoted in Stephanie Mitchell, “Pinning their hopes on buttons,” The Harvard Gazette, March 24, 2016, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/ story/2016/03/pinning-­their-­hopes-­on-­buttons/. 6. On the history of American campaign buttons, see Phillip John Davies, “Campaign Buttons to Hot Buttons: American Election Images, 1789 to 2000,” Contemporary Review, 277 (2000): 198–204. 7. Davies, 202. 8. Mark Frazier, Ron Paul Revolution: History in the Making (Jackson, MI: Mark Profitt, 2008), 20. 9. Thomas Smale, “Is Amazon’s ‘Merch’ the Next Big Thing?” Entrepreneur. com, May 31, 2017, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/295010. 10. Jefferson Graham, “Coronavirus pivot: Personalized puzzles, on-­demand products based on Zoom jokes makes Zazzle sales sizzle,” USAToday.com, December 23, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/12/23/ coronavir us-­p andemic-­d idnt-­f aze-­z azzle-­o nline-­s ites-­s ales-­ up-­50/3994998001/. 11. Naomi Stead, “Avoidance: On Some Euphemisms for the ‘Smallest Room,’” in Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, eds. Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 127. 12. Stead, “Avoidance,” 131. 13. Rick Bowers, Radical Comedy in Early Modern England: Contexts, Cultures, Performances (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 70. 14. The exhibition, Rembrandt in Amsterdam: Creativity and Competition, ran from 16 July 2021 to 6 September 2021 at the National Gallery of Canada. 15. The etching is reproduced in Bertrand Tillier, À la charge! La caricature en France de 1789 à 2000 (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Amateur, 2005), 39. 16. Joe Thorogood, “Satire and Geopolitics: Vulgarity, Ambiguity and the Body Grotesque in South Park,” Geopolitics, 21, no. 1 (2016), 230. 17. Thorogood, “Satire and Geopolitics,” 230. 18. Koen Vossen, “Populism in the Netherlands after Fortuyn: Rita Verdonk and Geert Wilders Compared,” Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 11, no. 1 (2010), 32. 19. Examples can be seen in Bradley E. Wiggins, “Crimea River: Directionality in Memes from the Russia-Ukraine Conflict,” International Journal of Communication, 10 (2016), 464–466.

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20. Ben Cost, “Artist paints dog poop Putin portrait to raise money for Ukraine victims,” New York Post, March 9, 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/03/09/ artist-­paints-­putin-­in-­dog-­poop-­to-­raise-­money-­for-­ukraine/. 21. See Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (New York: Twelve, 2018), 148–150. 22. T.A. Brank, “The Alleged Trump-Putin ‘Golden Shower’ Fiasco, Explained,” VanityFair.com, January 11, 2017, https://www.vanityfair. com/news/2017/01/trump-­russia-­report-­explained. 23. These objects are discussed in Rowley, Putin Kitsch, 83–84. 24. Paul Schwartzman, “The White House asked to borrow a van Gogh. The Guggenheim offered a gold toilet instead,” The Washington Post, January 25, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-­politics/ the-­white-­house-­wanted-­a-­van-­gogh-­the-­guggenheim-­offered-­a-­used-­ solid-­gold-­toilet/2018/01/25/38d574fc-­0154-­11e8-­bb03-­722769454f82_story.html. 25. Ibram X. Kendi, “The Day Shithole Entered the Presidential Lexicon,” The Atlantic, January 13, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2019/01/shithole-­countries/580054/. 26. Caroline Davies, “Inflated ego: Trump baby blimp joins Museum of London collection,” The Guardian, January 18, 2021, https://www. theguardian.com/us-­n ews/2021/jan/18/trump-­b aby-­b limp-­j oins-­ museum-­of-­london-­collection. 27. Rob Picheta, Nikki Carvajal and Greg Wallace, “Trump Claims Americans have to flush the toilet ‘10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,’” CNN.com, December 7, 2019, https://www.cnn. com/2019/12/07/politics/trump-­a mericans-­f lushing-­t oilets-­i ntl/ index.html. 28. Thomas Colson, “Trump says people ‘have to flush their toilet 15 times’ in a bizarre campaign rally rant about water restrictions,” Business Insider, October 19, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/ trump-­says-­people-­have-­to-­flush-­their-­toilet-­15-­times-­2020-­10. 29. Andrew Moore, “How the Coronavirus Created a Toilet Paper Shortage,” College of Natural Resources News, May 19, 2020, https://cnr.ncsu.edu/ news/2020/05/coronavirus-­toilet-­paper-­shortage/. 30. Zack Guzman, “This 27-year-old turned $800 into thousands selling Donald Trump dog poop bags online,” CNBC.com, December 13, 2017,

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https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/13/this-­b usiness-­m akes-­m oney-­ selling-­donald-­trump-­dog-­poop-­bags-­online.html. 31. Tracy You, “Chinese people rush to buy ₤2 ‘Donald Trump toilet brushes’ amid trade war with the US and joke ‘Trump can be so useful,’” The Daily Mail, May 16, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-­7 036679/Chinese-­p eople-­r ush-­b uy-­2 -­D onald-­Trump-­t oilet-­ brushes-­amid-­trade-­war.html. 32. Patrick, “Will Rogers World Airport unveils new Trump inspired urinals…,” thelostogle.com, December 11, 2019, https://www.thelostogle.com/2019/12/11/will-­r ogers-­w orld-­a irport-­u nveils-­n ew-­ trump-­inspired-­urinals/. 33. “Winnipeg nightclub patrons take aim at Donald Trump urinal,” CBC News, February 19, 2016, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ donald-­trump-­urinal-­winnipeg-­1.3456341. 34. Keri Blakinger, “London pub creates Trump, Rubio and Cruz urinals and allows customers to vote with their pee,” New York Daily News, March 1, 2016, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/pub-­ trump-­rubio-­cruz-­urinals-­piss-­poll-­article-­1.2549191. 35. “Dublin pub takes aim as urinal is decorated with Donald Trump’s face,” Irishcentral.com, August 1, 2016, https://www. irishcentral.com/culture/craic/dublin-­p ub-­t akes-­a im-­a s-­u rinal-­i s-­ decorated-­with-­donald-­trumps-­face. 36. Tufayel Ahmed, “Stolen Donald Trump Urinal Poster Safely Returned to Irish Pub in Dublin,” Newsweek, September 6, 2017, https://www. newsweek.com/stolen-­donald-­trump-­urinal-­poster-­safely-­returned-­ irish-­pub-­dublin-­659995. 37. “Nottingham pub’s Trump urinal ‘a bit of fun,’” BBC News, September 20, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-­england-­nottinghamshire-­ 37422388. 38. Olivia Marshall, “Brighton pub Mighty Duck paints Donald Trump on urinals,” The Argus, November 3, 2020, https://www. theargus.co.uk/news/18843642.brighton-­p ub-­m ucky-­d uck-­p aints-­ donal-­trump-­urinals/. 39. The pattern was made by “Off the Hook Mamma” and a pdf of it cost $4.59 to purchase. On the intersections between crafting and­ contemporary politics, see Hinda Mandell, ed., Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

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40. Bill Bradley, “Did Donald Trump Fart on the Georgia Votes Call? We Asked an Expert,” Huffpost, January 11, 2021, https://www.huffpost. com/entry/trump-­phone-­call-­fart_n_5ff8a8b3c5b65671988575b2. 41. Joe Trippi, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 2008), xx–xxi.

Bibliography Ahmed, Tufayel. “Stolen Donald Trump Urinal Poster Safely Returned to Irish Pub in Dublin.” Newsweek, September 6, 2017. https://www.newsweek.com/ stolen-­d onald-­t r ump-­u rinal-­p oster-­s afely-­r eturned-­i rish-­p ub-­ dublin-­659995. Blakinger, Keri. “London Pub Creates Trump, Rubio and Cruz Urinals and Allows Customers to Vote with Their Pee.” New York Daily News, March 1, 2016. https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ pub-­trump-­rubio-­cruz-­urinals-­piss-­poll-­article-­1.2549191. Bowers, Rick. Radical Comedy in Early Modern England: Contexts, Cultures, Performances. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Bradley, Bill. “Did Donald Trump Fart on the Georgia Votes Call? We Asked an Expert.” Huffpost, January 11, 2021. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ trump-­phone-­call-­fart_n_5ff8a8b3c5b65671988575b2. Brank, T.A. “The Alleged Trump-Putin ‘Golden Shower’ Fiasco, Explained.” VanityFair.com, January 11, 2017. https://www.vanityfair.com/ news/2017/01/trump-­russia-­report-­explained. Colson, Thomas. “Trump Says People ‘Have to Flush Their Toilet 15 Times’ in a Bizarre Campaign Rally Rant about Water Restrictions.” Business Insider, October 19, 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/ trump-­says-­people-­have-­to-­flush-­their-­toilet-­15-­times-­2020-­10. Cost, Ben. “Artist Paints Dog Poop Putin Portrait to Raise Money for Ukraine Victims.” New York Post, March 9, 2022. https://nypost.com/2022/03/09/ artist-­paints-­putin-­in-­dog-­poop-­to-­raise-­money-­for-­ukraine/. Davies, Caroline. “Inflated Ego: Trump Baby Blimp Joins Museum of London Collection.” The Guardian, January 18, 2021. https://www. theguardian.com/us-­n ews/2021/jan/18/trump-­b aby-­b limp-­j oins-­ museum-­of-­london-­collection. Davies, Phillip John. “Campaign Buttons to Hot Buttons: American Election Images, 1789 to 2000.” Contemporary Review, 277 (2000): 198–204.

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“Dublin Pub Takes Aim as Urinal is Decorated with Donald Trump’s Face.” Irishcentral.com, August 1, 2016. https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/craic/ dublin-­pub-­takes-­aim-­as-­urinal-­is-­decorated-­with-­donald-­trumps-­face. Frazier, Mark. Ron Paul Revolution: History in the Making. Jackson, MI: Mark Profitt, 2008. Graham, Jefferson. “Coronavirus Pivot: Personalized Puzzles, On-demand Products Based on Zoom Jokes makes Zazzle Sales Sizzle.” USAToday.com, December 23, 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/12/23/ c o r o n a v i r u s -­p a n d e m i c -­d i d n t -­f a z e -­z a z z l e -­o n l i n e -­s i t e s -­s a l e s -­ up-­50/3994998001/. Guzman, Zack. “This 27-year-old Turned $800 into Thousands Selling Donald Trump Dog Poop Bags Online.” CNBC.com, December 13, 2017. https:// www.cnbc.com/2017/12/13/this-­business-­makes-­money-­selling-­donald-­ trump-­dog-­poop-­bags-­online.html. Isikoff, Michael, and David Corn. Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. New York: Twelve, 2018. Jenkins, Henry, et al., ed. By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. New York: New York University, 2016. Kendi, Ibram X. “The Day Shithole Entered the Presidential Lexicon.” The Atlantic, January 13, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2019/01/shithole-­countries/580054/. Kjellman-Chapin, Monica. “The Politics of Kitsch.” Rethinking Marxism 22, no. 1 (2010): 27–41. Mandell, Hinda, ed. Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Marshall, Olivia. “Brighton Pub Mighty Duck Paints Donald Trump on Urinals.” The Argus, November 3, 2020. https://www.theargus.co.uk/ news/18843642.brighton-­pub-­mucky-­duck-­paints-­donal-­trump-­urinals/. Mitchell, Stephanie. “Pinning Their Hopes on Buttons.” The Harvard Gazette, March 24, 2016. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/03/ pinning-­their-­hopes-­on-­buttons/. Moore, Andrew. “How the Coronavirus Created a Toilet Paper Shortage.” College of Natural Resources News, May 19, 2020. https://cnr.ncsu.edu/ news/2020/05/coronavirus-­toilet-­paper-­shortage/. “Nottingham Pub’s Trump Urinal ‘a Bit of Fun.’” BBC News, September 20, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-­england-­nottinghamshire-­37422388. Patrick. “Will Rogers World Airport Unveils New Trump Inspired Urinals…” thelostogle.com, December 11, 2019. https://www.thelostogle.com/2019/12/11/ will-­rogers-­world-­airport-­unveils-­new-­trump-­inspired-­urinals/.

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Picheta, Rob, Nikki Carvajal, and Greg Wallace. “Trump Claims Americans have to Flush the Toilet ‘10 times, 15 times, as Opposed to Once.’” CNN. com, December 7, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/07/politics/trump-­ americans-­flushing-­toilets-­intl/index.html. Ratto, Matt, and Megan Boler, ed. DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Rowley, Alison. Putin Kitsch in America. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-­ Queen’s University Press, 2019. Schwartzman, Paul. “The White House Asked to Borrow a van Gogh. The Guggenheim Offered a Gold Toilet Instead.” The Washington Post, January 25, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-­politics/the-­white-­ house-­wanted-­a-­van-­gogh-­the-­guggenheim-­offered-­a-­used-­solid-­gold-­toilet/ 2018/01/25/38d574fc-­0154-­11e8-­bb03-­722769454f82_story.html. Smale, Thomas. “Is Amazon’s ‘Merch’ the Next Big Thing?” Entrepreneur.com, May 31, 2017. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/295010. Stead, Naomi. “Avoidance: On Some Euphemisms for the ‘Smallest Room.’” In Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, edited by Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner, 126–132. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009. Thorogood, Joe. “Satire and Geopolitics: Vulgarity, Ambiguity and the Body Grotesque in South Park.” Geopolitics 21, no. 1 (2016): 215–235. Tillier, Bertrand. À la charge! La caricature en France de 1789 à 2000. Paris: Les Éditions de l’Amateur, 2005. Trippi, Joe. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, rev. ed. New York: Harper, 2008. Vossen, Koen. “Populism in the Netherlands after Fortuyn: Rita Verdonk and Geert Wilders Compared.” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 11, no. 1 (2010): 22–38. Wiggins, Bradley E. “Crimea River: Directionality in Memes from the Russia-­ Ukraine Conflict.” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 451–485. “Winnipeg Nightclub Patrons Take Aim at Donald Trump Urinal.” CBC News, February 19, 2016. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/donald-­trump­urinal-­winnipeg-­1.3456341. You, Tracy. “Chinese People Rush to Buy ₤2 ‘Donald Trump Toilet Brushes’ Amid Trade War with the US and Joke ‘Trump Can Be So Useful.’” The Daily Mail, May 16, 2019. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-­7036679/ Chinese-­p eople-­r ush-­b uy-­2 -­D onald-­Trump-­t oilet-­b rushes-­a mid-­ trade-­war.html.

Part II Kitsch and Culture

Kitsch and Architecture Andrea Mecacci

On April 27, 2020 the Chinese Minister for Housing and Urban Development decided to ban the construction of buildings that copied, imitated, or plagiarized existing architectural models. With this simple ministerial decree, it seemed that the relationship between kitsch and architecture, which had done so much to define the cultural and day-to-­ day aspect of global modernity and postmodernity, might come to an end. The idea to design and then build a whole neighborhood, or rather a town, that imitated Paris—as happened in 2007 in Tianducheng, a residential district of Hangzhou that copied the French capital down to the smallest detail—had marked a tipping point even in China, where the relationship between model and copy is not at the center of its aesthetic culture. The cult of authenticity (or originality), which had defined Western aesthetics all the way from Greek mimesis to postmodern Translated from the Italian by Karen Whittle

A. Mecacci (*) University of Florence, Florence, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_6

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hyperreality, had lost its way in China in replicas of Austrian alpine Dörfer, Tuscan hilltop hamlets, Swiss mountain villages, Victorian neighborhoods and the inevitable Venice canals. But this voracious aesthetics, beyond the evident tourist clichés, had continued up to the end of modernism: copies of New York and Singapore skyscrapers, but also buildings that recalled the most orthodox German functionalism. But, if the aim of the ban on this copying aesthetics was to protect and promote local and national design culture, what can we say about the fake Great Wall of China in Nanchang? Two-and-a-half miles of pure hyperreality, perfectly indistinguishable from the 5600 miles of the real wall (or 13,000 miles counting all the offshoots), with the one small difference that it is situated about 1000 miles from its model. All of these at times paradoxical examples in the mutual dialectic between kitsch and architecture show the weak boundaries of the changing scenario of contemporary taste, in which aesthetic options once condemned, marginalized and mocked find constant rehabilitation. In order to establish how all of this happened, we need to observe one of the places, which gave birth to the modern, and to the relationship between architecture and taste that identified with the theme of modernity. Then we need to find out how this bond was surpassed, to open up to the contemporary processes of aesthetic hybridization in which bad taste, now dissolved into the broader and more problematic definition of kitsch, finds new legitimacy. This fleeting, wavering and contradictory critical point where modernity and aesthetics become one and the same can only be located if we are to take a perspective rooted in Western aesthetics, as expressed in Baudelaire’s reflection on the modern.

1 Toy Style In his writings on art, his diaries, right up to the notes for the unfinished book on Belgium which can be considered his last work, not only Baudelaire documents probably the first great analysis of the city as the exclusive scenario where modernity interprets itself—one of the main topics of his masterly essay The Painter of Modern Life—but he also probes its operating mechanisms, detecting them above all in the new chaos of

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formal or even ideological references to which taste is subjected. The banal, the ugly, the bizarre and the irregular return not only as new elements of a beauty that is more current, more inside the present and therefore closer to the mechanisms of everyday life (Baudelaire uses a more problematic term, “fashion”), but also as requirements for an aesthetics that steps further and further away from nature to instead base itself on the poetics of artifice. In Baudelaire this constructability of the aesthetic also touches on kitsch, or rather on what these days we call kitsch (more or less “bad taste”), since hat word had not entered the cultural lexicon at the time. Baudelaire analyzes this phenomenon as a contradiction; hence, he gives it two characteristics: banal conformism on one hand and excessive stylization on the other. Therefore, these two lines of interpreting the kitsch already give the word a double and contrasting meaning: an ideology of petit bourgeois taste and an exaggeration that hybridizes styles to the nth degree. It is this second option, as we will see documented by Baudelaire in his unfinished book on Belgium, Belgium Stripped Bare, that would be legitimized by the postmodern, with the camp aesthetics as its most fertile configuration. Some designers have adopted this exaggeration as an operating strategy, with their own easily recognizable stylistic code. Thus, we can state that the relationship between kitsch and architecture would develop along these same two registers. One might be quite taken aback by the reflection that Baudelaire makes in his essay The Salon of 1846 when he turns the meaning that we today attribute to the word chic totally on its head. He uses it as a synonym for another term that had not yet been coined: the almost homophonous kitsch. Chic is not what broadly encapsulates the concept of elegance, but a neologism of German origin deriving from the word Schick. Baudelaire’s interpretation is based on its literal meaning of “skill” or “tact,” the ability to tidy up a work by making it appropriate, nearing it the Latin notion of dispositio. Therefore, chic is the result of a technique that is an end unto itself, a sterile exercise in calligraphy, a “modern monstrosity” which can only be likened to the banal, the poncif. Modern bad taste finds its form in chic and its content in poncif: calligraphy and banality. And so we have the first identikit of kitsch. The poncif is an authentic “epitome of the vulgar” enveloped in appropriate but trite forms:

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“everything that is conventional and traditional owes something to the ‘chic’ and ‘poncif ’.”1 Hence, the kitsch phenomenon is split in two: it either banalizes and/ or takes to an extreme, confirms clichés and/or transgresses them by pushing them to the limit. These days, we can digest and even completely metabolize this short circuit, but in Baudelaire it was still a highly conflictual question as shown by the rancorous description of the habits in vogue in Brussels in 1864. In the unfinished book on Belgium, it was still not an option to follow camp’s deliberate action to be more bad taste than bad taste, in joyous self-awareness of the characteristics of kitsch. In Baudelaire’s eyes, the Belgians’ terrible taste is simply the symptom of a headless and stupid modernity. In this scenario, Parisian chic and poncif become radicalized and almost a sort of aesthetic and moral tyranny. One of Baudelaire’s favorite targets, Belgian taste, from fashion to architecture, “is nothing more than a poor attempt at elegance.”2 In Brussels, Baudelaire observes the overabundance of eclecticism, the style that would dominate European architecture for a large part of the nineteenth century. Baudelaire sums up this anthological aesthetics that selects, quotes and indeed does nothing but accumulate unexpected combinations, using the formula style joujou, toy style: “A pot and a rider on a roof are the most prominent evidence of extravagant taste in architecture. A horse on a roof! A pot of flowers on a pediment! That refers to what I call the toy style.”3 The labels used to describe this architecture— “trash,” “pastiche,” “counterfeit”—are on the whole the same that would be used to define not just kitsch, but also future postmodern architecture: “charmingly bad taste,” “a church made of varied styles is a historical dictionary. It’s the natural wastefulness of history.”4 The significant reference to the world of children and hybrid forms as sources of nineteenth-­ century design also appears in the observations that Gottfried Semper put together the year after his visit to the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in London in 1851. Before this first, immense instance of the self-­ representation of modern design culture, all that Semper could do was note a “Babylonian confusion” and “confused muddle of forms or childish triflings.”5 Twentieth-century kitsch would adopt two variants of this toy style: as the expression of excess and therefore an aesthetics close to or even

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corresponding to trash, and as a hybrid, provocative postmodern poetic that stylizes kitsch by relating it to camp. So we have two types of design kitsch, two aesthetics, which might share the same name but indicate two completely opposite universes: what do the aesthetic choices we see in the furnishings of a middle-class apartment have in common with those proposed in the most provocative contemporary architecture? While some forms can be shared—and now we will see which ones—what inexorably keeps these two worlds apart is, so to speak, the content that they express: on one hand, they pursue clichés of supposed elegance, and on the other, they span contemporary aestheticization while taking in its every dimension, vulgarity included. From this viewpoint, the relationship between architecture and kitsch appears more evident in terms of its morphology. Indeed, we can identify some principles that form a veritable rulebook. These principles can be found in every instance when aesthetics is at work, from fashion to design. In short, what they do is upend one of the basic pairings of the modern: form and function. Due to this mismatch, kitsch—itself also an exclusively modern category—becomes an aspect of the postmodern and changes into neokitsch. Kitsch—now neokitsch—metabolizes the negative it was imputed with by traditional aesthetics and the most ultraist modernism and deliberately makes its contents its own. Now, these values are no longer questioned or debated, but used and exploited for any aesthetic, artistic or commercial operation. In this perspective, the classification of the formal characteristics of kitsch drawn up by Abraham Moles right at the start of the 1970s proves useful, but also fatally ideologically marred by the functionalist aesthetic of modernism. In the twentieth-century scrutiny of architectural kitsch— and much more besides—polarities returned which we have now in part left behind. All positive acceptations of design had to be set against their negative opposite: authentic–inauthentic, true–false, model–copy, original–fake. Architecture, in particular, was affected by the crisis of this binary ideology when the postmodern took over from modernism. For example, in the reading by Moles,6 kitsch pushes the dichotomic themes of the beautiful and ugly to one side in favor of a more intangible extension between art and conformism and pinpoints the moment in history when means began to outstrip needs as the start of the rise of middle-class

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taste. This imbalance and gratuitousness became the basis for a culture of the superfluous, a culture of ultraconsumerism. It also promoted a design method that became part of a neokitsch culture in which form came to overshadow content. Against this background, Moles identifies five principles and precise “forms” in which kitsch expresses itself. The first principle, which is decisive in all aesthetic operations, is inadequacy, that is, an object’s total deviation from the value of its use. This is followed by accumulation, the exact opposite principle to the modern formula and movement of less is more. The third principle is synaesthetic perception, that is, the involvement of more than one sense in use of the object. The fourth is mediocrity which corresponds to the standardization of massified taste. Finally, we have the principle of comfort, namely easy and unquestioning access to consumer goods and culture. The form adopted by these kitsch characteristics is easy to spot: plentiful curved lines (but this shape is only seen in a negative light if considering the modernist preference for straight lines), excessive decoration, sentimental colors, faking (in particular of materials) and lastly distorted sizes and unrealistic proportions. At a closer look, they are the characteristics of Baudelaire’s toy style. The main formal principle adopted by architecture is decorative excess. This gives rise to an aesthetics of addition, making the building into a sort of mimetic and metaphorical ornament. In the first case—as shown by the architecture in Las Vegas (e.g., the pyramid-shaped Luxor Hotel)— the building almost becomes a sculpture that represents another object. In the second option—we could take any apartment block in Florida or California (the Hispanic style that suggests a condition of permanent vacation)—the building makes explicit reference to a condition, alludes to a feeling. Both processes could be thought to spark a dual dimension of exoticism: relating to time (the past as a permanent replica) and space (the touristy charm of a merely imagined elsewhere). From this perspective, one might think that the “mimetic” and the “metaphoric” building illustrate a facile psychologization of the cliché of a presumed, immediately recognizable bad taste. However, tempered by the mischievousness of the postmodern, contemporary architecture appears immune to this threat. By using kitsch as their antibody, those designers that swing between ironic provocation and playful inelegance

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enter another territory: camp, the exaggeration of bad taste. We can say that since the 1980s kitsch has mutated into a bona fide neokitsch, as its proposals incorporate an awareness of camp and a voracious postmodern hybridization of styles. Camp allows neokitsch to take a step back and look at itself and its bad taste with self-irony. The postmodern, on the other hand, provides the idea that every reference, every quotation, however high- or lowbrow it may be, is legitimate. The past becomes a great big store from which any “tool” can be used to arouse feelings, surprise and above all not cause boredom. In a further stage of toy style, pastiche is probably the formal principle that transforms kitsch into postmodern neokitsch. It is no longer a case of malfunctioning taste, but of going beyond a univocal canon to programmatically sack the past. While fashion may do this without so much as a second thought, it nevertheless leads us into a critically problematic scenario that the contemporary world as a whole still struggles to cope with or at least interpret. It is no coincidence that the biggest critics of the postmodern have insisted on this aesthetic strategy. While speaking of “aesthetic populism,” Fredric Jameson reprimanded that pastiche acted to empty out culture and assert an ideology of the image: “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. … The producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.”7

2 Bauhaus Hawaiian Postmodern kitsch looked at the accusations of functionalist modernism with ironic condescension. Embracing a post-ideological dimension, postmodern kitsch flipped the fundamentals of modernist design, replacing the idea of design-as-work with that of design-as-text. But this operation proved problematic. Postmodern kitsch—which found its maximum expression in architecture—was a text that took on the shape of a work, a text disguised as a work: form dressed up as content. It was a hybridization process that came to a head by turning the relationship between false

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and true upside down. Postmodern kitsch was propaedeutic to the now clear dimension in which form is content. It is in light of this transformation of values that we can understand the obsessive centrality given to Las Vegas as the paradigm of kitsch architecture. Eco’s sentence on Las Vegas all that time ago in 1975—“a ‘message’ city, entirely made up of signs, not a city like the others, which communicate in order to function, but rather a city that functions in order to communicate”8—reveals the omnipresence of a kitsch no longer hemmed into the harmless dimension of the souvenir, but now capable of aesthetically interpreting the sense of an entire city. Without going into the now unruly bulk of studies on Las Vegas, suffice it to highlight some characteristics that make the aesthetic of this city—and we could also add Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans—the emblem of postmodern kitsch. The history of Las Vegas, in the time separating it from the year of the first publication of Learning from Las Vegas, in 1972, shows the passage from a city modulated around an iconographic logic (the neon signs on the Strip) to a city identified by the extent of its spectacularity (as shown by the Luxor Hotel). This overdramatization of the urban space, its hyperreal Disneyfication, takes the logics that the postmodern had drawn up in its relationship with the modernist aesthetics to the extreme. In the conclusion to his The History of Postmodern Architecture, German architecture historian Heinrich Klotz identified ten contrasts between postmodern and modern9 and, one might add, it is precisely in the space opened by this dialectic that the kitsch option finds room to operate. Klotz’s ten characteristics revolve around an underlying bipolarity: the postmodern placed a “fictional representation” at its heart, pushing the totem of modernist design—function—to one side. In other words, it replaced the truth of function, the very realization of techne, with the story of illusion, the extemporary work of the imagination. It threw “technological utopianism” off the top spot to replace it with a “multiplicity of meanings.” The absurd anthology of styles proposed by Las Vegas, and mockingly set out in Learning from Las Vegas, somehow became the simplest and indeed least problematic reading of this option. Who would not have ironized, while relying on their own taste—a taste formed who knows where and when and how—about that plethora of quotations that looked

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like the draft of a glossary drawn up by an editor in a state of confusion, or notes jotted down too quickly by a perhaps overly exuberant first-year student of history of art and architecture: “Miami Moroccan, International Jet Set Style; Arte Moderne Hollywood Orgasmic, Organic Behind; Yamasaki Bernini cum Roman Orgiastic; Niemeyer Moorish; Moorish Tudor (Arabian Knights); Bauhaus Hawaiian.”10 In reality, the comedy of these anthologies hid the real issue at the core of Las Vegas’ architecture: the dialectic between structure and ornament, a dialectic that Las Vegas iconographically displayed to the highest degree. In order to illustrate this dynamic, Venturi and Scott Brown introduced the notorious duck and shed concepts. The former is a duck-shaped building (therefore, by extension it represents all those buildings that assume a symbolic shape: an ice cream cone, a sandwich); the second is a basic structure with a sign attached: “The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols.”11 The duck is the paradigm of the deformation of modernist symbolism, a form composed like a sculpture, giving rise to a self-monumentality, a symbolism that “has distorted the whole building into one big ornament. In substituting ‘articulation’ for decoration, it has become a duck.”12 Within this dialectic of which architecture is composed, kitsch appears to play a problem-solving role. In kitsch, the ornament–structure pairing and the accompanying ontologies, the copy–model and form–function polarizations find a meeting place, an environmental connection. By incorporating toy style and raising it up to an undisputed model, Las Vegas transforms excess decoration into excess communication, hyperreality. And it is precisely this passage that ratifies a new dimension of modern kitsch: no longer the falsification or degeneration of a model, but a clear operation of absolute iconism. By placing the iconic dimension at its core, postmodern architecture’s identification with the kitsch aesthetics is undeniable. So, when Charles Jencks seeks to define the characteristics of the postmodern building, revolving his interpretation around the concept of double coding—a building’s ability to speak to highbrow and mass culture at the same time13—what we are looking at is the contemporary version of architectural kitsch, which he then underlines in this

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rapid list of anti-modernist adjectives: “funny, semantic, ornamented, ironic, rich and colorful—not self-important and sober.”14

3 Pizza Tower and/or the Tower of Pizza As for every aesthetic category, kitsch too has to completely revise its meanings when it finds itself defining very different realities. While in the 1970s and 80s architectural kitsch could still be a question of aesthetic or ideological options, these days it is more complex to read the phenomenon. Umberto Eco’s amused descriptions in Travels in Hyperreality of the Madonna Inn, the hotel whose morphology makes it the archetype of kitsch hyperreality, or Louis Marin’s sinister semiological mappings of Disneyland, deemed the undisputed center of the dystopias of late capitalism,15 are still based on the idea of kitsch as the expression of the inauthentic and bad taste. David Harvey’s observations on the pastiche architecture in Blade Runner,16 in a further attempt at its interpretation, does not shift from this structure either. The Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas fits perfectly into this perspective, but when in China a whole neighborhood replicates Paris, Eiffel Tower included of course, can we still think of this design gesture using the paradigms that we saw in action from the toy style of postmodern hyperreality? Our daily self-indulgences now seem unmoved by the anachronistic, unilateral condemnation of kitsch. And if the modern aesthetics born from Hume’s efforts to seek a standard of taste found itself more at ease in the defiant and cynical observation of Jeff Koons—“I believe that taste is really unimportant”17—this seems to suggest at best that the negative dimension of kitsch is not so much an aesthetic problem but a more broadly anthropological one. (However, I cannot delve into this topic here because it goes outside the goals of this study.) Nevertheless, there is no doubt that by accessing a dimension of cultural hypertextuality, kitsch can not only betray its modern identity, namely bad taste, but be remodulated in the contemporary scenario as an almost all-inclusive aesthetic category, one of the keys to reading the passages from mass culture (the art of consumption), to the postmodern (the consumption of art), to diffused aesthetics. Architecture shows that the vertical hierarchy through

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which kitsch had always been encoded and analyzed has lost its validity. In such a network of references, kitsch is no longer exemplified in a singular object but in a plural one: the city. From Las Vegas to Tianducheng, kitsch architecture is the dimension in which the principle of accumulation becomes the urban landscape, almost an ontological paradigm, an unbroken horizon of stylistic contradiction in which the surrogate achieves emancipation and ends up becoming an archetype: thus, architecture sees itself as both an “anthological” and a “metalinguistic” design practice. It is only within this frame that some episodes can prove to be not only plausible, but even acceptable or even, ultimately, admirable. Indeed, a tourist strolling around the center of Pisa might ask: “Excuse me, where is the Pizza Tower?,” mixing the pronunciation of “Pisa” and “Pizza,” and then you find out that from 1964 to 1979, at 3726, Las Vegas Blvd., there was an Italian restaurant, the Tower of Pizza, better known as The Leaning Tower.18 And so what might seem to be a short circuit sparked by the most explicit kitsch suddenly acquires a sense and probably also a meaning.

Notes 1. Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” in The Mirror of Art. Critical Studies, ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 98. 2. Charles Baudelaire, Belgium Stripped Bare, ed. Rainer J. Hanshe (New York: Contra Mundum, 2018), 20. 3. Baudelaire, Belgium Stripped Bare, 157. 4. Baudelaire, Belgium Stripped Bare, 162. 5. Gottfried Semper, “Science, Industry and Art,” in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, ed. Harry Francis and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 130, 135. 6. Abraham Moles, Pyschologie du Kitsch. L’art du bonheur (Paris: Maison Mame, 1971). 7. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 17–18. 8. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego-­ New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 40.

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9. Heinrich Klotz, The History of Postmodern Architecture, trans. Radka Donnell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 421. 10. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 80. 11. Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 87. 12. Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 103. 13. Charles Jencks, The Story of Post-Modernism. Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture (Chichester: Wiley, 2011), 9. 14. C. Jencks, The Story of Post-Modernism, 44. 15. Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 239–257. 16. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 308–314. 17. Jeff Koons, The Jeff Koons Handbook (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992), 32. 18. In the film Casino (1995) by Martin Scorsese, it is no coincidence that the Italian restaurant is called “The Leaning Tower.” Gaspare “Jasper” Speciale, originally from New York, a bookmaker and loan shark from the local mafia, had reinvented himself as a restauranteur, investing in a legal activity, the Tower of Pizza restaurant. In front of the restaurant, which does not exist anymore, was an enormous sign, designed by Ben Mitchem, reproducing the tower of Pisa. A night-time image of the neon sign also appears in Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 63).

Bibliography Baudelaire, Charles. “The Salon of 1846”. In The Mirror of Art. Critical Studies, edited by Jonathan Mayne, 38–130. New York: Doubleday, 1956. Baudelaire, Charles. Belgium Stripped Bare. Edited by Rainer J.  Hanshe. New York: Contra Mundum, 2018. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Translated by William Weaver. San Diego-New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

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Jencks, Charles. The Story of Post-Modernism. Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture. Chichester: Wiley, 2011. Klotz, Heinrich. The History of Postmodern Architecture. Translated by Radka Donnell. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Koons, Jeff. The Jeff Koons Handbook. London: Thames & Hudson, 1992. Marin, Louis. Utopics: Spatial Play. Translated by Robert A. Vollrath. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984. Moles, Abraham. Pyschologie du Kitsch, L’art du bonheur. Paris: Maison Mame, 1971. Semper, Gottfried. “Science, Industry and Art”. In The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, edited by Harry Francis and Wolfgang Herrmann, 130–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.

From Fashion as Kitsch to Kitsch in Fashion: Redefining Beauty and Taste Today Maribel Castro Díaz

1 Introduction When we think of kitsch, we immediately evoke pink or golden colors, plastic or porcelain figures, old-fashioned styles, exaggerated shapes or sentiment. We might also think of fake or cheap versions of luxury originals, appropriations, impossible mixes of art and fashion, or ready-forconsumption products and goods. But kitsch is also something that has more profoundly defined fashion and other creative/cultural forms, positioning them in a given society or cultural context (Anglo-American and Western European, especially). Since its beginnings, kitsch has been considered in essentially pejorative terms. The concept of kitsch, originated between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, appeared as a critical tag used against products of pop/mass culture that lacked the depth of fine art. Kitsch was attacked in the twentieth century by theorists of modernity, but by the end the century, it began to be

M. Castro Díaz (*) Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, Madrid, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_7

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observed from a different, critical perspective by academics like Umberto Eco and Matei Calinescu. Since the 1980s, the discourse on kitsch and its state has changed, increasingly moving from debates about the nature of art to debates about everyday aesthetics, as Max Ryynänen has pointed out.1 Kitsch has been basically perceived as an anti-value for a critical field in which good taste and sophistication represent the cornerstones of “high” culture, which needs to protect itself from the mass, from “low” or popular entertainment. Theorists like Hermann Broch and Gillo Dorfles referred negatively to kitsch as an anti-value in art, in terms of imitation or falsification. In the first half of the twentieth century, Clement Greenberg developed a vision of kitsch as something opposed to modernism. While modernism would take distance in many ways from beauty and sentimentality, kitsch welcomed it and represented it constantly. The concepts of class, gender, and sexuality intertwine in kitsch, which would represent the otherness—still today, certain non-normative embodiments of gender are straightforwardly defined as kitsch. We could highlight a certain genderization of the concept of kitsch, as female culture has been largely associated with representations of sentimentality and soft sensitivities, present in kitsch. Kitsch has been also identified with a variety of practices of lowbrow female culture and artistry, like decorative art, ceramic, illustration, and so on. “Arts and crafts,” rather than fine art. Contemporary art, from pop to conceptual and postmodern art, has helped to remove the negative aura associated to kitsch. The term would begin to be analyzed in relation to everyday aesthetics, and not only from art,2 partially thanks to two revolutionary essays published in 1964: Apocalittici e integrati by Umberto Eco and “Notes on Camp” by Susan Sontag. The word kitsch is applied to objects or creations in any discipline that are subject to judgments of taste. For Umberto Eco, kitsch is related to the excess of sentimentality in the analysis of works and to the notion of aesthetic inappropriateness: Inadequacy in objects that are inappropriate in relation to their cultural content or intention.3 As Eco said, everyone seems to know exactly what bad taste is, but nobody is able to define it. Sometimes its recognition is instinctive, starting from what is considered out of place, or with an absence of measure, admitting that the measures

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inevitably vary according to the times and culture.4 Good taste and bad taste are concepts that depend upon time, not intrinsic to things. They exist from a certain point of view, in the mind of the beholder, who—by the way—is socially and culturally determined by society and history. Kitsch cannot be defined from a single point of view, nor can it be simplified to a negative definition, because it simply does not have an opposite, precise, and distinct concept. According to Matei Calinescu, what constitutes the essence of kitsch is its open indeterminacy, its vague “hallucinatory power, its spurious reverie, its promise of easy catharsis.”5 Always between beauty and ugliness, kitsch frequently leaves us with mixed feelings, while it is relaxing and enjoyable, fascinating, and—at times—revealing. Nowadays, certain debates on good-bad taste are becoming outdated and being redefined, while other questions about the opportunities and new forms of creativity and analysis favored by kitsch aesthetics and strategies become relevant. In Eco’s words, The criticism of taste becomes a sterile game, capable of providing us with pleasant emotions, but of telling us very little about the cultural phenomena of a society as a whole. Good taste and bad taste may not be useful to define the functionalism of a message that probably assumes many other functions within the context of a group or an entire society.6

In this context, this study aims to explore how fashion is currently playing an important role in the changing meaning of kitsch, appreciating it as a fertile territory in which art, high and low culture, gender issues, symbolic strategies, and everyday aesthetics intertwine.

2 Fashion as Kitsch Opposition to fashion is still a reality in Anglo-Saxon academic circles, where theorists react with different degrees of hostility to the mere idea of fashion, considered too frivolous—too kitschy—for serious study. Gilles Lipovetsky7 argued that fashion was not a “fashionable” question among intellectuals—keeping a marginal status—and it has had virtually no

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place in the theoretical inquiries of thinkers. Fashion was seen as an ontologically and socially inferior domain, undeserving of proper investigation. While art is usually understood as a field included within “high” cultural production, fashion, in contrast, is conceived primarily as an industry (albeit with an element of creativity), and as part of everyday life. There is a historical tendency to dismiss fashion as frivolous, ephemeral, and material, while art has always been valued as a meaningful form, of eternal beauty and spiritual nature (characteristics, however, currently questioned).8 For centuries, fashion has been considered oppressive, especially for women. In Philosophy of Fashion, Georg Simmel9 argued that the need to conform to approved forms of existence is what made women such enthusiastic participants in fashion. Fashion has always been accused of promoting harmful and stressful canons of beauty, derived from its unnatural and artificial quality. In everyday discourse there are frequent references to fashion as a tyrant, and couturiers are branded as dictators. Conversely, those who follow fashion are called “fashion victims,” being ridiculed. Fashion has been negatively associated with the sins of pride and lust,10 idea already present in Genesis (the origin of clothing was sin). Fashion incites to immorality. In addition, it has been considered a waste of time and money, a frivolity, a useless activity. On the other hand, fashion has been said to be uncomfortable, unhealthy, and to foster damaging hierarchical distinctions, entrenching the class system.11 Despite its importance as a social and commercial phenomenon, fashion has had a bad reputation. It represented, in short, everything that is irrational, trivial, ugly, vain, immoral, shallow, or oppressive. According to Barbara Vinken, discourses on fashion have been expressed by three main conceptual articulations: the division of being and mere appearance; the division of sexes, and the division of classes. As Vinken points out, The discourse on fashion assumes the philosophical form of critique of mere appearances, the cultural-theoretical form of a critique of the market economy, or the traditional form of critique of sexual morality; but there

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seems to be no possibility of a serious concern with the subject that would proceed otherwise than in the mode of critique.12

For the reasons stated above, we could argue that this cultural, social and theoretical positioning of fashion grants it a position of kitsch, always underestimated in relation to “higher” cultural forms. The critique of French structuralists have contributed significantly to the changing status of fashion in art and popular culture research, and how fashion is understood. Roland Barthes13 was one of the first academics to write about fashion in a positive way (The Fashion System, first published in 1967) and how we signify specific social and cultural positions through dress. Lipovetsky, along with other philosophers and writers, has shown that in the history of fashion modern cultural meanings and values, especially those that have favored the expression of human individuality to positions of dignity, have played a preponderant role. Recent fashion theory has attempted to comprehend the rising power of fashion in contemporary societies, and its key role in a world of consumerism and mass communications. Nowadays fashion is analyzed in its multiple networks, ranging from the culture of mass media, advertising, ideology to communication or the social sphere. As Lipovetsky14 says, “fashion has allowed public questioning to expand; it has allowed subjective thoughts and existences to take on greater autonomy.” Discourses on art and fashion have increasingly proliferated since the 1980s, partially thanks to a growing number of fashion exhibitions in museums. While art has traditionally been associated with masculine “genius,” the elevated, the intellectual, fashion, represented as something “other” from art, was associated to female vanity. But just like art, fashion can be endowed with technical and conceptual richness and complexity. Fashion historian Valerie Steele has stated that we live in socially constructed cultures, and it is precisely artificiality and the lack of purpose that make fashion a valuable aesthetic vehicle for fantasy.15 In the field of fashion, a great variety of provocative and diverse proposals have redefined and questioned conventions of high and low culture, and what is vulgar and what is chic. The changing meaning of kitsch today is an effect of a generalized desire for expression, and a way to

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escape from aesthetic canons imposed through exaggeration and decontextualization of referents. Today’s designers know how to transmit these concepts and reflect, through exacerbated irony, the kitsch aesthetics of the present.

3 Fashion, Class, Gender, and Kitsch: Redefining Beauty and Taste Today What is beautiful and what is ugly? What is masculine and what is feminine? What is elegant and what is vulgar? How can we define such a contested term which changes its meaning throughout the ages? Questions like these have been raised on the runway by fashion designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Franco Moschino, Gianni Versace, and Alessandro Michele, finding amazing answers, and transforming the way we dress and think. Diana Vreeland, fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue America, once said that too much good taste could be boring. It should be mentioned that, according to Pierre Bourdieu,16 good taste is not innate, but socially determined. What some may find shocking, outrageous, or in bad taste, others will appreciate as refreshing. It will largely depend on the individual gaze, but also on the conditions in which such ideas appear and develop. Bad taste is frequently the eccentric, the uncommon, the excessive; attractive and repelling at the same time. And it has often been associated with kitsch. While kitsch has been a concept mainly related to art, its connection to fashion is relevant, too. Kitsch in art has been associated with mass consumption, in a non-elevated, banal way (prêt-à-porter, we could say). According to Valeria Nofri,17 “fashion, as we know it today, and kitsch are outcomes of the same artistic revolution and it is appropriate that the word kitsch can now refer to fashion as well as to art.” Fashion, in everyday discourse, has appropriated the concept of kitsch, stealing it from the art world, and the word is now closer in its meaning to “trash,” rather than its historical meaning.18 The meaning of kitsch in fashion can be—if possible—a more complicated one. Instead of a negative or

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pejorative term, it is used as an aesthetic category. According to Robert Radford,19 recent changes in art progressively confer certain qualities more associable to fashion, such as seduction and transience. Like fashion, postmodern art tends toward irony and self-reference. Indeed, quotation and parody often displace the earlier emphasis on authenticity, in favor of a search for the new and image-based sex appeal. Kitsch was something pejoratively perceived from Western culture, thus defining an attitude toward others. But since the end of the last century, female, lower class, non-European, youth, and queer tastes are increasingly taking over the world, and of course, the realms of cultural production and mass consumption. This affects fashion, in the luxury sphere as much as in the high street. For Barthes, there was a conventional association between the prestige of fashion and its link with (French) aristocracy.20 For haute coûture fashion tradition, this idea has been somehow always present in the unconditional passion for elegance, the apparent independence from the market, and the search for stylistic perfection and elitist distinction over rational or financial reasons. This fine fashion was opposed to the street, and creators like Christian Dior, Hubert de Givenchy, and Cristóbal Balenciaga were seeking inspiration far from everyday vulgarity. Their creations were the quintessence of “good taste.” The first deliberate subversion of good taste in fashion probably dates back to the 30s and 40s. Elsa Schiaparelli was the first to marry art and fashion. With a unique creativity and sense of humor, she transferred surrealism to fashion, taking objects out of their usual context: A shoe transformed into a hat, gloves with golden nails, a dress with trompe l’oeil rips and tears. Schiaparelli became an ideal partner of artists such as Dalí and Cocteau. She did not consider fashion as a trade, but as an art, an artistic activity of crazy ideas, making her fashion house a “diabolic laboratory” of sartorial masquerade, as Cocteau called it.21 She turned every fashion show into a theatrical spectacle, just like Jean-Paul Gaultier and John Galliano would do many decades later. Nothing was impossible: aspirin necklaces, bees and beetles as materials for costume jewelry, evening gowns decorated with “ordinary” zips, dresses made of cellophane and other synthetic materials, and buttons turned into small sculptures in the shape of circus horses and acrobats or sugar cubes. Schiaparelli’s signature

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color, “Shocking Pink,” was widely used for wrappings, richly embroidered capes or lipsticks. Schiaparelli started the use of fashion as a vehicle to provoke, to confront normative conventions of taste, beauty, glamour, and femininity. But what really turned kitsch into a widely accepted style in fashion was the golden age of pop culture of the 1960s, the decade where the youth culture exploded, followed by its developments in the 70s and 80s. In the rebel 1970s, glam rock shook up the world of clubs and also of fashion; it meant a whole aesthetic revolution. “The best taste is bad taste”: Platform shoes with mini-shorts, bell bottoms with polyester shirts, glitter, retro, punk-no-future. Everything was tried, remixed, rejected, and re-processed. This involved a liberating creative force that continues to operate even today. In those years, postmodernism and its eclectic style began, and with it, the true fashion revolution. Fashion, like life, had stopped having fixed rules; everyone could choose what suited them best. The manifestation of individuality was linked to the revolutionary potential of fashion. As LGBTQ people asserted their rights with increasing emphasis, divergent sexualities found greater acceptance during the 1970s, and this circumstance was reflected in fashion. Although the most visible styles of homosexuality had traditionally been—to varying degrees—elegant and effeminate, after Stonewall new styles emerged beyond countercultural androgyny, mixing with the influence of disco, glam rock, or punk styles. In Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (2005), Barbara Vinken uses the term postfashion22 to mark the end of a century of fashion in which the relationship between fashion-creator and imitator reversed: In the 1970s, fashion began to move upward from the street into the haute couture, where it is adapted and imitated. Not only the fashion-buying public increased, but it also reacts to trends that emerge from subcultures. As Vinken stated, What from a sociological point of view would appear as a change of direction in fact reflects a new concept of fashion, one which resolutely uses non-fashionable elements to create the avant-garde effect of a fashion beyond fashion. The designers of the 1980s seal the end of the era of

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fashion-­creators, and with some self-irony, favor trends which lie outside the obsolete perception of the fashionable.23

Vinken highlights fashion’s performative power: Fashion constructs and subverts divisions of gender and class by stripping them bare, and it reveals them as an effect of construction, exposing them as artificial.24 Today, a growing number of influential fashion designers are articulating elements of artificiality, sentimentality, the aesthetics of bad taste and kitsch, and the combination of traces of the past with what happens in the street and the zeitgeist of our times.

From Shock to Acceptance: Subversive Deconstructions There are multiple ways in which kitsch has opened up ideas of beauty, taste and also class and gender issues. In the era of postfashion, works by designers like Vivienne Westwood, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, Miuccia Prada, and Alessandro Michele have produced powerful images of beauty, glamour, and other intense emotions with a mix of high and low. According to Barbara Vinken, Postfashion opposes itself to quiet elegance, but also to comfortable sportiness. […] With the growing readiness for ugliness, for the grotesque and the ridiculous, with the citations of a “perverse” sexuality, postfashion exceeds its avant-garde beginnings; it becomes self-distanced, self-ironic, even if, in its weaker moments, it falls back on a tendency to épater le bourgeois.25

British designer Vivienne Westwood resurrected the underground culture of the fifties with rock’n’roll and skinny pants, then moved to leather, latex, and bondage; she was the queen of punk, and eventually, mother of grunge. In their intentional vulgarity, punks were not much different from the previous disco generation. They opted for provocation, substituting the natural for strident artificiality: A celebration of plastic, shiny lurex, leopard prints, garbage bags, piercing, tattoos, hardware …. Everything considered ugly. Punks combined the impossible: kinky lace underwear, toilet chains, safety pins adorning leather jackets with

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swastikas and skulls, red or blue hair over their adolescent faces. In this context, Vivienne Westwood masterfully transformed punk into high fashion, mixing surprising and displaced elements that connected with a dada spirit. In 1985 Westwood introduced the “Mini-Crini,” a collection inspired by the corset and crinoline, garments reviled in the previous century. It involved a sort of homage to Christian Dior, who had also padded and fitted women with the “New Look.” Westwood basically took the conventional (fabrics and prints such as tweed and tartan, elements like corsets and crinolines, sartorial elements inspired in the ateliers of Savile Row) and transformed them into something entirely unconventional, challenging haute couture, where exaggerations are part of the trade. Just like Westwood, French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier experimented with the iconography of sexual fetishism and found inspiration in the streets, challenging the establishment. He equipped the “liberated” woman with all the signs of feminine seduction (exaggerated curves, hourglass shapes, stilettos, and lingerie), while presenting the homosexual man, who in the 70s celebrated his “coming out of the closet,” as an object of homoerotic desire, with panties, fitted marine t-shirts, and defined muscles. Corsets and underwear became outerwear: with a postmodern vision, Gaultier transformed the original function of a garment into its opposite. This provocative potential of corsetry had its peak in 1990, in Madonna’s looks during “Blonde Ambition” tour: The explosive combination of a powerful corseted bust with nude conical cups and a severe cut blazer would mean the ideal fusion of masculine and feminine, and the imminent future of fashion. Through a deliberate staging of fetishized sex, Gaultier achieves the effect of denaturalization of gender,26 deconstructing stereotypes and proposing strategies of displacement of fetishized femininity, now appropriated by women. As Charlotte Seeling stated, “exaggeration is necessary when you want to make something clear, and in this sense Gaultier has done more for the expansion of the concept of beauty than many artists and has advocated more for tolerance than many politicians.”27 Seeking provocation, Gaultier’s shows are often pure parody, displacement, and irony. He presented the Chanel suit, a contemporary symbol of French elegance, in cheap synthetic fabric. From a similar perspective,

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also Italian designer Franco Moschino made intelligent comments on the excesses in which fashion was incurring, being ironically celebrated by those he parodied. Some of his iconic designs include badges on an imitation Chanel suit, or a coat made of lots of teddy bears. “Chic & Cheap” was his claim. Miuccia Prada has proved with that bad taste can be beautiful, too. She introduced a hint of eccentricity in a context of good sense. Despite seeming harmless, Prada’s effects are profoundly subversive. In 1996, in the midst of the years of minimalism, Prada shocked the fashion scene with a collection reminiscent of the hideous oilcloth frets of the 1950s and 1960s. The allure of the petit bourgeois robe became an object of desire overnight, while collections of ruffled blouses and midi dresses in black or beige with lace trim turned models into grannies. Throughout her creations, Prada has constantly turned traditional ways of looking upside down. The brand’s take on kitsch also included precious and decadent luxury objects like the 2005 skirt made entirely of peacock feathers, which we can relate to that image Susan Sontag evoked: “The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.”28 Ideas of excess and extravagance are also present in the works by Alexander McQueen. His fashion shows were unique, full of emotion and innovation. Trained in rigorous British tailoring and in creative French craftsmanship, McQueen produced extraordinary designs, redefining the idea of beauty from the disturbing, the uncanny, the grotesque. Defying traditional ideas and aesthetics, the designer used an extreme and theatrical imagery around themes of sex and death. Despite being at times accused of misogyny due to his transgressive looks, his intention was to empower women.29 McQueen’s collections, intensely emotional, were also tightly linked to his sexuality and to the acceptance of himself. His work is another proof of how fashion has always been a territory for expression and construction of identity. Kitsch and camp have long functioned as survival mechanisms of gender and sexual minorities, and related forms of dress were later also forms of political action. But currently we are experiencing how kitsch and genderless fashion are being increasingly accepted and adopted by a general audience. One of the designers responsible for this phenomenon is

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Alessandro Michele. Ever since assuming the creative directorship of Gucci in 2015, Michele has brought a new spirit into the house, extravagant, dream-like, and kitsch. With his more-is-more aesthetic, his particular understanding and appreciation of the historical codes of Gucci and his constant dialogue between art and fashion, Michele has infused many Renaissance-inspired elements into his designs and Gucci’s overall visual identity, thus creating a consistent narrative for the brand. In every collection since his debut, Michele has presented an eclectic melting pot of cuts, eras, and styles. In his fantastical designs there is a signature sophistication, something he calls “beautiful strangeness.” Michele plays with a richness of references, high and low, beautiful and odd, harmoniously mixed in every season. This has been noted in the Fall/Winter 2017–2018 collection: Street was matched with couture, the exotic with the familiar, masculine with feminine, the chic with the shabby, one era with another: Alessandro Michele called it the “anti-modern labyrinth” […]. The increase in eclectic pieces tells a simple story: in a society of rights and responsibilities, let fashion monopolize desires and wishes—an idea that is perhaps part of the reasons behind the current obsession with the brand.30

According to Susan Sontag,31 androgyny was considered one of the great images of Camp sensibility, and that relates to kitsch, too. And Alessandro Michele, in what was called his “vintage kitsch” style, defined Gucci girls and boys who indistinctively wear floral and lace dresses and strict tailoring suits, furry moccasins and platform shoes, in an effortless androgyny that has become one of Gucci’s main features. Michele’s whole aesthetic is based on a bucolic, genderless, maximalist imagery. A whole world of fantasy emerges in every fashion show: Michele presents fabulous gowns with a fairytale feel, while some of his looks seem borrowed from a grandmother’s attic or from the dressing room of a Reno cabaret. Alessandro Michele has made Gucci relevant again, swapping the brand’s classic sophistication for a more challenging, diverse, and creative vision of fashion.

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 amp, Kitsch, Queer, and the Vulgar C in Fashion Exhibitions More than any other art form, fashion most intensely embraces and expresses the exuberant aesthetics of kitsch, mastering the ability to question conventions of beauty and taste. With their common qualities and subtle differences, both camp and kitsch work as a transgressive commentary on mainstream culture while also bringing subcultures and diversity to the front. This has been reflected in some key fashion exhibitions, which will be presented below. Like kitsch, the term queer (more encompassing than gay) has also been used in a pejorative sense. In the 70s, the influence of the LGTBQ community in the world of fashion began to be more evident. Exploring the aesthetic sensibilities and unconventional clothing choices prevalent among members of this community, we clearly see that queer culture has played an antagonistic role in the creation of modern fashion. Curated by Valerie Steele and Fred Dennis, “A Queer History of Fashion: from the Closet to the Catwalk” (2014) was an exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology (New York) that exposed an often undercover side of fashion. The show delves into the LGBTQ contribution to style, from eighteenth-­century London to present-day high fashion. Ranging from the sober to the flamboyant, and referencing traditional dress codes, AIDS awareness, anti-fashion looks, the exhibition explores the contributions of gay individuals as both designers and trendsetters, through high fashion, street style and performance gear. Works by couturiers like Cristóbal Balenciaga, Christian Dior or Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Gianni Versace are displayed together with historical ensembles. The exhibition addresses subjects of androgyny, dandyism, and the influence of subcultural and street styles, including drag, leather, and uniforms. As various fashion theorists have explored,32 dissenting ways of relating to fashion as a cultural form have resulted in a sensibility that embraces both idealizing and transgressive aesthetic styles. In 2016, the Barbican Art Gallery opened the exhibition “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined,”33 conceived by curator Judith Clark and

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psychoanalyst Adam Philips. Fashion was frequently considered inherently vulgar, more specially when it was perceived to be too popular, excessive, sexualized, kitsch, or camp. This exhibition exposes “the vulgar” as a reflection on this inherently challenging but utterly compelling territory of taste, inviting visitors to a journey through thought-­provoking categories that change with time, context, and experience. The exhibition included leading modern and contemporary designers like Manolo Blahnik, Hussein Chalayan, Courrèges, Paul Poiret, Yves Saint Laurent, Viktor & Rolf, Jeremy Scott for Moschino, Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy, John Galliano for Dior, Maison Martin Margiela, and Iris van Herpen, among many others. The MET gala, known as the “Super Bowl of fashion,” opens the Costume Institute’s annual fashion exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and is themed according to the show that year. “Camp Notes on Fashion”34 was the title for the 2019 edition: The title was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay, which provided the inspiration for the exhibition. The concept of camp was not new, but Sontag brought it into focus, defined its aesthetic grammar, and legitimized it, changing cultural history. In the 2019 exhibition, extraordinary and exquisitely kitschy/camp pieces were on display: Salvatore Ferragamo’s 1938 platforms made of gold leather and rainbow suede next to Alessandro Michele’s 2017 gold leather and rainbow platform sneakers; a 1960s fluffy purple Balenciaga evening dress put together with a 2018 purple satin and ostrich feather puff exploding with butterflies by Jeremy Scott for Moschino; a 1951 Balenciaga gown made of black velvet and pink taffeta teamed with Thierry Mugler’s legendary mid-90s couture “Venus” dress; also, some designs with evident queer perspectives, like a hot pink Jean-Paul Gaultier men’s sailor suit and Alessandro Michele’s ode to Oscar Wilde in the form of a Gucci jacket. Every design in the show shone with a spirit of positivity, and this spirit is part of what fuels camp’s rebellion against the status quo. “Camp. Notes on fashion” was divided into two parts: the first room traced the etymological origin of camp, the second looked at the different modes of representation and how they play out in fashion. The exhibition displayed and developed all the formal characteristics of camp: irony, humor, parody, pastiche,

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naïveté, duplicity, ambiguity, artificiality, theatricality, extravagance, exaggeration, and aestheticism. Camp and kitsch are concepts that present a vision of the world in terms of style. They are playful, anti-serious, inclusive, committed, and enjoyable. As Sontag wrote, “Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy.”35 And at the same time, both concepts favor a radically unsettling aesthetic experience.

4 When Fashion Meets (Pop) Art: Collaborations, Appropriations, Intersections Relationships between art and fashion have been happening and becoming stronger since last century. Many of their extraordinary outcomes are celebrated, while some “fashion meets art” examples are reluctantly observed from both disciplines as something that can be—pejoratively— considered kitsch. Gillo Dorfles considered any reproduction of art as kitsch in nature, an equivalent to forgery. But Matei Calinescu points out that the aesthetic falsity of kitsch should not be confused with that of an artificial falsification. Kitsch claims that each of its potentially innumerable reproductions and reproductions of reproductions—, contains some of the objective aesthetic value of the styles, conventions, and works that it overtly misrepresents.36 Kitsch offers instant beauty, proposing that there is no substantial difference between it and original, eternal beauty. There are many fashion designers who create garments or fashion pieces inspired by the works of world known artists, even directly appropriating their images and motifs. It could be argued that designs like the legendary “Mondrian dress” (1960) by Yves Saint Laurent were not a mere reproduction of a recognizable masterpiece, but a modern classic in itself. Fashion’s obvious inspiration in art history can be seen in endless examples, such as Warhol’s Marilyn portraits in the famous 1991 Versace jumpsuit and Galliano’s 2008 haute couture collection for Dior, inspired

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in Klimt’s paintings. As contemporary fashion icons, these examples are innovative and chic, mixing different levels of culture and playful reflections on the idea of originality. But we can find multiple examples of “fashion meets art” that may be tricky to evaluate. Are they even kitsch? Luxury brand Louis Vuitton called on a major figure of kitsch and contemporary art, Jeff Koons, for an artistic collaboration in 2017. After previous collaborations with artists such as Takashi Murakami and Olafur Eliasson, Louis Vuitton chose Koons to create a new collection of handbags, signature item of the fashion house. Renowned for his particular take on kitsch and pop culture, Jeff Koons transposed paintings by masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Van Gogh, and Rubens on Vuitton bags and accessories. In choosing works that are part of the collective memory, the Masters series37 invited a fresh look at these masterpieces, taking them outside the museum and into the (mass consumption) world. This collaboration was the first chapter in an ongoing project that celebrates Louis Vuitton’s multiple connections with the history of art. The idea behind this collaboration was to blur the lines between high and low culture, an ethos which still exudes into Koons’s work. The collection includes masterpieces from the Western cannon of art history emblazoned upon leather handbags, backpacks, silk scarves, and woven shawls. Each painting is the primary design with the original artist’s last name prominently featured in large silver or gold-plated letters. Bags are then adorned with touches of the Jeff Koons brand, a bunny and a flower, from his Inflatables series. In some way, the “Masters” collaboration with Vuitton carries on this theme—Koons has literally reprinted priceless artworks and made them available to be mass-produced and mass-­consumed. The aesthetic charm of kitsch is transparently commercial here; these creations present an invitation to immediate possession and enjoyment: Consumers could buy their own versions of some of the art world’s most famous masterpieces, while acquiring status symbols at the same time. This perspective takes us to an idea pointed out by Matei Calinescu:38 the modern illusion that beauty can be bought and sold. And this is something democratic: Once the elitist claim to a single vision of beauty is lost, it can even be easy to fabricate. Kitsch, according to Calinescu, has the power to please, to satisfy popular aesthetic nostalgia, and of the

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vague ideal of middle-class beauty, fundamental in questions of aesthetic consumption and, therefore, of production. But let’s not forget that despite seeming an unusual alliance, Louis Vuitton is known for the same principles as Jeff Koons: brand, name, craftsmanship, cult, and elite. And they both seem to move between the intended and the involuntary kitsch in this controversial and commercially successful collection. We should also note that this project interestingly links kitsch to a strong dada and pop attitude, movements which, by the way, criticized the bourgeois class and consumer culture. The critic could argue that mass-market collaborations dilute an artist’s “message”—whatever that means these days—but Koons’s Louis Vuitton or H&M partnerships only strengthen his cause. As Jenny Sharp wrote, “kitsch is in fact the taste of the middle classes, which today is the taste of the vast majority of our society.”39 And that of the high classes, too. “Good collaborations are art, great collaborations are kitsch,” Ana Andjelic stated. There are obvious parallels between these collaborations and the world of art: there are auctions, collectors, dealers, critics, resale marketplaces, monographs. Just like art, collaborations aim to shock and surprise.”40 The idea of making art “accessible” has seen Koons labeled as one of the founders of a neo-pop art movement which is still influencing the luxury fashion industry today. Koons’s willingness to shake the foundations of an elite industry connects him with the likes of Supreme, YEEZY, Off-White, and Vetements—brands whose presence and profitability have forced the fashion world to rethink its aesthetics and connection to youth culture. Virgil Abloh, founder of the cult brand Off-White and artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear division, who sadly passed away in 2021 at the age of 41, was known for pushing boundaries and using creativity to communicate socio-political messages. Abloh’s creative pursuits spanned mediums, from music to furniture or fashion, defying easy definition. His inspiration came from both hip hop and classical art; for him nothing was exclusive, and everything could be connected, intersecting the spheres of streetwear and high fashion on the runway, or collaborating with a number of noteworthy artists, including Takashi Murakami, Jenny Holzer, and Damien Hirst. Abloh also made collaborations with a variety

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of brands and companies, like Ikea, Mercedes Benz, Nike, Levi’s, Moncler, and Jimmy Choo. Abloh cites Jeff Koons as a key influence on his work.41 When explaining the decision to name his hugely successful brand “Off White” in a 2014 interview, he said: “I’m defining a grey area between two things; not necessarily opposites. For example: street and high fashion; kitsch and credible; men and women.”42 This explanation evokes Koons’s intention to blur the lines of art and commerce, whereas Abloh’s own background in Architecture and ability to work in a variety of mediums reveals a conceptual mentality which aligns him with the artist. Both Koons and Abloh seem to share a common ethos, also related to discourses of appropriation of universally recognizable art icons and their utilization in controversial designs, although for different audiences. Abloh successfully connected with youth, encouraging and motivating the new generations to be disruptive, inviting them to reflect on their references. Louis Vuitton holographic duffel bags, the “industrial belt,” Mona Lisa hoodies, the “little black dress” with its title literally printed, the combination of streetwear with luxurious designs like the Arc’teryx off-white tulle gown …. As a creator, Abloh certainly contributed to building bridges between the classic and the zeitgeist of the moment and was able to connect to a type of consumer who has always resisted the high fashion industry, understanding what it demands. Aligned with Abloh, Demna Gvasalia, the designer behind the fashion brand Vetements and the creative director (and responsible for new life) of Balenciaga, has challenged visions of ugliness and beauty through a totally disruptive proposal based on kitsch, appropriation, and reconsideration of icons of the popular culture. The shift encapsulated by Demna Gvasalia was the rising up of what is usually considered low to the highest of high fashion. With a sharp-tuned sense of brand identity and influence, Gvasalia has pushed what can be desired, from designs literally inspired in Ikea Fakta bag to the DHL t-shirt or the plastic Barbes checked bag. His fashion language has become universally accepted and frames the aesthetic of the times. He took the most avant-garde attitudes of contemporary fashion, the anti-fashion streetwear aesthetic he pioneered at Vetements, and the historical elitism of Balenciaga, putting it all in one place, redefining the spaces between new and old elitism.

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These examples prove how in today’s postfashion the appropriations of cultural icons, collaborations between talented designers and luxury or consumer brands, risky new contemporary visions of beauty connected to youth urban sensibility, and extreme juxtapositions conform a new set of fashion proposals that are making little distinctions between the high and the low, the underground and the mainstream, the corporate and the cool, the authentic and the fake, the kitsch and the chic.

5 Conclusion Kitsch has certainly always been discredited in the face of everything that belongs to the order of “high culture” or to the realm of the intellectual. But it has permeated many aspects of art, creativity, and of course, fashion. Right now, we are experiencing a fascination for elements and ideas that refer, without a doubt, to a changing meaning of kitsch. Kitsch works as an aesthetic system through which we perceive and re-create reality, and it is becoming a privileged strategy and trend in fashion nowadays, exposing taste conflicts. The expression of the personal creativity as well as the social, the critical and even perverse value of the apparently banal, the hyperbole of the everyday, and the symbolization of identities, ideas, and cultural constructions are being articulated in the form of extraordinary designs. Fashion, survivor of the debate between the aesthetics of high and low culture and considered too kitschy for the academic circles for so long, has happily aligned with the new understanding of kitsch, revisiting old ideas and references and connecting especially with the youth and street culture. The analysis of the designers, exhibitions, and projects in this chapter exemplifies how the inclusion of elements of irony and vulgarity in high couture and luxury goods has permeated contemporary production and consumption. Fashion is currently addressing the context of mass consumption, the democratization of beauty and luxury, gender identity issues, the lack of inclusion and diversity. It is also making interesting comments on the idea of originality and cultural appropriation. Fashion makes progress—in creative terms—not only through disruptive ideas that become canonical over time, but also, for the benefit of society, by

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questioning bad practices and correcting prejudices. In the era of postfashion, kitsch can function as a thought-provoking, subversive element or as escape entertainment in times of globalization, homogenization, and restrictions, revealing itself as a liberating creative force.

Notes 1. Max Ryynänen, Contemporary Kitsch. The Death of Pseudo-Art and the Birth of Everyday Cheesiness (A Postcolonial Enquiry), Terra Aestheticae Vol. 1 (Theoria), 2018: 1, 81. 2. Ryynänen, Contemporary Kitsch, 77–78. 3. Matei Calinescu, Cinco caras de la modernidad. Modernismo, vanguardia, decadencia, kitsch, postmodernismo, trans. Francisco Rodríguez Martín (Madrid: Tecnos, 2003), 233. 4. Umberto Eco, Apocalípticos e integrados, trans. Andrés Boglar (Madrid: Lumen, 1981), 79. 5. Calinescu, Cinco caras de la modernidad, 226. 6. Eco, Apocalípticos e integrados, 101. 7. Gilles Lipovetsky, “The Empire of Fashion: Introduction,” in Fashion Theory: A Reader, ed. Malcolm Barnard (New York: Routledge, 2007), 25–26. 8. Valerie Steele, “Fashion,” in Fashion and Art, ed. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (London-New York: Berg, 2012), 13–14. 9. Georg Simmel, “Philosophy of Fashion,” in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 197. 10. Valerie Steele, “Why People Hate Fashion,” in The Style Engine, ed. Giannino Malossi (New York: Monacelli, 1998), 69. 11. Steele, “Why People Hate Fashion,” 70. 12. Barbara Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2005), 3. 13. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (California: University of California Press, 1990). 14. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 10. 15. Steele, “Why People Hate Fashion,” 71. 16. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement and Taste (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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17. Valeria Nofri, “The aesthetics of kitsch: From Versace to Prada.” In Giovanna Motta and Antonello Biaginni (eds.), Fashion through History: Costumes, Symbols, Communication (Volume II) (Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2017), 281. 18. Nofri, “The aesthetics of kitsch: From Versace to Prada,” 282. 19. Robert Radford, “Dangerous Liaisons: Art, Fashion and Individualism,” Fashion Theory, 2:2 (1998), 151 163, https://doi. org/10.2752/136270498779571103. 20. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (California: University of California Press, 1990). 21. Valerie Steele, Fashion Theory. Hacia una teoría cultural de la moda, trans. Lilia Mosconi (Buenos Aires: Ampersand, 2018), 32–33. 22. Barbara Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2005), 63. 23. Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist, 64. 24. Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist, 4. 25. Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist, 65. 26. Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist, 31–32. 27. Charlotte Seeling, Moda. 150 años. Modistos, Diseñadores, Marcas, trans. Karmen Louzao Martínez, Virtudes Mayayo García and Almudena Sasiain Calle (Potsdam: H.F. Ullmann, 2011). 216. 28. Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp” (1964), in Camp. Notes on Fashion, ed. Andrew Bolton (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art), 169. 29. Steele. Fashion Theory, 285–286. 30. Manon Garrigues, “Gucci by Alessandro Michele: 3 shows in 6 moodboards,” trans. Cosima Baring, Vogue, 21 February, 2018, https://www. v o g u e . f r / f a s h i o n / f a s h i o n -­i n s p i r a t i o n / d i a p o r a m a / gucci-­by-­alessandro-­michele-­3-­shows-­in-­3-­moodboards/25935. 31. Sontag, Notes on “Camp,” 161–175. 32. Valerie Steele (ed.), A Queer History of Fashion: from the Closet to the Catwalk (New Haven ad London: Yale University Press and Fashion Institute of Technology, 2013). 33. Google Arts and Culture, “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined,” Accessed December 3, 2021, https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/the-­ vulgar-­fashion-­redefined-­barbican-­centre/3ALStredxpsULg?hl=en. 34. Andrew Bolton, Camp Notes on Fashion (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019). 35. Sontag, Notes on “Camp,” 175.

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36. Calinescu, Cinco caras de la modernidad, 248. 37. Louis Vuitton. “Masters. A collaboration with Jeff Koons.” Accessed October 20, 2021, https://hk.louisvuitton.com/eng-­hk/stories/ masterscampaign2#masters/monet. 38. Matei Calinescu, Cinco caras de la modernidad. Modernismo, vanguardia, decadencia, kitsch, postmodernismo, trans. Francisco Rodríguez Martín (Madrid: Tecnos, 2003). 39. Jenny Sharp, “It’s New, It’s Different, It’s Been Here All the Time,” in Ark 41 (The Journal of the Royal College of Art, Londres, 1967), pp. 24–25. 40. Ana Andjelic, “Special Report: Good collaborations are art, great ones are kitsch,” Highsnobiety, November, 13, 2020, https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/special-­report-­what-­makes-­a-­good-­collaboration/. 41. Ray Rogers, “Rising Star Virgil Abloh on His Inspirations: Youth Culture, Andy Warhol & Jeff Koons,” Billboard, August, 9, 2016, https://www.billboard.com/music/features/virgil-­a lboh-­o ff-­w hite-­ interview-­7502771/. 42. Emilia Petrarca, “Virgil Abloh is Everywhere: An interview with Fashion’s Über-Connector.” WMagazine, August, 3, 2016, https://www.wmagazine.com/gallery/virgil-­a bloh-­o ff-­w hite-­f all-­2 016-­p aris-­f ashion-­ week-­kanye-­west.

Bibliography Andjelic, Ana. “Special Report: Good Collaborations are Art, Great Ones are Kitsch.” Highsnobiety. November, 13, 2020. https://www.highsnobiety. com/p/special-­report-­what-­makes-­a-­good-­collaboration/. Barnard, Malcolm (ed.). Fashion Theory: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2007. Barthes, Roland. The Fashion System. Translated by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. California: University of California Press, 1990. Bolton, Andrew. Camp. Notes on Fashion. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement and Taste. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Calinescu, Matei. Cinco caras de la modernidad. Modernismo, vanguardia, decadencia, kitsch, postmodernismo. Translated by Francisco Rodríguez Martín. Madrid: Tecnos, 2003.

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Eco, Umberto. Apocalípticos e integrados. Translated by Andrés Boglar. Madrid: Lumen, 1981. Frisby, David and Featherstone, Mike (eds.). Simmel on Culture. London: Sage, 1997. Garrigues, Manon. “Gucci by Alessandro Michele: 3 shows in 6 moodboards.” Translated by Cosima Baring, Vogue, 21 February, 2018. https://www.vogue. fr/fashion/fashion-­inspiration/diaporama/gucci-­by-­alessandro-­michele-­3-­ shows-­in-­3-­moodboards/25935. Google Arts and Culture. “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined.” Accessed December 3, 2021. https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/the-­vulgar-­fashion-­ redefined-­barbican-­centre/3ALStredxpsULg?hl=en. Lipovetsky, Gilles. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Louis Vuitton. “Masters. A collaboration with Jeff Koons.” Accessed October 20, 2021, https://hk.louisvuitton.com/eng-­hk/stories/masterscampaign2# masters/monet. Nofri, Valeria. “The Aesthetics of Kitsch: From Versace to Prada.” In Giovanna Motta and Antonello Biaginni (eds.), Fashion through History: Costumes, Symbols, Communication (Volume II), 280–284. Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2017. Petrarca, Emilia. “Virgil Abloh is Everywhere: An interview with Fashion’s Über-­ Connector.” WMagazine. August, 3, 2016. https://www.wmagazine.com/ gallery/virgil-­abloh-­off-­white-­fall-­2016-­paris-­fashion-­week-­kanye-­west. Radford, Robert. “Dangerous Liaisons: Art, Fashion and Individualism,” Fashion Theory, 2:2 (1998), 151–163, https://doi.org/10.2752/136270 498779571103. Rogers, Ray. “Rising Star Virgil Abloh on His Inspirations: Youth Culture, Andy Warhol & Jeff Koons.” Billboard. August, 9, 2016. https://www.billboard. com/music/features/virgil-­alboh-­off-­white-­interview-­7502771/. Ryynänen, Max. Contemporary Kitsch. The Death of Pseudo-Art and the Birth of Everyday Cheesiness (A Postcolonial Enquiry). Terra Aestheticae Vol. 1 (Theoria), 2018: 1, 70–86. Seeling, Charlotte. Moda. 150 años. Modistos, Diseñadores, Marcas. Translated by Karmen Louzao Martínez, Virtudes Mayayo García and Almudena Sasiain Calle. Potsdam: H.F. Ullmann, 2011. Sharp, Jenny. “It’s New, It’s Different, It’s Been Here All the Time,” in Ark 41 (The Journal of the Royal College of Art, Londres, 1967). 24–25.

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Sontag, Susan. Notes on “Camp” (1964), in Camp. Notes on Fashion, edited by Andre Bolton, 161–175. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Steele, Valerie. “Fashion.” In Fashion and Art, edited by Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, 13–27. London/New York: Berg, 2012. Steele, Valerie. Fashion Theory. Hacia una teoría cultural de la moda. Translated by Lilia Mosconi. Buenos Aires: Ampersand, 2018. Steele, Valerie. “Why People Hate Fashion.” In The Style Engine, edited by Giannino Malossi, 66–71. New York: Monacelli, 1998. Vinken, Barbara. Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System. Oxford/New York: Berg, 2005.

Digital Kitsch: Art and Kitsch in the Informational Milieu Domenico Quaranta

This chapter is an attempt to understand how the advent and widespread use of digital media has affected our understanding of kitsch and how this relates to art, in view of the way digital media have been shaping and reconfiguring creative production, something that could be summed up with the term “digital kitsch.” In this chapter, “digital kitsch” is understood as the default mode for creative endeavors that use digital media: tools that have made visual literacy accessible to all and rendered the strategies and languages of the avant-garde banal and commonplace; tools that elicit technophilia, rather than critical, informed use, and are characterized by built-in limitations and ideologies that condition their creative outputs. Digital kitsch therefore takes in everything from amateur internet creations to professional content, from low-res “poor images” to mainstream media productions, from pixel graphics to hi-res

D. Quaranta (*) Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milano, Italy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_8

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CGI, from desktop wallpapers to immersive environments, from virtual reality to artificial intelligence. If kitsch is the most typical product of modernity, digital kitsch is the most typical product of the postmodern, post-media, post-digital, post-human age we are living in. By no means exhaustively, this chapter looks at how art might exist in this arena, in relation to digital kitsch, but without identifying with it.

1 The Artist Looking at Kitsch I just love looking at stuff that people have created without the intention of it being called art. I mean, stuff that is made by people semi-naively, by people who are simply excited to create things. And I think this enthusiasm is shared by many of my peers. You know, there’s an aspect to Second Life that is grotesquely kitsch, and I can’t help but love this aspect. I think we’ve reached a point now, my generation, where we don’t even know if we’re celebrating something and saying it’s great or engaging in ironic critique and mocking it. We’ve almost collapsed the two.1

The video shows a young girl looking into a webcam. Behind her, we can make out a neutral white environment, something between a dorm room and a gallery space. She’s not looking directly at us, but seems to be distracted, even absorbed by something happening in the lower right corner, as if she were reading something, or scrolling through a web page. A monotonous electronic soundtrack vaguely reminiscent of Kraftwerk accompanies a series of colorful animated graphics that appear on the surface of the screen: a bee buzzing around little flowers, a tennis ball bouncing in one corner, a little heart beating in another, a spider dropping from the ceiling, a flash of lightning crossing the girl’s forehead, a ladybird climbing up the glass, a row of dancing pizza slices, and then kittens, puppies, bunnies, fish, snow effects, UFOs, musical instruments, sports equipment, budgies, ice cream cones, and, of course, candies. Titled VVEBCAM (2007), this 1:43  minute video by Los Angeles– based artist Petra Cortright joined MoMA’s (Museum of Modern Art, New York) permanent collection in 2020. It is presented on a small, 4:3 screen enclosed in a black frame, though this is not how it should ideally

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be experienced: as the wall caption explains, the video was made for YouTube, “where the artist initially exploited the comments section of the website as much as the video itself, using keywords to attract viewers searching for erotic or offensive content and sabotaging their expectations.”2 This material is no longer available, as YouTube took the video down in 2010—precisely because of the scam keywords—but it is what makes VVEBCAM not your typical piece of video art. It is the only surviving fragment of a three year performance that took place in the public, online space of a video-sharing platform.3 In 2007 YouTube was only two years old, and had no mainstream media channels, censorship, or copyright filters. Pirated and NSWF material4 was the norm, rather than the exception. Its slogan “Broadcast Yourself ” was attracting increasing numbers of people interested in producing and uploading amateur video content, with a view to building an audience and an online identity. So-called camgirls were a successful sub-genre—attractive young girls performing for the webcam, usually from their bedrooms. Cortright’s piece clearly plays with this trope, but with a twist: there is music, but she doesn’t dance to it; she doesn’t address the camera, she doesn’t speak, she’s not animated or trying to be sexy: on the contrary, she looks bored and detached. In a way, VVEBCAM could be described as a self-portrait of the artist as a young surfer, riding a wave of kitschy graphics. Yet VVEBCAM’s relationship with the aesthetic category of kitsch is much more nuanced than this, and cannot be reduced to mere spectatorship: the artist looking at kitsch. Cortright, who was born in 1986, belongs to the generation of artists who experienced the shift from the late 90s, low-bandwidth version of the Web, built from scratch by academics, activists, amateur designers, and early netizens, to Web 2.0, where web design has become increasingly professional, and the large majority of non-professionals have access to advanced tools and user-­ friendly publishing templates, and are actively encouraged to use them. The internet quickly evolved into a “mainstream world”5 and a “true mass medium”6—in which users are not passive consumers of mainstream content, but “prosumers” (producers + consumers). This shift has rejigged traditional categorizations such as professional and amateur, introducing new categories like “pro-am”7 and “sub-amateur.”8 Existing notions (“bricoleur,” “remix”) have been dusted off to describe producers who use

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professional-level tools at their default, basic settings, in order to participate in an attention economy where anyone can be successful, but in which the users have become the commodity. The generation of artists that emerged during this dramatic shift—the so-called post-internet generation—reacted to it with works that often show a critical awareness of these developments.9 They gathered around “surfing clubs,” group blogs where found internet content was shared, reframed, and commented upon; they explored, collected and archived material, turning internet surfing into a professional activity and the starting point of any creative operation; and when they created original content, they subtly mimicked the stylistic attitudes, tropes, genres, and formats of general internet content, adding a layer of conceptual awareness rather than trying to make their work look more professional, slick, or technically sophisticated. All this should be taken into account when looking at Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM. The work appropriates found internet content, but this content doesn’t belong to the same time frame as the video. It’s not contemporary kitsch—it’s web vernacular from the previous decade, and from another internet age; borrowing a term introduced by artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied in that period, it’s “digital folklore”:10 the outcome of spontaneous, amateur forms of creativity that are no longer possible, which have been lovingly, nostalgically unearthed from online forums and personal websites with archeological, archival precision. And while this sheds light on Cortright’s attitude to her appropriated content, what takes these low materials into the realm of “high art” is a traditional, familiar operation of appropriation and reframing which can be traced back to avant-garde collage, pop art, and postmodernism. The keywords Cortright deployed were also appropriated—avidly copied and pasted from other YouTube accounts, spam emails, and a variety of sources. They were not included just for the gaze of the average art audience, however: their main function was to hijack an “accidental audience”11 of people not interested in art, and to manipulate the context in which the video was seen. VVEBCAM was not made for a museum: it was made for the internet, and for a social media platform that the artist seeks to infiltrate seamlessly. The video was produced making standard use of tools available on any consumer electronics device: it’s small and

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low-res; it ends abruptly; there is no postproduction, montage, or after-­ effects—it was recorded with basic webcam software, and features live interaction with standard webcam effects. There’s no craft in it. Furthermore, while Petra Cortright does not look like the average YouTube camgirl, she also avoids any characterization as an artist as well. Her bio presents the aforementioned list of keywords, starting with “tits vagina sex nude boobs britney spears” and ending with “crash bandicoot hedgehog metroid tasvideos bisquit speedruns tool assisted.” These keywords determine the type of “related videos” that appear, which feature porn celebrities, long tongues, dancing teens, and sex-related content; they also fuel the social interactions in the comments section, often insulting and aggressive. The video’s title is all lowercase and misspelled. These elements came to characterize Cortright’s presence on YouTube in the years to come,12 and they are what still make it so difficult to contextualize her YouTube videos as art: however far removed from the mainstream they are, their native environment is the swamp of social media content, without an “art” tagline. Avoiding the usual strategies adopted by art either to bring the popular, the trivialm and the abject into the art world (appropriation, dislocation, assemblage) or to inhabit mainstream media (provocation, parody), they live in a blind spot between high art and low brow, forging a dynamic, evolving relationship with both. Only by recognizing what’s different about them can we isolate them from the “informational milieu”13 they are part of, and understand them as art.

2 Kitsch Is Everything That Men Call Kitsch14 Writing about VVEBCAM, I have used the categories of art and kitsch unquestioningly, as if a given. Assuming that Petra Cortright is an artist, I have tried to show the artistic significance of an artwork that not only appropriates kitschy imagery, but also tries to disguise itself as kitsch, seamlessly infiltrating its environment and addressing its audience. And, without further explanation, I have used the concept of kitsch as a synonym for “general internet content”—an equivalence that could

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legitimately be dismissed as problematic. General internet content is a large, overarching category which includes amateur content and memes, but also mainstream and professional media content, from stock images to advertising, photojournalism to web design, porn to hyper-realistic 3D imagery: a vast realm not characterized by any kind of aesthetic consistency. All of the above might sound pretty far removed from the commonly held idea of kitsch as a conventional form of beauty bordering on cuteness. I will explain the reasoning behind this equivalence in the next paragraph, but first let’s try to answer a question: what does the term kitsch refer to today? Going through the vast literature about kitsch, it’s hard to resist the feeling that our contemporary notion of kitsch is not the result of any kind of evolution or progress, but rather the overlapping and coexistence of different ideas. Although things have clearly developed, from the original, modernist dismissal of kitsch—as the antithesis of the concept of avant-garde—to the Sixties’ fascination for it in both avant-garde art and theory, up to our current appreciation and even celebration of it; and despite the fact its arena has simultaneously expanded—from the idea of a pretentious pseudo-art that merely copies the effects of art to the entire sphere of popular culture—and narrowed down: Hermann Broch considered Wagner’s music kitsch, while for Umberto Eco Ray Bradbury’s tales and Rhapsody in Blue were kitsch; none of these theories of kitsch could ultimately be deemed unfitting, old-fashioned or obsolete, and none of them can be said to have replaced previous iterations. All of them, to some extent, still hold true today, and taken together they all shape our contemporary, contradictory, layered, vague yet clear idea of kitsch. This coexistence is not just the result of some sort of postmodern relativism, the end of the grand narrative of modernism, globalization, the “swings of taste” discussed by Gillo Dorfles,15 or the wide use of kitsch made by those, at all levels of cultural production, who challenge high art as a patriarchal, colonial infrastructure. In addition to this, we also need to take account of two factors that define contemporary culture: the lack of a stable, shared definition of art, and the impact of digital media on the means of production and dissemination of cultural contents.

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There has always been a dialectical relationship between kitsch and art. From Hermann Broch to Celeste Olalquiaga, to define kitsch, you need to have an idea (and history) of art; and to define art, you need to have an idea of kitsch. However, in the context of the “high art” that has taken shape since the Nineties—without dominant ideas, with many centers and as many peripheries, multicultural and hybrid, constantly engaged in revisiting styles, languages and ancient and recent traditions, and produced by and for actors who shun codified roles—it is quite natural that the contemporary idea of kitsch has similar characteristics. The two arenas have become mutually permeable on different levels and at different points of the fine membrane that divides them, but this fine membrane must be maintained: if it dissolves it would no longer be possible to identify art in the flow of contemporary culture, to separate the wheat from the chaff, the gold from the sand. It is here that the “old” definitions of kitsch can help us relate to art. How to draw a line between the Banality sculptures and the objects of “bad taste” that Jeff Koons was inspired by? Why are the latter in children’s playgrounds or on grandma’s sideboard, while the former are on display at the Tate or Versailles? And how do I distinguish Petra Cortright’s videos from the millions of similar contents circulating on YouTube? Institutional or contextual definitions of art are not enough, nor is the fact that Koons and Cortright call themselves artists and have their works exhibited in museums; there has to be something that goes beyond languages, materials, and artist’s statements, and the fact that their works contain, as Danto said, “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”16 It is here that, unexpectedly, the ideas of Broch, Greenberg, or Eco can come to our aid: “The artist who limits himself merely to a search for new areas of beauty creates sensations, not art. Art is made up of intuitions about reality, and is superior to kitsch solely thanks to these intuitions,”17 writes Broch. Art creates “something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid,” says Greenberg: it is dynamic and always in motion, while “Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same.”18 And if kitsch, according to Eco, manifests an artistry aimed at heteronomous ends, and “struts about in the guise of other experiences, and sells itself as art without reservation,”19 art follows

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an inverse strategy, appropriating the banality of kitsch (Koons) or following the conceptual art push toward deskilling and the rejection of academic craftsmanship—something Ivan Illich called “deschooling”20— and disguising its presence in the native space of kitsch (Cortright).

3 Digital Kitsch How does digital media culture affect our contemporary relationship with kitsch? And where is digital media art situated in this scenario? To answer these questions, we must necessarily consider the backstory of digital media; who designed them, and what purpose they had in mind; how software tools, algorithms, and processes affect the aesthetics of what can be produced with them; how common consumer electronics devices, as well as software conceived for entertainment purposes, belong to contemporary mass culture and have shaped it; how interfaces, software, networks and devices have led to the emergence of an “informational milieu,” where massless flows of information “become the environment within which contemporary culture unfolds,” establishing “dynamic and shifting relations”21 between them; and lastly, how digital media art qualifies as one of these “massless flows,” in an ongoing, shifting dialogue with other flows that we variously qualify as trends, subcultures, social practices, vernacular aesthetics and memes. Digital media emerged in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Although the idea of a universal machine was introduced by Alan Turing in the Thirties, computers were mostly used for number crunching until the Sixties, when engineers realized that digital machines could also be used to generate music, process text, program images and animations, and code interactive systems. The idea of the computer as an “active metamedium,” “whose content would be a wide range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media,” was later formulated by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg in their seminal essay “Personal Dynamic Media” (1977).22 This essay illustrates the potential of the Dynabook, the prototype for the PC of the future, whose “interim version,” programmed with Smalltalk programming language, could be used to write, draw, paint, make music, and even produce three dimensional graphics. While early

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computer-­generated pictures and graphics, made by artists or engineers with an interest in art, are by necessity aesthetically minimalist, featuring mostly abstract geometric shapes generated by algorithms and sometimes printed with primitive plotter drawing systems, the illustrations featured in Kay and Goldberg’s essay display some genuine kitsch aesthetics, created either by the programmers themselves, or by the high school students who tested the system. The Dynabook anticipates three important features of digital media that emerged in the following decades. First, the “metamedium” was conceived to democratize and make art-making accessible by partially automating it. It not only renders work easier and faster for professionals, but also makes creative practices accessible to an increasing—from the Nineties onward, an exponentially increasing—number of people who do not see themselves as artists, but who enjoy having access to tools and knowledge. If we agree with Greenberg, when he claims that “Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy”;23 we have to acknowledge that, by contributing to “universal literacy” and extending this to any kind of media, the digital computer opened up to a flood of “user-generated kitsch.” Secondly, early adopters of the “metamedium” are often more interested in mastering the tool, researching and displaying the medium’s potential, than in delivering “intuitions about reality” (Broch) or producing “something valid solely on its own terms” (Greenberg). This attitude to the medium, which is far from universal but was widespread when the computer was not yet viewed as a legitimate artistic medium, and called for programming literacy, access to laboratories and an aptitude for collaboration, turns a misunderstood notion of artistic formalism into simple technophilia, and has conditioned—and to some extent still conditions—the production of much digital media art, which the contemporary art world often rejects as kitsch and purely a celebration of the technology.24 Third, the way a digital tool is designed, and the limitations of technology belonging to any given time, conditions the aesthetics of what you can make with it. While in some cases this stimulates creativity and the search for original solutions, more often than not, among those who use

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the tools as designed and uncritically, it leads to conventional, aesthetically homogeneous results. Though I have mentioned these considerations together, it should be noted that the questions of technical limitations and design ethos open up completely different sets of issues, attitudes, and approaches. Technical limitations may force a creator to adapt to a specific aesthetic. As we have seen, early computer art was minimalist by default. When computer graphics began to enable more complex results (a color palette, 3D imagery, some level of realism), some of the early computer artists, like Charles Csuri, followed suit and kept stretching the medium’s limits, showing that their early work was not fueled by need or aesthetic choice. Unsurprisingly, what Csuri made from the late Eighties onward borders on the kitsch of desktop backgrounds and animated screensavers. Other artists, like Manfred Mohr, stayed faithful to their own abstract geometric style, and garnered art world recognition. Throughout the Eighties and early Nineties, interface designers had to work with the constraints of small, pixelated screens, and limited memories, graphics cards and computing power. Nonetheless, Susan Kare’s 32 × 32 pixel icons for the Macintosh (1984) are a masterpiece of minimalist elegance and clever interface design which immediately entered popular culture. Early game designers faced similar limitations: if we compare the sometimes cartoonish, sometimes realistic graphics displayed on Arcade machines or the packaging of 8bit games with what we actually see on screen, we can get a measure of the gap between the kind of immersion and entertainment game companies wanted to achieve, and the visualization limits of the game engine. Yet, by coming up creative solutions to work around those limitations, designers such as Tōru Iwatani and Shigeru Miyamoto succeeded in developing a classic visual style which, though made obsolete by new industrial standards and the race of video games toward photorealism, has survived as a landscape of memory and nostalgia, and as a visual language it is much appreciated and deployed for its purity and economy of means, in both the underground scene and the visual arts world. On the other hand, the design of digital tools is informed by the ideologies embedded in them. As has been widely discussed in the field of Software Studies, software is never a neutral tool: it embodies the ideas,

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and the biases, of those who design it, for better or for worse, on multiple levels—from the binary logic of its source code, which always demands binary choices, to the way it is licensed (proprietary software/open source), to the metaphors deployed in its interface, to its primary function, to the biases of artificial intelligence algorithms, which are often trained on datasets and databases that may artificially narrow down the sets of options available.25 Let’s take a simple example: Photoshop. Designed in 1988 by programmers and special effects experts Thomas and John Knoll, who sold the license to Adobe that same year, Photoshop was conceived as a postproduction tool for photographers. Released for Macintosh in 1990, it soon became the industry standard in raster graphics editing. Its tools and filters enable photo editors to manipulate (i.e., enhance) images, and this ideology is so entrenched that the term “photoshopped” has entered common use. Of course, with its wide range of tools, Photoshop can be used for many other purposes, but always within a finite range of possibilities. Back in 1999, artist and programmer Adrian Ward released Autoshop, a generative version of the program that parodied Photoshop’s familiar interface and tools, introducing unpredictable automation and random chance. Believing that “creativity lies not in the modification of rules, but in setting the criteria for the rules, rather like conceptual art,”26 Ward demonstrated that if these criteria are adapted, software can produce completely different outputs. In his early demos of the software, John Knoll used his own pictures to demonstrate the potential of his tool. One was a holiday snap of his girlfriend Jennifer, sitting on a beach in Bora Bora. In 2010, to celebrate Photoshop’s anniversary, Knoll revisited these early demos in a YouTube video.27 The first altered version of Jennifer in Paradise is pure kitsch: Knoll clones his future wife and the island in front of her, and edits the picture to make this aberration look natural. In 2013, the artist Constant Dullaart retrieved the original picture from the video and restored it, making it the starting point of a larger project, in which he manipulated the image both digitally and physically, using lenticular printing and frosted glass. The project investigates the ambiguous status of the first “photoshopped” image, which, while it opened up a realm of

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possibilities, destroyed what Roland Barthes called the “noeme” of photography, and incidentally abused and commodified a young woman’s body.28 Photoshop also allows us to expand on the concept of universal (visual) literacy introduced at the beginning of this paragraph. According to media theorist Lev Manovich, “One general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer.”29 Manovich gives the example of digital cinema technology, which translates the avant-garde strategy of collage into the “cut and paste” command, and also lets us paint on films, combine animation, printed texts and live action footage, and even merge different images into a single frame: “what used to be exceptions for traditional cinema became the normal, intended techniques of digital filmmaking, embedded in technology design itself.”30 Manovich wrote this in 2001. In the two decades since then, the rise of social media and the explosion of amateur digital culture have laid bare the uncanny consequence of translating the strategies of the avant-garde into widely available creative tools: everybody is using them. What education and the study of art history failed to accomplish, commercial software, consumer technology and smartphone applications have pulled off in a matter of years, putting the avant-garde into everyone’s hands. The average internet user may still claim to love Impressionism and not to understand Duchamp, but it is the avant-garde that has given them the tools for their internet memes and TikTok videos; their language is collage, not painting en plain air. According to Greenberg, “when enough time has elapsed the new is looted for new ‘twists,’ which are then watered down and served up as kitsch”;31 Eco asserts that, “kitsch renews itself and prospers just by continuously exploiting the discoveries of the avant-garde.”32 Yet this contemporary form of digital kitsch is not prepared and served up to a mass of consumers by the mainstream media; the avant-garde has been digested and made accessible through creative tools, and increasing numbers of mostly anonymous users are now using these tools to churn out the palatable, easily digestible version of the avant-garde that we are voraciously consuming and using to communicate.

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4 Art and Kitsch in the Informational Milieu The previous section frames digital kitsch as the default outcome of the creative use of digital media. Before continuing, it’s important to underline once more that the category of “digital kitsch” as discussed here not only encompasses digital artifacts that can be easily recognized as kitsch because of their aesthetic—from glittery animations to overly postproduced images, from cute cat videos to Surrealist painting remixes. All digital artifacts belong to this category by default, as they are the outcome of a process of democratization of production that has established universal literacy by incorporating and automatizing the strategies and tools of the avant-garde, and—more often than not—they are the result of efforts to master these tools, which impose their own build-in aesthetics and ideologies onto each artifact. This might be more obvious in the cropped, manipulated, filtered version of a picture that you just posted on Instagram, but it is also present in the apparently immediate, unedited picture stored on your phone, made with a tool that shows you reality as a picture in advance, corrects the lighting and takes the shot when everybody is smiling; it’s more noticeable in a recipe published in Comic Sans, but it’s also in the very text you are reading, written with a copy-and-­ paste machine that allows the author to choose between a variety of expertly crafted, pre-selected fonts. Some of the examples provided above, however, show how art can resist a medium that is biased toward digital kitsch. Manfred Mohr stands for all those artists who stay consistent to their own aesthetics and research, making something valid “solely on its own terms” instead of pursuing the developments and emerging potential of the medium. Adrian Ward came up with a celibate, conceptual machine that, setting aside the promise of utility usually built into software, succeeds in revealing the limitations encoded behind its shiny interface. By exploiting and making Photoshop’s default settings visible, Dullaart revealed how its uncritical use has changed the medium of photography and our relationship with images beyond recognition. Both works channel “intuitions about reality.”

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A complete—or at least provisional—phenomenology of how digital media art exists in this fluid, mutable, layered informational milieu goes far beyond the scope of this chapter. As we have already seen, a lot of internet-based art attempts to reach an accidental audience by hiding its nature as art and adopting hijacking strategies. When this is successful, responses may go from simple redistribution to sincere admiration to a savage flaming.33 For our purposes, it is important to note that, in this environment, the relationship that forms between avant-garde and kitsch is simultaneous rather than sequential, and is more dialogue than exploitation—although exploitation still occurs, when mainstream media borrow aesthetics from online communities or contemporary artists, as happened in 2007, when Kanye West’s producers used datamoshing effects—a form of compression glitch many artists were experimenting with at the time—in a video; or in 2011, when pop singer Rihanna appropriated the aesthetics of seapunk in a live performance on Saturday Night Live, enraging the niche yet global online community working on this imagery, a riot of color gradients, 3D models, aquatic iconography such as waves, mermaids, palm trees and dolphins, animated gifs and nostalgic allusions to the visual culture of the Nineties.34 Using various forms of digital kitsch as source material is another common artistic strategy. The generation that grew up on social media has made extensive use of user-generated content (YouTube videos, Flickr images, Twitter posts), producing video mash-ups, playlists, artist books, Tumblr blogs and installations. One popular example is Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 by Cory Arcangel (2009), in which the artist recreates Arnold Schoenberg’s musical composition by splicing dozens of YouTube videos of cats playing the piano.35 Sometimes, artists operate like anthropologists, or media archeologists, as can be seen in Natalie Bookchin’s video installations, exploring online phenomena like camgirls or the confessional use of social media, or excavating lost GeoCities homepages from the Nineties, as in Lialina and Espenschied’s project One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (2010–ongoing). Artists often source mainstream content as well, from stock image archives (Katja Novitskova) to pirated cinema (Nicolas Maigret). In all these cases, the aesthetic is that of the source material.

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The works that went by the name of “Game Art” offer another interesting case study. Taking the form of photographic journeys, machinima videos, modified game engines, in-game performances and independent art games, this art often borrowed languages and practices from online communities and subcultures (hackers, modders, sceners, and game fans), and embraced the aesthetics of the mainstream media they were based on.36 However radical, a performance staged in The Sims will always look like it belongs in a dolls house. Second Life, a virtual world founded in 2003, soon gained mainstream popularity and for some years gathered a large, active community of artists. All the art created there has the same 3D, cartoonish aesthetic, be it the re-enactment of a milestone of performance art (Eva and Franco Mattes), a form of coded performance that hacked the game engine (Gazira Babeli) or a travel log through the weirdest places of this completely user-generated virtual space (Jon Rafman). All these works are characterized by the game’s kitschy aesthetic, but do not belong to kitsch as a category of cultural artifacts: their aesthetic is either the platform’s default or the focus of their investigation, a ready-made overlay on practices that are an attempt to measure the distance between reality and simulation, an effort to break the magic spell of immersion, and an exploration of online communities, respectively. In some cases, digital media art actively contributes, willingly or unwillingly, to the implementation of online digital kitsch, by producing contents that are turned into popular memes, borrowing a specific manifestation of it as a coded language that can be used and abused, or devising frameworks meant to enrich the public domain and offer the online crowds new tools and raw materials. When he added his Kneecam No. 1 (2000) video to YouTube, Matthias Fritsch was just trying to showcase a piece of documentary filmmaking inspired by Dogma 95. Downloaded by other users and redistributed under the new name “Technoviking,” the video—featuring a muscular white male at a techno parade—became wildly popular, generating an offspring of tributes, variations, and remixes.37 DIS Images (2013) was a platform conceived by the artistic and curatorial collective DIS, which sold installation pictures and fashion shoots set in the white cube space of galleries and museums as stock images, with low-res versions visible on their website, properly watermarked. The project used the aesthetic of stock images to comment

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ironically on the analogies between these images and art documentation, and also to exploit the economies of commodified digital images as novel distribution channels.38 In his ongoing project threedscans.com (2012–) Oliver Laric enhances the public domain by publishing free 3D models of sculptures, archeological relics and various artifacts buried in museums and public collections. These models are downloaded and deployed by all sorts of 3D technology users, for all sorts of purposes: from amateurs playing with 3D sketching tools, to other artists, students, professional designers, makers, set designers for mainstream media, for use in animated gifs, renders, 3D printing, videogames, videoclips, sceneries, and so on. Laric runs regular online searches and avidly collects anything that has been done with these neglected museum artifacts he gave new life to by making a digital version of them.39

5 NFTs, “Crypto Art,” and Kitsch Kitsch could not, in fact, either emerge or prosper without the existence of kitsch-man, the lover of kitsch; as a producer of art he produces kitsch and as a consumer of art is prepared to acquire it and pay quite handsomely for it.40

Throughout this chapter, we have seen how digital media art and digital kitsch exist and circulate within the same informational milieu. Art often borrows from kitsch, poses as kitsch, and enhances kitsch with new content and tools. Both often use the same instruments and palette. So far, however, they mostly traveled along parallel paths. More recently, however, their relationship has become a lot more promiscuous, and this is generating a great deal of confusion in the art world. Behind this development is a relatively new technology conceived to generate artificial digital scarcity and certify ownership, which has rapidly generated a burgeoning market: NFTs. Standing for “Non-Fungible Token,” an NFT is a piece of code registered on a blockchain, which is a permanent, secure, distributed digital ledger protected by cryptography, mostly used to generate and exchange cryptocurrencies. While currencies are fungible tokens—each token can be exchanged with another of equal value—each

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NFT is unique, and can thus be associated with a digital asset to make the latter unique too.41 NFTs started being used in 2017 for any kind of collectibles: in-game assets (avatars, skins, gadgets), virtual land, collectible cards, rare memes, sports memorabilia and works of art. A number of platforms and marketplaces emerged. As NFTs are mostly bought using cryptocurrency, and are more comprehensible to those who have some familiarity with blockchains and crypto, and believe in them, their early adopters in terms of creators have been crypto companies (such as Larva Labs, which made CryptoPunks, and Dapper Labs, which made CryptoKitties), programmers, engineers, meme makers and artists working with digital media, while the collectors are often crypto investors and blockchain entrepreneurs. The use of the terms “artists” and “collectors” in this context requires a side note. Only a few of the early practitioners came from an art world background, and only a few of the early investors were traditional art collectors. Most of the former were professional designers or amateur creators used to sharing their creations for free on social media platforms and online communities such as Instagram or Deviantart; they belonged to the vast, shapeless, anonymous throng responsible for most online user-generated content—a big part of what we have called digital kitsch. Most of the latter got rich by making savvy investments and cashing in on crypto, meaning they had lots of money but little to invest in to show off their status, and a vested interest in making this game work. The former had little to lose, apart from the cost of the transactions; the latter had a lot to invest. With no art world in between (no galleries, no institutions, no art critics or curators), the investors’ cash and (usually bad) tastes became the arbiters of what was significant and valuable in this field. Unsurprisingly, they started referring to their purchases as “crypto art.” The NFT market grew rapidly between 2017 and 2020, and when the auction house Christie’s decided to tap into these massive flows of cryptocurrency (on December 12, 2020, a collection of images by an illustrator known as Beeple fetched $777,777), crypto investors were ready to follow suit. On March 11, 2021, Christie’s sold Beeple’s Everydays. The First 5000 Days—a compilation of 5000 illustrations formerly circulated

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for free, in the form of a high-resolution .jpg—for $69 million, making a $9  million commission. In the following months, the NFT market exploded, artists and practitioners from the art world joined in, and art magazines began covering it. Yet, at the end of 2021, with a few exceptions, the top positions in the NFT art market, which many view as a pyramid scheme,42 were still firmly occupied by the same early adopters. So what’s going on? For decades, digital media art and digital kitsch shared the same environment, often inhabiting the same platforms; the fine membrane between them was occasionally breached from one side or the other, but it basically held. The new variable that the NFT market has introduced is economic value. On one side of the membrane, the art world, mistaking economic value for cultural value, and giving up its historical role, has begun to mistake digital kitsch for art, while on the other side, an aggressive bunch of crypto investors posing as collectors, and delighted with their new role as cultural gatekeepers (and the money it brings in) are exploiting the weaknesses of the art world. The outcome is likely to be the dawn of a brand new age for digital kitsch, in which it becomes more sought after and valuable than art, and gets its own markets and even museums.43 Because of their peer-to-peer, decentralized structure, blockchains are often described as a consensus mechanism: transactions can only be accepted and validated when all the nodes in the network verify them. The art world, too, has always functioned as a consensus mechanism: some nodes may be more powerful than others, but none has never been powerful enough on its own to grant an artist a stable position in art history: no institution, no curator, no scholar, no gallery, no collector. The interaction between all nodes has always been crucial in determining cultural value. More specifically, the nodes with little or no economic interest often acted as a control mechanism against the art market’s excesses—those elements more likely to embrace fads, trends and hype, and fall headlong into the trap of kitsch. It’s an imperfect system, which often resists innovation, and is inclined to convert the avant-garde into new forms of academicism, and thus into kitsch. But it’s the only tool we have to safeguard that fine membrane, and keep enjoying kitsch without mistaking it for art.

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Notes 1. Jon Rafman, “Conversation with Nicholas O’Brien, Kool-Aid Man in Second Life,” 2009. Video, 18:01, https://vimeo.com/11689565. 2. “Petra Cortright,” MoMA, New  York, accessed April 12, 2022, www. moma.org/collection/works/401436. 3. A restoration/reconstruction of the piece in its original appearance has been produced by Rhizome, New York for its online exhibition Net Art Anthology (2016–2019), and is available online at this link: http:// archive.rhizome.org/anthology/vvebcam/. See also: “Net Art Anthology,” Rhizome, accessed April 12, 2022, https://anthology.rhizome.org/. Cortright never uploaded the video on YouTube again, although it has subsequently been shared by other users on the platform. 4. Not So Work Friendly. 5. Gene McHugh, Post Internet (Brescia: Link Editions, 2011), 5. 6. Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, eds., Mass Effect. Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012), XV. 7. “Pro-Am: Art and Culture on the Internet” was the title of a series of conferences organized by Western Front, Vancouver in September 2012. Video documentation is available online at: “Pro-Am: Art and Culture on the Internet,” Western Front, accessed April 12, 2022, https://legacywebsite.front.bc.ca/events/pro-­am-­art-­and-­culture-­on-­the-­internet/. 8. Introduced by Ed Halter in: Ed Halter, “After the Amateur: Notes,” Rhizome, April 29, 2009, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/apr/29/ after-­the-­amateur-­notes/. 9. The vast bibliography on Post Internet is beyond the scope of this piece. For this author’s take on the subject, and more bibliographical references, see Domenico Quaranta, “Situating Post Internet,” in Renewable Futures. Art, Science and Society in the Post-Media Age, eds. Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and Armin Medosch (Riga: RIXC Center for New Media Culture, 2017), 81–92. 10. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, eds., Digital Folklore (Stuttgart: merz & solitude, 2009). 11. The concept was introduced by the artist Brad Troemel in 2013 to describe online audiences that “share images and videos initially conceived as artworks without any concern for authorship, context, or property—without any particular awareness that they are engaging with ‘art’ at all.” See Brad Troemel, “The Accidental Audience,” The New Inquiry, March 14, 2013, https://thenewinquiry.com/the-­accidental-­audience/.

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12. “Petra Cortright,” YouTube, accessed April 12, 2022, www.youtube. com/user/petracortright. 13. Inspired by Gilbert Simondon’s concept of “milieu,” the term “informational milieu” was introduced by Tiziana Terranova in 2004, and adopted by Ceci Moss in 2019 to describe the environment in which most digital media art takes place. See Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (New York: Pluto Press, 2004) and Ceci Moss, Expanded Internet Art. Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu (New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019). 14. Paraphrasing a quote from the Italian philosopher and aesthetics scholar Dino Formaggio, “Art is everything that men call art.” See Dino Formaggio, L’arte (Milano: Isedi, 1973). 15. Gillo Dorfles, Le oscillazioni del gusto. L’arte d’oggi tra tecnocrazia e consumismo (Torino: Einaudi, 1970). 16. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 571–584, https://doi.org/10.2307/2022937. 580. 17. Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” 1950–1951, in Kitsch. An Anthology of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (London: Studio Vista, 1969), 49–76. 61. 18. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1953, in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture. Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989 [1961]), 3–33. 19. Umberto Eco, Apocalittici e integrati. Comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa (Milano: Bompiani, 1977 [1964]), 112 (author’s translation). 20. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). 21. Terranova, Network Culture, 8. 22. Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, “Personal Dynamic Media,” Computer 10(3) (March 1977): 31–41. Republished in The New Media Reader, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge—London: The MIT Press, 2003), 393–404. 23. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 9. 24. See Anne Collins Goodyear, “From Technophilia to Technophobia: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Reception of ‘Art and Technology,’” Leonardo, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2008), 169–173. 25. On the biases of Artificial Intelligence training systems, see: Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, “Excavating AI. The Politics of Images in

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Machine Learning Training Sets,” September 19, 2019, https://excavating.ai. 26. Adrian Ward, Geoff Cox, “How I Drew One of My Pictures: * or, The Authorship of Generative Art,” 1999. Paper presented at the Generative Art international conference, Politecnico di Milano, www.generativeart. com/on/cic/99/0399.htm. 27. “Photoshop. The first demo,” Adobe Photoshop YouTube channel, accessed April 12, 2022, https://youtu.be/Tda7jCwvSzg. See also: Gordon Comstock, “Jennifer in paradise: The story of the first Photoshopped image,” The Guardian, June 13, 2014, www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/photography-­blog/2014/jun/13/photoshop-­first­image-­jennifer-­in-­paradise-­photography-­artefact-­knoll-­dullaart. 28. The project started with an open letter to Jennifer: Constant Dullaart, “A Letter to Jennifer Knoll,” Rhizome, September 05, 2013. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/05/letter-­jennifer-­knoll/. 29. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2001), 306–307. 30. Ibid. 31. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 11. 32. Eco, Apocalittici e integrati, 76 (author’s translation). 33. I wrote extensively about this in: Domenico Quaranta, “Response. Contemporary Art and Online Popular Culture.” Artpulse, Issue 20, December 2014, 34–37. 34. Borrowing the term from Mark Fisher, I call this form of accelerated incorporation into the mainstream “precorporation.” See Domenico Quaranta, “Between Hype Cycles and the Present Shock,” Docs #06, NERO Editions, Rome 2020, www.neroeditions.com/docs/ between-­hype-­cycles-­and-­the-­present-­shock/. 35. “Drei Klavierstücke op. 11,” accessed April 12, 2022, https://coryarcangel.com/things-­i-­made/2009-­003-­dreiklavierstucke-­op-­11. I offered an overview of these kind of practices in my touring exhibition Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (2011–2012). See Domenico Quaranta, ed., Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (Brescia: Link Editions, 2011). 36. See Matteo Bittanti and Domenico Quaranta, eds., GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2006).

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37. Domenico Quaranta, “My Life Without Technoviking: An Interview with Matthias Fritsch,” Rhizome, December 5, 2013, https://rhizome. org/editorial/2013/dec/05/interview-­matthias-­fritsch/. 38. An archival copy of the project is available: “Dis Images,” Rhizome, accessed April 12, 2022, https://anthology.rhizome.org/dis-­images. 39. “Three D Scans,” accessed April 12, 2022, https://threedscans.com/. 40. Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” 49. 41. For a more extensive discussion of this topic, see Domenico Quaranta, Surfing with Satoshi. Art, blockchain and NFTs (Milano: Postmedia Books—Ljubljana: Aksioma, 2022). 42. See Martin O’Leary, “The Case Against Crypto,” Watershed, December 3, 2021, www.watershed.co.uk/studio/news/2021/12/03/case-­against-­ crypto; and David Gerard, “NFTs: crypto grifters try to scam artists, again,” Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, March 11, 2021, http://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/03/11/nfts-­c rypto-­g rifters-­t ry­to-­scam-­artists-­again/. 43. See The Museum of Crypto Art, founded by investor Colborn Bell, which could be described as a great inventory of digital kitsch. “The Museum of Crypto Art,” accessed April 12, 2022, https://museumofcryptoart.com/; and Ben Davis, “Colborn Bell, Founder of the First Museum of Crypto Art, Isn’t Worried About Wooing the Traditional Art World: A Q&A,” Artnet News, December 17, 2021, https://news.artnet. com/market/interview-­colborn-­bell-­museum-­of-­crypto-­art-­2049578.

Bibliography Bittanti, Matteo, and Domenico Quaranta, eds. GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames. Milan: Johan & Levi, 2006. Broch, Hermann. “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch.” In Kitsch. An Anthology of Bad Taste, edited by Gillo Dorfles, 49–76. London: Studio Vista, 1969. Calinescu, Matei. Faces of Modernity. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977. Collins Goodyear, Anne. “From Technophilia to Technophobia: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Reception of ‘Art and Technology.’” Leonardo, 41, no. 2 (2008): 169–173. Comstock, Gordon. “Jennifer in Paradise: The Story of the First Photoshopped Image.” The Guardian, June 13, 2014. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/

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photography-­b log/2014/jun/13/photoshop-­f irst-­i mage-­j ennifer-­ in-­paradise-­photography-­artefact-­knoll-­dullaart. Cornell, Lauren, and Ed Halter, eds. Mass Effect. Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012. Crawford, Kate, and Trevor Paglen. “Excavating AI. The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets.” September 19, 2019. https://excavating.ai. Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 571–584. https://doi.org/10.2307/2022937. Davis, Ben. “Colborn Bell, Founder of the First Museum of Crypto Art, Isn’t Worried About Wooing the Traditional Art World: A Q&A.” Artnet News, December 17, 2021. https://news.artnet.com/market/interview-­colborn-­bell­museum-­of-­crypto-­art-­2049578. Dorfles, Gillo. Le oscillazioni del gusto. L’arte d’oggi tra tecnocrazia e consumismo. Torino: Einaudi, 1970. Dullaart, Constant. “A Letter to Jennifer Knoll.” Rhizome, September 5, 2013. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/05/letter-­jennifer-­knoll/. Eco, Umberto. Apocalittici e integrati. Comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa. Milano: Bompiani, 1977 [1964]. Formaggio, Dino. L’arte. Milano: Isedi, 1973. Gerard, David. “NFTs: Crypto Grifters Try to Scam Artists, Again.” Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, March 11, 2021. http://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/03/11/nfts-­crypto-­grifters-­try-­to-­scam-­artists-­again/. Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” In Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture. Critical Essays, 3–33. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989 [1961]. Halter, Ed. “After the Amateur: Notes.” Rhizome, April 29, 2009. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/apr/29/after-­the-­amateur-­notes/. Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Kay, Alan, and Adele Goldberg. “Personal Dynamic Media.” Computer 10(3) (March 1977): 31–41. Lialina, Olia, and Dragan Espenschied, eds. Digital Folklore. Stuttgart: merz & solitude, 2009. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2001. McHugh, Gene. Post Internet. Brescia: Link Editions, 2011. Moss, Ceci. Expanded Internet Art. Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu. New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. O’Leary, Martin. “The Case Against Crypto.” Watershed, December 3, 2021. www.watershed.co.uk/studio/news/2021/12/03/case-­against-­crypto.

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Quaranta, Domenico, ed. Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age. Brescia: Link Editions, 2011. Quaranta, Domenico. “My Life Without Technoviking: An Interview with Matthias Fritsch.” Rhizome, December 5, 2013. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/dec/05/interview-­matthias-­fritsch/. Quaranta, Domenico. “Response. Contemporary Art and Online Popular Culture.” Artpulse, Issue 20 (December 2014): 34–37. Quaranta, Domenico. “Situating Post Internet.” In Renewable Futures. Art, Science and Society in the Post-Media Age, edited by Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, Armin Medosch, 81–92. Riga: RIXC Center for New Media Culture, 2017. Quaranta, Domenico. Surfing with Satoshi. Art, Blockchain and NFTs. Milano: Postmedia Books—Ljubljana: Aksioma, 2022. Quaranta, Domenico. “Between Hype Cycles and the Present Shock.” Docs #06, NERO Editions, Rome 2020. www.neroeditions.com/docs/between-­hype­cycles-­and-­the-­present-­shock/. Rafman, Jon. “Conversation with Nicholas O’Brien, Kool-Aid Man in Second Life.” 2009. Video, 18:01, https://vimeo.com/11689565. Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. New York: Pluto Press, 2004. Troemel, Brad. “The Accidental Audience.” The New Inquiry, March 14, 2013. https://thenewinquiry.com/the-­accidental-­audience/. Ward, Adrian and Geoff Cox. “How I Drew One of My Pictures: * or, The Authorship of Generative Art.” 1999. Paper presented at the Generative Art international conference, Politecnico di Milano. www.generativeart.com/on/ cic/99/0399.htm.

Kitsch, Beauty and Artistic Practice Jozef Kovalčik and Michaela Hučko Pašteková

Current western artistic practice is situated in a very peculiar position within contemporary culture. The concept of high culture seems to be refused as an old-fashioned and elitist fantasy, even if arts scenes benefit from the highbrow institutional background. On the other hand, most contemporary artists do not have the slightest interest or ambition to occupy the space of popular culture, although, unlike in the past, they no longer consider it as schematic, non-imaginative, or simply commercial. However, if someone’s work is trying to approach the zone of low culture or even kitsch,1 critics sharpen their attention whether it is just irony and ridicule, or a serious “higher” intention. Kitsch itself is still worthless, lacks any artistic value, and even more, within the framework of artistic practice, it is also unacceptable from a moral point of view.2 As to popular J. Kovalčik Department of Aesthetics, Comenius University in Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia e-mail: [email protected] M. Hučko Pašteková (*) Slovak Association for Aesthetics, Bratislava, Slovakia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_9

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culture, that is a completely different situation; kitsch cannot be considered intolerable, as it is often not only suitable but also sometimes expected due to creative activity. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, when the idea of kitsch began to emerge, beauty also became an increasingly important issue, which suffered a similar fate as kitsch. It gradually ceased to be a welcome ambition and goal of each artistic or creative endeavor. Even if not truly accepted, it became something that cannot be completely rejected in art. For aesthetic and political reasons, beauty was moved to the edge by artists, at least on a proclamatory level, and has ceased to be an articulated topic. In the context of artistic practice, serious critics wouldn’t describe an artwork as nice, pleasant, or even exciting anymore. Such attributes and reactions have primarily been reserved for an area of popular culture. From there, beauty, like kitsch, was not removed. On the contrary, it gained and strengthened a relatively convincing position.3 Even producers in popular culture with more artistic ambitions made beauty the epicenter of their efforts, as they wanted to avoid being labeled as “kitschy.” In the last two centuries, beauty and kitsch have had a very similar fate, although they are undoubtedly very different categories, which are coincidentally found side by side. In the context of popular culture, some works of art are labeled as balancing between beauty and kitsch. Yet it is usually possible to identify quite clearly under which category individual artifacts can be subsumed. On the contrary, in artistic practice, they are analyzed separately, as if they have nothing in common and are completely different topics. In this study, we point out that the paths of rejecting beauty and kitsch show many similarities, which puts them in proximity in relation to so-called high art. First, we will present Greenberg’s uncompromising rejection of kitsch in artistic practice, which he set aside exclusively for the “innocent” and valuable avant-­ garde. In the next part, the focus of analysis is a position of beauty in art, where it is often directly or indirectly rejected as something unwelcome and often associated with kitsch. We point out that beauty is understood as a door through which one can enter a space controlled by kitsch. We introduce some specific examples from artistic practice in the last part where we point out that the fear of beauty is a symptom of much greater concern, fear of popular culture and kitsch.

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1 Avant-Garde and Kitsch Clement Greenberg presented a comprehensive idea of the role kitsch should play in relation to art production in his famous text Avant-Garde and Kitsch.4 As the title suggests, he divided culture into two antagonistic and irreconcilable camps. He pronounced the avant-garde as a realm of true artistic values, which must strive for isolation from society to maintain its “purity.” It is the opposite of dominant culture within a (western) social context which is to be controlled by the masses (or more precisely, by their taste), whose desires, ideas, and expectations are necessarily non-­ imaginative and simple. Moreover, within capitalism, it obeys the rules of the market. Greenberg is aware that the avant-garde must find some means of subsistence. For this reason, he assumes that the only solution relies on the resources of the elite and the “ruling class,” which have enough money and good taste. For it is the latter that the avant-garde belongs. No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. In the case of avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of the society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold.5

Thanks to the connection to financial means, the avant-garde can live peacefully in capitalism without remorse for adapting to the market, at least not directly. Greenberg claims that the avant-garde is no longer supposed to rely on a creative compromise in such conditions that artists had been forced for centuries from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to Rembrandt. This new emerging realm is dedicated to avant-garde for free creation of what is valuable, complex, and sufficiently sophisticated without having to consider the incomprehensible masses and their demand. In other words, because artists have ceased to be an integral part of society, their works do not have to be understandable, and their attractiveness does not force them to appeal to an uneducated or simple audience. As a result, the avant-garde should reject practically everything, the whole past, traditional practices, and the pursuit of the best possible

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imitation. Beauty also becomes unwelcome; it is rejected, or at least, pushed aside as irrelevant. To sum up, Greenberg presented a purification of the avant-garde in two steps. First, he eliminates capitalism by keeping the avant-garde in a safe place beyond the reach of the market. This makes it independent of the masses, although, paradoxically, Greenberg ties avant-garde very firmly to the elites, whose demands and ideas are not questioned.6 In the second step of Greenberg’s purification, the avant-garde seeks to relieve the burden of its past, while being determined by its own program, which is reduced to formal problems. “Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.”7 The avant-garde is thus synonymous with art for art’s sake, closed and isolated without leaving its universe, and thus without interfering with social reality, or bringing content capable of responding to everyday life. Greenberg is convinced that the avant-garde, which is to be carefully purified of any potential contamination,8 should be the only real art, with the demise of which the culture as a whole would end. The proof is the existence of the greatest threat to the avant-garde, its inverse opposite— kitsch, which is “popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc. etc.”9 All these cultural products meet the needs of the audience and their imagination, while being open to its aesthetic preferences. The fact that kitsch does not separate from society and has no ambition to isolate itself in the autonomous world, but on the contrary, would like to be an integral part of it, is not the biggest problem. It’s the direct focus on the profit. “Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.”10 Therefore, any work of art that has been created in response to audience preferences should be perceived as worthless. Kitsch is simply a toxic product of capitalism. In the case of kitsch, Greenberg chooses the same strategy as in the description of the position of the avant-garde, although he proceeds inversely. Just as he purifies the avant-garde in two steps, he points out the double contamination of kitsch. Apart from toxic commerciality which makes kitsch unacceptable in the first place, it should also be

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blamed for the lack of any innovation. The main source of its so-called creativity is the artworks of the past which are constantly stolen by kitsch. And this relationship to the history of art brings it closer to academism and which Greenberg also finds highly problematic. He introduces Ilya Repin as an example of “low” artistic value because academism ends up at the kitsch level. “‘front’ for kitsch.”11 The reason for this conclusion is that the avant-garde can create a sophisticated work that depicts the “cause“ in contrast to kitsch or academicism, which brings a comprehensible work that seeks to capture a simple “effect”. In other words, for Greenberg, sophistication, or better, complexity is synonymous with quality and artistic value; intelligibility is the exact opposite. If an artwork is to have artistic value, it cannot be comprehensible and accessible to a wider audience12 or come up with artistically valuable content with the help of tradition. The avant-garde should therefore negate its past and ridicule the history of art, get rid of the “slave” tradition of subordinating demand and create de novo almost anything. However, as Boris Groys states, denying the art of the past is not the biggest difficulty for the avant-garde, because kitsch has become that problem. The conflict between different historical formations is replaced here by a class conflict within a single historical formation: capitalist modernity. The true achievement of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” is not Greenberg’s theory of the avant-garde but his discovery of kitsch as a specific artistic formation.13

The avant-garde has defined a boundary that a true artist cannot cross, as behind this strict line spreads the area dominated by a low taste, market rules and the creation of what is mostly understandable. Seen from the opposite side, kitsch has locked the avant-garde into a golden cage and the fear of kitsch contamination still somehow determines artistic practice. But at the same time, this artistic “kitschy” formation, which is mostly the art of the oppressed classes, did not stop attracting artists and provoked many interesting avant-garde reactions. Groys goes even further when he claims, “that without this Greenbergian discovery of kitsch as a specific aesthetic and artistic domain, pop art, conceptual art, and different forms of institutional critique would be impossible (…) In fact,

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Greenberg redefined kitsch as the only true aesthetic manifestation of our modernity—the true heir of traditional art.”14 The fact that kitsch has inherited traditional art also has fundamental implications for the avant-garde’s relationship to the concept of beauty and artistic production, where beauty plays a crucial role as a goal and an ambition for artistic endeavor. If Greenberg considers the avant-garde antagonistic to kitsch, he is distancing himself from the artistic tradition driven by the effort to create works of art as “beautiful” objects. It means that denying kitsch would also reject the traditions of beauty. In this sense, is the concept of beauty not always present, albeit unthematized, in the dispute between kitsch and avant-garde? Could beauty be a simple substitute for kitsch in this discourse? Or perhaps beauty could be explored as a category that should be inherent in avant-garde practice and popular culture? Could beauty be considered the same goal of both practices, which is only achieved by different means?

2 Beauty Forgotten or Dethroned? In modernist aesthetics, it seems, beauty was treated almost exclusively as a category related to older art forms or only as a concept long after its expiration. Arthur Danto, in The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art,15 claims that beauty as a topic, but also the ambition of artistic endeavor, was practically invisible. In reaction to art projects and initiatives claiming a great return of beauty in art, he asserts that “(…) beauty had almost entirely disappeared from aesthetic reality in the twentieth century, as if attractiveness was somehow a stigma, with its crass commercial implications.”16 On the other hand, he argues that beauty has been strongly present every day, mostly in difficult or borderline moments of life. The need for beauty is most intense, confirming its specific position in human life. Beauty is but one of an immense range of aesthetic qualities, and philosophical aesthetics has been paralyzed by focusing as narrowly on beauty as it has. But beauty is the only one of the aesthetic qualities that is also a

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value, like truth and goodness. It is not simply among the values we live by, but one of the values that define what a fully human life means.17

And perhaps for this reason, it is only a matter of time before beauty will be again a real topic of aesthetics, and art will quit ignoring the challenges of everyday life. At the same time, according to Danto, beauty has not disappeared from the whole artistic production, as it has never been a universal ambition of all creative approaches in art. “It is not and never was the destiny of all art ultimately to be seen as beautiful.”18 Therefore, for some artists, it was not a loss, as it was not the goal of their efforts. On a more general level, the history of art cannot be understood as a history of the universal ambition to create beautiful objects, as the concept of beauty has often been applied more to non-art phenomena (e.g., to nature).19 In this context, it would be inappropriate to expect the massive comeback of beauty in all artistic initiatives and immediately become the epicenter of interest for all artists emancipating from modernist desires to beauty-untouched artifacts. To understand the return of artistic beauty, it is useful to describe when it was rejected and if at all. Before the emergence of the avant-­ garde, beauty was not ubiquitous in the arts and was associated with creating artworks. But it was also not considered a major problem for artistic practice. Danto points out that only the avant-garde, whose representatives made a lot of effort to ensure that the beauty of art completely disappeared, played a crucial role in this process. “(P)hilosophers almost certainly would continue to teach that the connection between art and beauty is conceptually tight. It took the energy of artistic avant-garde to open a rift between art and beauty that would previously have been unthinkable (…)”20 The avant-garde radically rejected beauty in all respects (at least, Danto is convinced about that), and it became unacceptable for political, artistic, and aesthetic reasons. Beauty should represent everything avant-garde fought against in terms of artistic ambitions and values, but also as a symbol of petty-bourgeois taste. And Greenberg should also add academism and traditional art practices with which he expels beauty in the traditional sense21 while identifying it with kitsch. Even if beauty in some form somehow vanished from art practice, it can hardly be concluded that the avant-garde has completely displaced

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beauty and erased it entirely from art. Wolfgang Welsch claims that avant-garde refused it only in its certain form as an “established, bourgeois, stale ideal.”22 The goal was establishing or enforcing different, better, more valuable, and new beauty. According to Welsch, the desire for beauty has not disappeared. It has only taken the less immediate form. Barnett Newman and Dubuffet deliberately rejected beauty, while Welsch argues they created beautiful works differently than in the traditional sense of the word. Only the “standard” or “traditional” beauty had been condemned, not the higher beauty, which was desired. Danto agrees that some artistic initiatives could be described as beautiful in this “higher” sense. For example, the impressionists, compared to academic artists, were perceived as producers of clearly ugly works, far from what was considered beautiful at the time. Several decades later, the reception of their artworks has dramatically changed. From today’s perspective, probably nobody would question the fact that impressionistic works of art are beautiful (some would even call them kitsch). However, Danto points out that this could not be stated about the art projects of Dadaists, which should hardly be described as beautiful these days. “I see Dada, by contrast, as the paradigm of what I am terming The Intractable Avant-Garde, the products of which are misperceived if perceived as beautiful. That is not its point or ambition.”23 Perhaps, it would be difficult to question the contribution of the avant-­ garde radical critique of the art world and the category of beauty, which has never ceased to be part of artistic practice despite their efforts. On the other hand, it seems that circumstances and arguments for rejecting beauty often have nothing to do with criticism of social conditions, the market, or capitalism but rather have the nature of a hidden or open defense of elitism and snobbery. One could also question whether beauty has ceased to be treated as something relevant because of its strong association with kitsch and popular culture, the opposite of alleged real art. After all, who is actively working with this category in the art world except for non-professional artists? Or it could be said that the category of beauty has been forgotten because it is unacceptable to admit that beauty is an ambition and goal of one’s artistic endeavor. Meanwhile, Welsch does not consider whether the idea of ​​“higher beauty” can be applied to popular works that attract the

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attention of a wide audience. In other words, beauty (regardless of its immediacy, comprehensibility, or sophistication, which should be associated with mass taste) should be cursed for political rather than aesthetic reasons. Welsch considers the recent increased interest in beauty, which cannot be described as something “authentically” from within the artistic practice, to be very questionable. He sees it more as external pressure, something very artificial in art. “It is the aestheticization of the everyday world that is at the basis of this interest.”24 The trend of beautification and aestheticization, which permeates other areas of life, should, therefore, also interfere with an artistic practice where beauty should be permeated to make it more “useful for stimulating attention and increasing the number of the public.”25 So beauty should penetrate more into the art world to reach more people. Welsch finds this “popular” approach unacceptable, claiming that competing with areas that systematically work with beauty and achieve success (advertising, media, fashion design, etc.) would be pointless. He finds it unnecessary for art to go in the same direction while acknowledging that aestheticization could provoke something and bring some inspiring content. Welsch considers aestheticization more important in principle and sees the place of art more in the “realm of alternity.”26 In other words, the fact that everything must be beautified today does not mean that art also must follow this trend. None has prescribed such a duty to art which should be rather an “alternity” to the tendency to create beautiful things and to follow its independent way. The “rift” between art and beauty, which avant-garde (at least, part of it) discovered and continued to create, has an important place in contemporary artistic practice. Thanks to it, many new artistic areas have opened hitherto unimaginable approaches, themes, and ways of thinking in arts. After all, in the postwar period, it would be very difficult to imagine any artistic field without avant-garde approaches that reject and often ridicule efforts to create artifacts dominated by beauty. Welsch’s recommendation makes sense in such art projects aimed to challenge traditional artistic practices, including avant-garde ones (although they rarely attack the very essence of the avant-garde).

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A constant effort to achieve “alternity” is an impetus for the diversification (but sometimes also stagnation) of such artistic approaches. The negation of the past, and therefore of beauty, is often an essential part of them. Challenging bigoted, petty, bourgeois, racist, and chauvinist attitudes is often impossible without some uncompromising radicalism, which does not consider bourgeois expectations, and is considered “ordinary” outrage. For example, uncompromising and violent art projects of Vienna actionists destroyed the image of a “beautiful” fascist-infested Austrian society but also strongly attacked the art production that represented it. In this case, it would be difficult to imagine beauty traditionally as a regulatory idea of the artistic practice.27 On the other hand, it would be absurd to expect contemporary artists who grew up with computer games not to work with this source at all and look for some other, more “authentic” inspiration. The beauty that comes from the field of digital games fundamentally transforms the current artistic practice; therefore, it cannot be ignored as an unwelcome guest. According to John Roberts, the negation (another key avant-garde word) of previous art production, which should accompany the effort to create something “new,” should also be crucial for any art project. Acceding to the conditions of existing art would mean that such an artifact falls into heteronomy and becomes academic. “In this way, there can be no renewal of art without art resisting, reworking, dissolving what has become tradition, and duly, therefore what has become hereronomous.”28 Thus, real art rejects tradition and everything it represents, including beauty, not to mention popular culture. But unlike a nihilistic attitude based on the destruction of the past and obsession with “formal ‘advance’ or stylistic supersession in art,” Roberts defends negation in another sense. “Rather, the ‘new’ here is the restless, ever vigilant positioning of art’s critical relationship to its own traditions of intellectual and cultural formations and administrations.”29 Thus, one could identify similar expectations from artistic production as in Welsch’s, who does not advocate an obsession with the “new” but the “alternity.” Both, therefore, defend the idea of art as a closed space, where only acceptable approaches are based on the denial of the past, particularly popular culture. Any other “alternatives,” including those working with beauty, are, in principle, intolerable. There is a risk that such work could

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get in the way of heteronomy, but it could also fall into the context of traditional or academic approaches. In the worst case, it could reach the level of advertising, design, or even kitsch. These concerns about defilement with traditional or even mass art are not far from Greenberg’s argument, although they seem less radical. After all, only avant-garde practices based on negation, the search for the new and the alternative, are, in principle, considered as real art, which in principle rejects beauty as a relevant ambition in artistic production. On the other hand, it seems completely absurd to require art practice to return to the conditions before creating a “rift” between art and beauty. It is difficult to imagine that artists would return only to traditional methods and media or the ambition to create objects that could be described as beautiful while forgetting everything avant-garde came with. Undoubtedly, avant-garde approaches have become an integral part of the art world.30 Thus, as it would be a mistake to exclude beauty and its tradition, technologies, media, and ambitions from artistic practice, it would also be disproportionately reductive to claim that only a return to times before the avant-garde is what has a place in art production. Promoting one or the other approach would also mean denying a network of artistic institutions that tend to preserve and present traditional and avant-garde art. For example, most art academies teach traditional and avant-garde practices, and the ambition to negate the past and create beautiful artifacts is also something inherent, though unarticulated, to these institutions throughout the postwar period. To define the hierarchy in these practices could be compared to the ambition to determine in advance whether the truth or critique of social conditions can be better expressed by an avant-garde approach or by the traditional one. Artistic practices based on the effort to create a “new” or “alternative,” but also those based on traditional practices, cannot be perceived as something universal that would define the whole artistic practice. However, it should also be emphasized that the antagonism between the avant-garde and the traditional or between the avant-garde and the kitsch defined by Greenberg leads us to perceive the art world through this prism and to overlook its diversity, which is overlooked by Welsch, Roberts and, to some extent, Danto as well. Many contemporary art projects do not follow the path of tradition or the avant-garde, and some

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have the ambition to create beautiful artwork, in addition to a larger audience and often offer radically critical content.

3 Artistic Practice and Fear of Kitsch After the Second World War, art increasingly opened up to new topics and approaches, abandoning the traditional media and leaving established hierarchies in artistic practice and its reflection. The boundaries of art have moved much closer to everyday life, and previously unacceptable and unimaginable methods became dominant quite fast. Pop art recognized “low” themes and mass icons as worthy of artistic interest. It incorporated them into producing works of art, giving it a relatively stable position in many art scenes. But it did not end with openness to popular culture and the banality of everyday life. Artworld tried to convince the audience about its willingness to accept any “creative” approach absorbing any themes and artistic practices. It was only a matter of time before attention would focus on the main enemy, which defined the relational identity of “real” art. Kitsch massively entered the art scenes in the 1980s. Monumental shiny statues of Jeff Koons or photographs of the couple Pierre and Gilles appear like kitsch, not just thematizing it. Greenberg’s fantasies did not come true and turned to the opposite. In this context, one could hardly imagine that works of art considered beautiful should be problematic in the art world. If kitsch is accepted as a legitimate artifact, then any work of art dominated by beauty must have the same label. These optimistic assumptions undoubtedly lead to the conclusion that the difference between high and popular culture makes no sense anymore. They should be considered as non-functional concepts in opposition to artistic practice. However, the works of Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Pierre and Gilles have never left the realm of high art, regardless of their visual similarities with artifacts from popular culture. All of them produce kitsch-like works, but certainly not to treat them as kitsch. They present their pieces as sophisticated, critical, or ironic reactions to a consumer society that can only be identified and deciphered by a sufficiently

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knowledgeable eye and an art-trained audience. The intentions and descriptions of authors or audiences could not be considered sufficient to be labeled as artistic instead of kitschy. As Danto would claim, it is necessary to be recognized as a work of art by the art world. Once this has happened, the perspective for interpretations of these pieces is quite fixed. To verify this claim, it is sufficient to imagine the opposite. If the author’s artifacts are presented in the context of popular culture, it would be very difficult to interpret them differently than just plain kitsch. Whether an “effect” or a “cause” are seen in a given work does not depend on the properties of the given artifact but rather on the context in which the artwork is presented and from the perspective from which it is interpreted. If one approaches the piece only as clear straight kitsch, the artifact represents a flat and schematic popular culture. Conversely, if the same piece is seen as ironic, in which depth and sophistication are revealed only to a small group of “initiates,” then the artwork is undoubtedly part of a high culture. Thus, it seems the boundaries between high and popular culture have not disappeared, nor has the practice of expectations, stereotypes, and patterns of thinking. This is not only accurate for kitsch and the avant-garde but also for the beauty that has been synonymous with kitsch for too long to be accepted in a high culture now. In the first part, it was suggested that Greenberg’s argumentation about the avant-garde and kitsch could easily be perceived as a polemic about the avant-garde and beauty. Nowadays, the decision to refuse beauty in art practice is not a revolt or a conceptual gesture, as was the case, for example, in the era of Dadaism. Many artists dismiss to thematize beauty because they still somehow associate it with kitsch, though they do not assert it explicitly or directly. Beauty tends to be described similarly as kitsch; it is supposed to be easy, evoking primarily emotional reactions, delivering a certain kind of pleasure, and being, at the same time, breath-­ taking and superficial. These characteristics copy the definitions of kitsch in Greenberg’s, Harries’s, or Tomáš Kulka’s theories31 completely as something monologist without any depth, complexity, or external references and relations. Merging or substituting beauty with kitsch probably occurs when beauty becomes the main goal of artistic practice without any ambition to convey critical content. In this case, the stereotypical connection

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between beauty and kitsch could be so strong that it could be very difficult to perceive an artifact’s beauty rather than its pure effect. For example, some critics find controversial and monumental stunning prints of photographer Andreas Gursky, well-established in the art world. His artworks are sold at auctions for millions of dollars,32 beautiful and kitschy at the same time. Gursky’s works could be described as spectacular due to their dimensions (some photographs exceed a length of five meters) and the strong visual expressiveness achieved with his unique methods and digital post-­ production. He photographs mostly primarily anesthetic places, but photographing them from a crane or even a helicopter allows him to turn a construction site, Formula 1 pits, production hall, library, supermarkets, stock exchange, or commercial warehouses into a tangle of abstract lines, points, expressive strokes, and dense colored areas. Gursky thematically ranges from a critique of capitalism, circulation of finance, organization of leisure, commodification, the repetitiveness of certain social patterns, aesthetics of superficiality, production of goods, and emptiness of media images to the ignorance of the individual in society. He intentionally contaminates photographs with the aesthetics of mass media, commercial images, and visual attractiveness and beauty. His curator, Peter Galassi, claims that “(…) no amount of pondering and planning is sufficient unless it leads him to an image that persuades the eye.”33 Beauty is crucial for Gursky because it helps critically reflect capitalism by its own means. On the other hand, Gursky is not focused on contemporary media culture and its tools, but he systematically works with references to traditional artistic approaches. For example, his New York Stock Exchange (1991) photograph evokes action when viewed from a distance; however, some theorists recognize here the magnificence of historical paintings by Delacroix or David. If one gets closer to the color structures, it is possible to recognize workers and bankers in multicolored clothes, papers and documents scattered on tables and floors, and hundreds of computer screens. Thus, Gursky works with traditional effects. He uses “old” tricks and illusions and transposes them to the current context. Financial markets appear as the same abstraction for most of the population as an afterlife in the baroque. Gursky is aware of this abstractness, placing the

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human figure in the anonymity of the ornament of the masses34 and revealing to the viewer a complete picture that could not be perceived. Jörg Colberg accuses Gursky of supporting and promoting neoliberal capitalism because his photographs are so overwhelming that they should paralyze the viewer without allowing them to go below the surface. “Instead of thinking about resistance, a viewer is ultimately awed by the spectacle presented in front of her or him.”35 Does Gursky produce the same types of commodities he criticizes? Colberg blames him for transforming a photograph of Madonna’s concert (which took place on September 13, 2001, and unintentionally became an honor of the victims of 9/11) into a large-scale commercial spectacle using digital tools. According to Colberg, it was more of a personal, intimate event in the context of occurrences. But can Madonna’s public concert be like this? Given the emotional weight of the historical import of the moment depicted, Gursky draws us to an oxymoronic reality that the purported emotional intimacy of the post–9/11 mourning experience became experienced and transmitted through the anonymity of the commercialized mass spectacle. Madonna I is more a portrait of our obsessive image culture and the desensitization and equalization of experience it results in rather than one of the public events it purports to depict.36

As mentioned, Greenberg refuses to allow the artwork to have artistic value and, at the same time to be accessible, comprehensible, and contaminated by the interests of the masses. From this perspective, photography could be labeled as simple and explicit kitsch. But this is what Gursky’s oeuvre is: on the one hand, artistically valuable, but on the other hand, understandable and widely accepted and admired. It could be considered an avant-garde piece that also appears beautiful. For this reason, Colberg, among others, finds this approach problematic, accusing Gursky of a calculated ambition to produce a pompous effect based on the references to established aesthetic canons and empty excitement without asking serious questions. His beautiful, attractive, tempting images disturb him—the same as today’s mainly commercial media representations. The argumentation refusing Gursky’s approach is based on the modernist idea of overemphasizing a rift between art and beauty. On the other

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hand, supporters of Gursky paradoxically defend him using the same modernist stereotypes and assumptions. They adopt “avant-garde” vocabulary and almost completely avoid calling his photographs beautiful or visually attractive. So, they try to entirely refuse the notion of beauty, perceiving it as contaminated with kitsch or something inappropriate in art practice. As Welsch claims, beauty should remain reserved for our everydayness or for other, more commercial areas in which it should be firmly recognized and convincing. And Gursky’s approach is to be described and contemplated by attributes such as sublime, spectacular, extraordinary, or visually powerful. Thus, beauty is supposed to sublimate into different concepts, especially because of the fear of being identified as kitsch, even though its terminological avatars ultimately point to the same.

4 Conclusion Indeed, the controversies suggest that beauty could be perceived as an ambition inherent to kitsch and avant-garde production. However, beauty is often disqualified or deliberately ignored by artistic discourse. The problem does not lie in the concept but rather in the fact that beauty is stereotypically situated close to kitsch or is even used as its synonym. Danto points out that beauty is understood as a banal, sometimes even embarrassing, and trivializing category. “There is the widespread sense that in some way beauty trivialized that which possesses it.”37 So, beauty has a sealed destiny and can slowly really be rehabilitated. But, perhaps the artistic practice itself could change this approach putting the relationship between avant-garde and kitsch/beauty ahead of new challenges. Groys claims they need to quit being perceived as two specific art forms, but rather they need to be seen as two attitudes toward art. “Our perception of art is permanently shifting between the avant-garde attitude and the kitsch attitude.”38 From the perspective of the first, we admire what and how art can capture, edit and process art today. From the perspective of the second, we let ourselves be absorbed and impressed by artistic effects.

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According to Groys, the shift in the understanding of avant-garde and kitsch antagonism is mainly the consequence of the transition from the era of mass consumption of art to its mass production. Today, we all have both experiences, and the ambiguity is reflected in our attitude to art. Each can be a producer of avant-garde practices but only resting and relaxing consumers and recipients. Being able to “switch” between the two attitudes, that one can understand problems from multiple perspectives, opens a space for everybody to have a wider range of aesthetic experience, but also sensitivity to the problems and suffering of others, which resulted in a fundamental convergence of the aesthetic field and society. This resolutely changes the whole nature of the artistic practice since “to be an artist has ceased to be an exclusive fate,”39 and everyone can find themselves on one side or the other. As a result, the artists are forced to leave their close world of art and enter areas where they are only one of many visitors or participants. They can also open up to the audience enough to take an active part in creating the works of art that are their collective result. Because of that, they lose control over their works and their final form, and thus also whether the result is an avant-garde, kitsch, or beautiful work.

Notes 1. We do not consider popular culture and kitsch to be synonymous, but in some cases, they tend to be blurred, especially in the relational definition of the identity of high culture, when kitsch, mass, low and popular culture are considered the same. 2. See, Karsten Harries, Meaning of Modern Art, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 74–83. 3. See, Wolfgang Welsch, “The Return of Beauty?” Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, Vol. 33, No. 1, (2013): 93–100. 4. Greenberg Clement, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 3–21. 5. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 8. 6. According to Boris Groys, Greenberg’s biggest concern throughout the text is who will be a consumer of avant-garde art, i. e. “how to secure

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socioeconomic basis of avant-garde art”, see Boris Groys, In the Flow (London, New York: Verso, 2016), 103. 7. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 6. 8. Andreas Huyssen points out that the concern for purity was one of the main features of modernism. “Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.” See, Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1986), vii. 9. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 6. 10. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 10. 11. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 11. 12. Carroll Noël, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 34, 30–48. 13. Groys, In the Flow, 106. 14. Groys, In the Flow, 107. 15. Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2003). 16. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, 7. 17. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, 15. 18. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, 36. 19. See Wladislaw Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1980), 149. 20. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, 29–30. 21. Alexander Nehamas points out that for Greenberg the notion of beauty as such was not problematic at all. He tries to define it in modernist fashion and in a completely different way than in popular culture. “But what he understands by it was something that did not even belong to art as a whole: it was the exclusive feature of high art.” Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness. The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 33. 22. Welsch, “The Return of Beauty?”, 94. 23. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, 49. 24. Welsch, “The Return of Beauty?” 97. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Nevertheless, Hermann Nitsch, a leading figure in Vienna actionism, says that he is striving to achieve a certain form of beauty. See, Eva

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Badura Triska, Hubert Klocker, Vienna actionism (Wien: Mumok, 2012), 31–42. 28. John Roberts, Revolutionary Times and the Avant-Garde (London New York: Verso 2015), 52. 29. Roberts, Revolutionary Times and the Avant-Garde, 52. 30. See, Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 55–82. 31. Tomáš Kulka, Umění a kýč. (Praha: Torst, 2000), 62–112. 32. His photograph Rhein II. (1999) was sold for over $ 4.3 million in 2011. 33. Peter Galassi, Andreas Gursky (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 31. 34. “The current site of capitalist thinking is marked by abstractness,” writes Siegfried Krackauer. See, Siegfried Krackauer, The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essay (London, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 81. 35. Jörg Colberg, Photography’s Neoliberal Realism (London: MACK, 2020), 28. 36. Sotheby’s New York, Contemporary Art Evening Auction. New York, 16 November 2017 (auction catalog, New York: Sotheby’s, 2017), accessed November 25, 2021, https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2017/contemporary-­art-­evening-­auction-­n09713/lot.69.html. 37. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 27. 38. Groys, In the Flow, 113. 39. Groys, In the Flow, 112.

Bibliography Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Carroll, Noël. A philosophy of mass art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Colberg, Jörg. Photography’s neoliberal realism. London: MACK, 2020. Danto, Arthur C. The abuse of beauty: Aesthetics and the concept of art. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2003. Galassi, Peter. Andreas Gursky. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001. Greenberg, Clement. Art and culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. Groys, Boris. In the flow. London, New York: Verso, 2016. Harries, Karsten. Meaning of modern art. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

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Huyssen, Andreas. After the great divide: Modernism, mass culture, postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1986. Krackauer, Siegfried. The mass ornament. Weimar essay. London, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Kulka, Tomáš. Umění a kýč. Praha: Torst, 2000. Nehamas, Alexander. Only a promise of happiness. The place of beauty in a world of art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Roberts, John. Revolutionary times and the Avant-Garde. London and New York: Verso 2015. Sotheby’s New  York. “Contemporary Art Evening Auction. Auction catalog.” Accessed November 25, 2021. https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2017/contemporary-­art-­evening-­auction-­n09713/lot.69.html. Tatarkiewicz, Wladislaw. A history of six ideas. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff; Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1980. Triska, Eva Badura and Hubert Klocker. Vienna actionism. Wien: Mumok, 2012. Welsch, Wolfgang. “The return of beauty?” Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 33, no. 1, (2013): 93–100.

Biokitsch in Art: And the Survival of the Prettiest Laura Beloff

In the field of the visual arts and humanities, artists working with biological and biotech arts are at the forefront of understanding with a wide perspective the potentialities and the societal implications of science and technology developments. Artistic projects emerging from biological and biotech arts are often presented with aesthetics adopted from laboratories and scientific experiments; they incorporate petri dishes, glassware, hardware components, and clinical machine parts. Among the numerous artworks with these kinds of typical laboratory aesthetics are also examples that stand out with their different aesthetics, which, when looked at from a traditional high-art perspective, could be seen in the light of the definition of kitsch. Kitsch is commonly claimed to attest to “poor taste,” excessive cuteness, or sentimentality. However, when these artworks are investigated through a wider societal perspective, the works seem to have additional layers which affect, challenge, and play with kitsch aspects.

L. Beloff (*) Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_10

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1 Introduction To consider something that is living, biological, and created by natural forces to be kitsch seems unfit at first sight. It seems rather obvious that the idea and aesthetics of kitsch, and the natural environment, including biological organisms, are opposites. In his article “Kitsch Happens. On the Kitsch Experience of Nature (Hommage à Tomás Kulka)” Max Ryynänen writes about his experience of looking at a sunset in a natural landscape with colleagues: “[…]‘Kitsch happens,’ I said. My peers were not convinced. One of them said nature cannot be kitsch. I think he was right, but I think that his stance was about another issue, i.e. the fact that to be experienced as kitsch, an object needs to be manmade” (Ryynänen 2019, 11). Ryynänen continues by referring to Tomás Kulka’s book, Kitsch and Art, in which Kulka points out that nature cannot be kitsch, but its representations can be (Kulka 2010, 90). One example is taxidermy dioramas, commonly not considered kitsch unambiguously located between the idea of nature, its ideological representation, and the use of “real” animals (e.g., Aloi 2018, 103–116). When investigating the way natural elements, such as organisms, taxidermy artifacts, and ornamentation, have been used in our (visual) culture, one wonders how this past use of cultural and aesthetical heritage will direct the design trajectory for the visuality imposed upon organisms that are in the future, and already today, manipulated and constructed with biotechnology. There is an interesting example from the past in which the visuality of a non-human organism was manipulated, driven by aesthetic reasons. The story, claimed to be only a myth, concerns our familiar orange carrot. Domesticated carrots were originally purple and yellow; the orange variety started appearing in sixteenth-century historical records. But it has also been claimed that we mainly know the orange carrot today because “in the seventeenth century, Dutch growers cultivated orange carrots as a tribute to William of Orange—who led the struggle for Dutch independence—and the color stuck. A thousand years of yellow, white, and purple carrot history was wiped out in a generation” (Khimm 2011).

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This article will problematize and add to this notion about kitsch being human-made by investigating artifacts primarily from the field of bioart, which often deals with living organisms, and speculating on the future aesthetics of our surrounding natural environment. In the past, we have cultivated and bred organisms using traditional methods and based on our desires, such as taste, size, easiness to harvest, and profit, among others, but also based on their aesthetics. According to George Gessert, humans have domesticated and shaped organisms largely based on aesthetics. Gessert’s examples include dogs, various pets, and specifically plants categorized as economic and ornamental plants. The latter category relates to Gessert’s artistic practice with plant breeding (Gessert 2010, 11). This article began with the notion of looking at bioart works from a visual and aesthetic perspective rather than “what they do,” but also being open to the aspects that older traditions in cultivation and new methods in biotechnology enable us to envision. The following investigates kitsch aspects and the use of kitsch in a few selected bioart works intending to envision a longer cultural trajectory from the past to the future concerning the evolving division between nature, culture, kitsch, human-made artifacts, and biological organisms. It is also an investigation into how the types of artistic practices that follow advancements in bioscience influence the way the kitsch concept is understood and used.

2 Friction in Nature/Culture Kitsch artifacts that imitate nature, or existed in the past as a part of nature but later became isolated decorative artifacts, are a prime example of the rigid division between nature and culture—biological and artificial. A good example is a garden, which can be seen as an interesting “object” in which the concepts of human-made and grown flourish side by side. Mateusz Salwa points out that gardens are situated between art (culture) and nature. According to him, “there can be no totally artificial gardens devoid of what we commonsensically conceive of as nature.” He continues by saying that gardens are humanized pieces of nature (Salwa 2014, 46).

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For visitors, a garden offers an immersive experience; one does not solely observe it but experiences it by being in it. This experience impacts our behavior, often toward appreciating nature, even though the garden has a very artifactual or artistic character—to follow Salwa’s thinking. He points out that visitors would likely be disappointed if they suddenly discovered the garden is artificial (Salwa 2014, 51). Giovanni Aloi continues further from this by looking at the work by artist Mark Wallinger’s Double Still Life (2009), which consists of artificial flower arrangements resembling the typical décor of hotel lobbies and high-end waiting rooms (Gallery Victoria Miro 2009). Aloi writes that the aesthetic impact of the work equates to fresh flowers but “coming closer reveals the bitter truth.” Aloi continues by asking, “But why would we value the composition differently? Why would we desire living flowers when all we do is pass by and merely glance at them, anyway?” (Aloi 2019, 233). This speculation by Salwa and Aloi on aspects of artificial and living problematizes our relationship between the nature-culture divide and brings out the friction between bioart and kitsch. Agneta Dyck’s works are good examples of this observed divide (or encounters) between nature and culture. To produce the series of artworks titled Masked Ball (2008), Dyck placed small kitsch porcelain figures depicting seventeenth-century characters into a beehive (Dyck website 2008) (Gibson Gallery 2019). The porcelain figures were broken, and Dyck considered fixing them in collaboration with bees that eventually constructed honeycomb structures on them; for this, Dyck used bee pheromones and perfumes to mark the places where she wanted the bees to make their marks. Dyck’s work presents kitsch figurines that have transformed with the help of bees to become art objects of high culture instead of being broken kitsch artifacts that eternally reference their lack of originality. These works by Dyck blur the boundaries between the human-made and the biologically grown in a comparable manner to a garden perceived by Mateusz Salwa to be between nature and culture.

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3 Between Original and Fake; Flowers The term flower in this article references specifically ornamental plants, which according to Gessert, appeared much later than the animal and plant domestication practices (Gessert 2010, 33). The following section briefly examines our cultural history and human intentions toward living organisms, especially concerning their aesthetics. In the late sixteenth-century Netherlands, a tulip infected by a virus developed a rare visual appearance with striped flowers. These tulips became a fashion craze around the 1630s, referred to as “tulip mania.” The individual flowers exhibiting these patterns became desired possessions with sky-rocketing prices despite the findings of botanist Carolus Clusius, which had already shown that these tulips attacked by the virus (tulip breaking virus) are in the process of slow degeneration and unpredictable in cultivation (Dash 2010). Today, we have reminders of these emerged striped tulips from the past in our regular selection of tulips, although today’s striped variants are healthy and patiently cultivated by skillful botanists. One should note that tulips are not kitsch as organisms, although some representations of them might come close. However, these early virus-infected tulips present an example in which the aesthetics of a biological species became a core value and desired possession for humans. George Gessert writes in length about the breeding of plants and its relation to aesthetics. In a short section about kitsch and plants, he writes: “Any plant is kitsch if some part of it has been bred away from a distinctive species form toward stereotypical or generic form” (Gessert 2010, 83). Gessert looks at domestication and aesthetics (including kitsch) from a perspective that concerns human-impacted evolution on plants’ form and how certain features of specific species are more kitsch than others. What comes very clearly from his text is that breeding practices have turned these biological organisms into commodities. “[Kitsch flowers] offer entertainment that reinforces the despair that humans cannot interact gracefully with other species. The best humankind can do, kitsch plants suggest, is dominate life, have fun and go extinct” (Gessert 2010, 88).

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A plant as a commodity is the focus of the bioart work Common Flowers / White Out (2014) by Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel (Fukuhara & Tremmel 2014). The project focuses on the first gene-modified (GM) flower that was commercially available, the blue carnation named Moondust. The blue color of the Moondust carnation was achieved through genetic modification by adding a gene from a petunia plant to a white, wild-type carnation. Fukuhara and Tremmel write on the website: “These flowers represent a cultural-historical milestone because they are the first commercially available genetically-modified consumer product intended only for aesthetic consumption. Unlike other GM products— such as tomato, corn, potato or soy—the GM carnations are neither used as human food nor as animal feed and are therefore evading any public discussion on their social, ethical or moral impact.” In their project, Common Flowers / White Out, Fukuhara and Tremmel cloned cut-flowers of the blue carnation using plant tissue culture methods to disable the previously introduced gene that produces the flower’s blue color and restoring the carnation to its original, untainted, white state. In this work, the original white carnation, which has been previously gene-modified to produce the blue color driven by commercial purposes, is again gene-modified by the artists. But this time, the intention has been to bring the blue carnation back to its “natural” state with white color. Comparably, as kitsch is claimed to be an imitation, in this project, the gene-modified blue carnation is re-manipulated to become an exact imitation of the original white carnation. In this work, the biology-based artifact, which is grown but human-made, references its origin and heritage. One can ask why these flower experiments are considered within the article’s focus and perspective on kitsch. There is no specific topic or theme that one could claim always relates to kitsch; however, if one organism from the biological world relates to kitsch, it is likely to be flowers. The world is full of imitation plastic flowers and flower paintings in different styles and qualities, numbers of which (but not all) can be considered kitsch. One should note that there is a commercial value and interest in the ornamental plants and their popularity as common décor in public and private spaces. This aspect plays a role in the wide proliferation of ornamental plants—both living and imitations.

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In the traditional understanding, kitsch always needs an original, which references and forms a comparison between the original and the fake (e.g., Calinescu 1987, 251–252). Kitsch can be seen as a failed commodity that speaks of all it has ceased to be, claims scholar Celeste Olalquiaga (1998, 28). That is not the case in the flower examples (historical tulips and Common Flowers/White Out). These bio-based experiments do not aim to imitate something that could be considered the original; rather, they differentiate themselves as unique compared to the “original” aesthetics of the specific species. There is something very kitsch about this desire—or perhaps “camp,” a concept parallel to kitsch. Susan Sontag writes, “The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (Sontag 1999, 53). When solely considering the reference and imitation aspects of kitsch, one could claim that recent computational developments in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and their use in art would offer an interesting example to think about. In her project Mosaic Virus (2019), artist Anna Ridler has worked on generating digital images of “new” tulips with a GAN that has been previously trained with thousands of images of “original” existing tulips (Ridler 2019). In a sense, the “new” tulip, which is generated using machine-learning processes, references and imitates all of the thousands of “original” tulips used in training the neural network. This artifact, the generated new tulip, exists in the digital world as a quick (and cheap) copy of real tulips residing in the physical world. This section has introduced contradicting concepts and terms such as artificial, imitation, manipulated, original, unnatural, and living concerning plants and their deep roots in our cultural history, use, and scientific developments. A good overview of milestones in the historical development of the era of biotechnology and technoscience is given; for example, by scholar Ingeborg Reichle (2009, 15–31). Reichle points out the research by G. J. Mendel, who systematically investigated heredity in peas, and how the later impact of Mendel’s work has led to biologists’ adaptation of the term and concept of inheritance. Today, the same term is under evolvement impacted by humans’ intentional actions with biotechnological possibilities, opening horizons for thinking between biological and computational realms.

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4 Flora and Fauna Becoming Kitsch History presents us with various examples of cultural artifacts that can be considered kitsch, which incorporate natural forms and matter and constitute “relics out of things whose value emanated from their intrinsic relationship to life […]” (Olalquiaga 1998, 52). The scholar Celeste Olalquiaga points to our enchantment with kitsch when she writes about kitsch artifacts related to the natural world. According to her, our fascination results from our alienation from the natural environment and non-­ humans. Olalquiaga suggests a possibility that these kinds of kitsch objects can connect us with transient fantasies about possible pasts and futures concerning the natural world. One of her focuses is the Crystal Palace (1851–1936), which was constructed in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Britannica n.d.; Olalquiaga 1998, 34). Argued to be kitsch artifacts by Olalquiaga, many ornamental features representing flora and fauna in the Crystal Palace reveal a struggle between two concepts of nature. […] the traditional one, where theologized view of nature provided culture with symbolic meaning; and the modern one, which destroyed this view by reformulating nature according to rational, scientific paradigms and techniques, while simultaneously and contradictorily seeking to regain through this fragmented emblem what, by its own doings, was permanently gone. (Olalquiaga 1998, 45)

When observing how things made by natural forces can become kitsch, one aspect becomes clear: they must be separated from their original context in the natural environment and positioned in a human-world context. According to Olalquiaga, separating things from their original context and functions makes natural artifacts into commodities onto which we can project our cultural desires and anxieties (Olalquiaga 1998, 52). This separation of things from their original context, as Olalquiaga describes kitsch in relation to ornamental flora and fauna, is comparable to today’s scientific research in a laboratory setting which is often based on the isolation of specific individual species. Similarly, it can be observed in our long-term cultivation and breeding practices and even in our

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concept of “individual species.” All these actions and methods can be seen as a part of the trajectory that has turned the non-human species into commodities for human enjoyment. A well-known artwork that can be described as aesthetically “kitschy” is Eduardo Kac’s GFP Bunny (2000), a living rabbit that glows green fluorescent color under specified lighting. The rabbit was created in a French laboratory with a common science procedure of transferring a green fluorescent protein from another organism to the rabbit. Another comparable work by Kac is The Eighth Day (2001), which presents a small-scale artificial ecology with several GFP organisms (plants, amoeba, fish, mice) under a transparent dome with correct lighting. What is different in these examples, in comparison to Olalquiaga’s analysis of ornamental flora and fauna, is that they encompass and present living organisms as art products. Scholar Jens Hauser has written about The Eight Day that the work relies on emotional factors “the fully green glowing mice signify less than they are; they have less a metaphorical function than a presence in the work” (Hauser 2008, 86). As another example, artist Sam Van Aken created a new type of fruit tree, Tree of 40 Fruit, using the traditional fruit tree crafting method (Van Aken n.d.). This tree blossoms with kitsch aesthetics in the range of pinks, violets, and reds—and looks more artificial than natural. In the fall, the tree does what it promises: produces 40 different fruits growing on the same tree. This tree is simultaneously human-made and artificial but also biological and grown. Matei Calinescu writes that the concept of kitsch centers around questions such as imitation, forgery, counterfeit, and the aesthetics of deception and self-deception: “Kitsch may be conveniently defined as a specifically aesthetic form of lying” (Calinescu 1987, 228). But concerning this project, it would be difficult to think about forgery or deception. It is easier to see in relation to Olalquiaga’s claim concerning the kitsch-infused flora and fauna exhibits in the Great Exhibition, which created a merger between the old and known—such as elements from a natural world—with new technological advancements, “Making the novel world of industrial production more familiar by shaping it after plants and animals, this mixing of the old with the new ideologically “naturalized” machinery and manufacture by giving the appearance of

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being products of nature rather than of human labor” (Olalquiaga 1998, 39). Similar could be said about many of today’s products and artworks that appear as products of nature instead of being results of technological methods.

5 Biokitsch “Like art itself, of which it is both an imitation and a negation, kitsch cannot be defined from a single vantage point,” writes Matei Calinescu in his text about the ambiguous and complex concept of kitsch (Calinescu 1987, 232). The author’s investigation of connections between kitsch and bioart shows that not all of Calinescu’s insights (for example, mass production and aesthetic inadequacy) fit this. But some do; for example, Calinescu defines two categories (based on literature) of kitsch: it is produced for propaganda (including political kitsch, religious kitsch, etc.), and it is produced mainly for entertainment. He points out that the division between these two categories can be vague—as propaganda can masquerade as “cultural” entertainment, and entertainment can have manipulative goals (Calinescu 1987, 234–235). When looking at bioart works from the perspective of Calinescu’s kitsch categories, it seems that many of them fall in between. For example, Jennifer Willet’s projects can be seen as political statements, which use kitsch as a masquerade to attract the audience’s attention, who might be looking for easy entertainment but are lured into the world of biotechnology laboratory-based work with serious comments and challenging questions. In comparison to previous bioart examples in this article, Jennifer Willet’s artworks are undoubtedly based on kitsch aesthetics: artificial colors and materials, decorative setups with a mix of things that are usually not seen together, piles of plastic flowers, and many other human-­ made artifacts. In between these kitsch installations are found laboratory equipment and living micro-organisms. For example, An INCUBATOR in Sheep’s Clothing (2011) is a life-sized sculpture of an artificially constructed mountain sheep with a peek-a-boo door opening to a functional incubator in the stomach of the animal, with live yeast samples visible

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through the window in the incubator door. Laboratory Ecologies (2017) is a mix of colorful laboratory tools and (plastic) kitsch objects representing natural organisms. In Willet’s projects, kitsch is used intentionally for a critical framing of the scientific laboratory traditions and environment, which Willet claims to be cold, sterile, and masculine, and conveying a gendered, authoritative, Western hierarchy of knowledge. She states (concerning a recent exhibition (Kersnikova 2021)) that her work aims to construct a feminist science fiction where biotechnology manifests interspecies collaboration, reproduction, theater, and storytelling to reimagine our shared biotech future. In these works, the division between the natural and artificial has disappeared; the works freely mix kitsch artifacts with living biological organisms, which are strongly framed by human manipulation and laboratory procedures. Looking at Willet’s works, one can easily state that her kitsch aesthetics stand against standardized, clean lab aesthetics and their embedded values, as well as challenging the typical belief of laboratory work producing scientific facts. As mentioned, what is often considered kitsch might not easily fit our common expectations concerning biological, living, and grown organisms. But the increasing possibilities of biotechnology for creating designed organisms based on genetic editing and modifications, including their aesthetic appearances, has begun to contradict these expectations. When looking at works of bioart, like the ones presented in this article, one could state that kitsch challenges conventions and expectations. This is easily visible in Willet’s works which deliberately use kitsch as a statement but does not follow the typical aesthetics of the bioart field. When looking at other examples—such as Van Aken’s Tree of 40 Fruit or Common Flowers / White Out by Fukuhara and Tremmel, it becomes clear that certain questions and thoughts concerning the developed aesthetics have not yet emerged. For example, what has not yet been asked is: what criteria are used for the chosen aesthetics of the manipulated organisms, and what do different choices imply? Will our future natural environment be filled with attractive kitsch-style organisms and elements? Or is the current complex understanding of kitsch evolving and becoming commonplace aesthetics in the future?

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I propose to define biokitsch as an approach located within the arts across kitsch produced for propaganda and for entertainment. It is kitsch located in the field of bioart. It is an approach that asks serious questions (about non-humans, the natural environment, and human morality) by disguising itself with playful approaches and aesthetics. In short, biokitsch offers a glimpse of another world.

6 Conclusion: Survival of the Prettiest Is the idea of beauty seen in the natural environment something learned culturally and will disappear and be replaced by novel human-designed organisms in the future? The article has presented a few examples of organisms from history (the orange carrot and the striped tulip) that were aesthetically valued by humans in the past and therefore have survived as we have decided to cultivate and maintain them. In other words, with modified reference to Darwin’s natural selection (Darwin 1869, 91–164), we have performed what I call the survival of the prettiest. Generally, it has been taken for granted that kitsch and the natural world reside in distinctly their own camps. This article has aimed at challenging this by investigating kitsch from the perspective of art that deals with manipulations of the biological world. The field of bioart has started, partly unconsciously, to deal with questions concerning the divide between the natural and cultural, the concept of original versus copy, nostalgia toward the lost nature, and aesthetics related to these questions—and many artworks are excellent examples for this investigation. Based on various scholars’ existing notions about kitsch, while investigating the field of bioart for this article, it has become clear that grown biological organisms and the natural world can be considered from a kitsch perspective—if and when they are human-made. Advancements enforce this in biotechnology, enabling us to design the “nature” we want. The natural world we know today is threatened with becoming a relic of the past; we have already lost connections to parts of the natural world that are replaced by kitsch artifacts. Alternatively, and ironically, one could think that instead of creating kitsch artifacts, we can now create

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novel biotechnology-enabled organisms as a part of our future “nature” that may follow the aesthetics and functions of biokitsch. At the same time, one cannot help pondering the evolution of the kitsch concept within our contemporary zeitgeist. The concept of kitsch seems to be looking for fresh avenues, territories, and new types of meaning, which are impacted strongly by technoscientific advancements like those referenced in this article.

Bibliography Aloi, Giovanni. 2018. Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene. New York: Columbia University Press. Aloi, Giovanni. 2019. “(Brief ) Encounters.” In Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art, edited by Giovanni Aloi, 231–42. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. Calinescu, Matei. 1987. Five Faces of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1869. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 5th edition. London: John Murray. Dash, Mike. 2010. Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused. New York: Crown Publishing Group, Random House. Gessert, George. 2010. Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press (Leonardo Books). Hauser, Jens. 2008. “Observations on an Art of Growing Interest: Toward a Phenomenological Approach to Art Involving Biotechnology.” In Tactical Biopolitics; Art, Activism, and Technoscience, edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, 83–103. MIT Press. Kulka, Tomas. 2010. Kitsch and Art. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. https://books.google.fi/books?id=J8UXbeysl2EC&printsec =frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Tomas+Kulka%22&hl=fr&sa=X&redir_esc =y#v=onepage&q&f=false. Olalquiaga, Celeste. 1998. The Artificial Kingdom. First. New  York: Random House. Reichle, Ingeborg. 2009. Art in the Age of Technoscience; Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art. Wien, New York: Springer.

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Ryynänen, Max. 2019. “Kitsch Happens. On the Kitsch Experience of Nature (Hommage à Tomáš Kulka).” ESPES 8 (2): 7. https://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.3595474. Salwa, Mateusz. 2014. “The Garden as a Performance.” The European Journal of Aesthetics 51 (1): 42–61. https://doi.org/10.33134/eeja.115. Sontag, Susan. 1999. “Notes on ‘Camp’ (1964).” In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and The Performing Subject: A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto, 53–65. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Online References The Carrot Museum. “History of Carrots.” Accessed November 12, 2021. http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/history.html. Khimm, Suzy. ”Are carrots orange for political reasons?” Accessed November 12, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-­klein/post/carrots-­ are-­o range-­f or-­a n-­e ntirely-­p olitical-­r eason/2011/09/09/gIQAfayiFK_ blog.html. Wallinger. ”Double Still Life.” Accessed February 26, 2022. https://www. victoria-­miro.com/exhibitions/517/works/artworks25450/. Dyck. “Masked Ball.” Accessed November 3, 2021. http://www.aganethadyck. ca/web/artwork/masked-­ball. Gibson Gallery. “Aganetha Dyck.” Accessed November 3, 2021. https://www. gibsongallery.com/art-­toronto-­2019-­aganetha-­dyck/. Fukuhara & Tremmel. ”Common Flowers / White Out.” Accessed November 6, 2021. https://bcl.io/project/comflow/; https://bcl.io/project/whiteout/. Ridler. “Mosaic Virus.” Accessed November 10, 2021. http://annaridler.com/ mosaic-­virus. Britannica. n.d. “Crystal Palace.” Accessed November 17, 2021. https://www. britannica.com/topic/Crystal-­Palace-­building-­London. Kac. “GFP Bunny.” Accessed February 26, 2022. https://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html. Kac. “The Eighth Day.” Accessed February 26, 2022. https://www.ekac. org/8thday.html. Van Aken, Sam. n.d. “Tree of 40 Fruit.” https://www.samvanaken.com/. Kersnikova. “Jennifer Willet: When Microbes Dream” https://kersnikova.org/ en/posts/events/all/jennifer-­willet-­when-­microbes-­dreama.

Epilogue: What Next? Paco Barragán and Max Ryynänen

Both knickknacks and the art world have inspired us to edit this book about kitsch—and the positive turn of it. If the new, broader scale of mass production and consumption of cute, sentimental, and sugared things made scholars react many times earlier in history, the acceptance of it also raised its head earlier, too, between what we call the first wave of kitsch theory (the 1930s) and the second (the 1960s), and then the second and the third waves (1990s to present). Also, we feel that a new sort of “kitschification” is in many different territories of life—and the articles in this book show this, too. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein writes in his The New Aesthetics of Deculturation: Neoliberalism, Fundamentalism and Kitsch about the erosion of differences and the rise of a new culture with no depth and no roots to share.1 We might not be worrying about the global everyday culture that is just

P. Barragán Advanced Studies in Art History, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain M. Ryynänen (*) Department of Arts, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_11

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surface—but it resounds perfectly with Takashi Murakami’s “superflat” theory, which we present in the introduction. In a less apocalyptic way, we would like to point out to the reader that the context of this book, the academic world, has also taken up kitschy qualities more than ever. There is an overflow of books and articles that often look like real scholarly articles but only add to the magnitude of publishing (the same article articulated again in a new way), thereby giving publishing points to the author and which nobody reads, if not, in the same way, using them, last minute, to build up a better looking reference list. There are texts where academic trend jargon and excessive use of quotes and references (while argumentation might be absent) have taken over free thinking. Universities as institutions, especially the underdogs in the rankings, have started to work increasingly for the ranking systems themselves rather than the quality of research while overshadowing scholarly discourse with boasting and cheesy self-presentation. Many scholars desire to leave the universities, as working there is not as much about substance as it once was. All this looks a bit like the kind of thing that made critics of kitsch angry about what they thought was pseudo-art. While it does not raise a reaction that would be called kitsch, there are analogies that are good to note here. While we now hail pseudo-art as okay (Why couldn’t a bourgeois family fulfill their need to feel cultured with a semi-cheesy painting?), we think that the texts that now make up quite a big chunk of academic publishing are not okay, as it takes away the whole idea of what scholarly work is. Bourgeois paintings did not kill the avant-garde, but in a way, kitschy publishing and university culture that dominate academia today are more dangerous. It is harder and harder to find real scholarly work in the jungle of “academic kitsch publications.” And some of these publications become cheesy platforms for performing the right code words and the “righteousness” of the author—although scholarly work cannot be compromised too much if we want it to challenge us and give new knowledge. For this book, we sought authors, freelancers, and university workers, who, in whatever way, really had a point to make about the topic. We knew it as we had read their texts. Commodification, when it affects both form and content and makes the object (like a text) more of an imitation

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of “the real thing” than the real thing, is something that we face on all levels in society, and if anything, we hope that this book does not add to that. So, kitsch, as some of the authors of this book write, might have changed, it might be more positively laden, and it might have increased in our living contexts—but it also has the potential to be used more broadly as a framework for criticism on our era, for instance, the academy. Is there any time when understanding kitsch and benefiting from its long thread of discussions would not work better to support our understanding of our current age than now? Also, we wanted kitsch to be portrayed by scholars in different disciplines—or between them—covering different angles of the topic with different methodologies. So, we aimed from the outset for a polyphony where one could find the true, multi-faceted nature of the use of the concept and the phenomenon itself. We did not want to package it all into one format or voice, and we hope that these multiple voices here will help us better understand kitsch and help us gain more methods to understand history and our current time. Some are more philosophical, some less—and some are analytical, some continental, and some historical or cultural. To see the whole, we hope, makes us understand better both kitsch and the contemporary societies we live in today.

Note 1. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, The New Aesthetics of Deculturation: Neoliberalism, Fundamentalism and Kitsch (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).

Bibliography Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. The New Aesthetics of Deculturation: Neoliberalism, Fundamentalism and Kitsch. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.

Index1

A

B

Academia (as kitsch), 24, 264 Adam, Georgina, 23, 35, 39 Alps, the, 18 Architecture, 2, 19, 45, 46, 88, 167–177, 198 Art bad, 5, 13, 22, 100 bio-kitsch, 47, 251, 252, 254, 258–260 decorative, 182 digital, 46 Art biennial, 22, 23, 39, 43 Art fair, 22, 39, 43

Baroque, 4, 9, 25, 69, 71, 73, 77, 81, 242 Barr, Alfred H., 31 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 21, 35 Baudelaire, Charles, 46, 168–170, 172 Beauty, 6, 11, 20, 41, 44, 46, 47, 72, 74, 78, 80, 100, 169, 181–200, 210, 211, 229–245, 260 Berenson, Bernard, 30, 32 Blockbuster, 22, 23, 25, 42 Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten, 263

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7

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268 Index

Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 11, 23, 41, 186 Bourgeoisie, 29, 66 Branded artists, 35 Broch, Hermann, 11, 51n48, 65, 76, 182, 210, 211, 213

Duncan, Carol, 41, 42 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 28, 29 Dutch Realism, 26 Duveen, Joseph ‘Joe, 30 E

C

Calinescu, Matei, 8, 13, 121, 122, 182, 183, 195, 196, 255, 257, 258 Camp, 7, 11, 12, 16, 18, 20, 45, 47, 75, 76, 96–106, 169–171, 173, 191–195, 231, 255, 260 Castelli, Leo, 24, 32, 33, 35 Cheesy, cheesiness, 4, 14, 16, 29, 44, 45, 47, 87–95, 97–99, 101–111, 264 Christmas, 17, 69, 127, 157 Class, 3, 5, 17, 18, 30, 36, 43, 44, 66, 70, 74, 75, 78, 101, 182, 184, 186–195, 197, 231, 233 Commodity (art as a), 24 Corny, 93, 94 Cottington, David, 19 Cultural industries, 43

Eco, Umberto, 6, 9–14, 50n24, 50n30, 51n43, 111, 174, 176, 182, 183, 210, 211, 216 Egenter, Richard, 11 En plein air, 29 Extravagant, 68, 70, 71, 75, 76, 84, 170, 192 F

Fake, 8–10, 15, 66–68, 76, 84, 168, 171, 181, 199, 253–255 Fashion, 3, 13, 14, 17, 19, 37, 46, 47, 69, 71, 77, 151, 152, 169–171, 173, 181–200, 219, 237, 238, 246n21, 253 Foster, Hall, 20, 24 French Salon system, 30 Friedman, Milton, 21 Fukuyama, Francis, 21

D

Danto, Arthur, 20, 211, 234–236, 239, 241, 244 Deitch, Jeffrey, 21 Democratization of culture, 5 Dickie, George, 20 Disneyland, 176 Documenta, 21 Dorfles, Gillo, 11, 125, 182, 195, 210

G

Gender, gendered, 15, 18, 46, 182, 183, 186–195, 199, 259 Giesz, Ludwig, 11 Globalization, 22, 39, 200, 210 Glorification of the quotidian, 27 Gold, golden, 5, 7, 14, 22, 66, 71, 88, 108, 149, 150, 181, 187, 188, 194, 196, 211, 231, 233

 Index 

Graw, Isabelle, 23, 36, 37 Greenberg, Clement, 9, 10, 13, 19, 24, 32–34, 46, 66, 71, 81, 122, 182, 211, 213, 216, 230–234, 239–241, 243, 245n6, 246n21 Guilbaut, Serge, 32

269

Koons, Jeff, 8, 15, 19, 20, 22, 35–37, 39–41, 43, 44, 78–80, 82–84, 86n19, 176, 196–198, 211, 212, 240 Kulka, Tomas, 7, 13, 14, 17, 26, 121, 123, 128, 241, 250 Kusama, Yayoi, 19, 20, 35, 37, 41 L

H

Haring, Keith, 21 Harries, Karsten, 241 Hierarchy (cultural), 14, 75 Higgins, Kathleen, 6, 11, 45, 47 High and low (culture), 38, 148, 183, 185, 196, 199 Hirst, Damien, 2, 18–20, 35, 39, 41, 43, 44, 74, 79, 81, 84, 87, 183, 189, 192, 196, 197, 199, 209, 240 Honig, Elizabeth Alice, 25, 27 Hughes, Robert, 22 Hulst, Titia, 32, 33 Humor, 45, 75, 94, 143–158, 187, 194 Hyper-modern, 66–68, 77 K

KAWS, 19, 35, 41 King, Ross, 28 Kitsch, 4–47, 65–84, 96–106, 119–135, 143–158, 167–177, 181–200, 205–222, 229–245, 250–261, 263–265 Kitsch as high art, 78–81

Lapland, 18 Las Vegas, 67, 88, 95, 172, 174–177 Low (vs. high), see High and low (culture) Lowbrow, 10, 173, 182 Luxury, 39, 66, 71, 80, 84, 181, 187, 191, 196, 197, 199 M

Manet, Édouard, 25, 29 Martínez, Melvin, 37, 38 Mazzocut-Mis, Maddalena, 17 Mega dealers, 35 Meissonier, Jean-Louis-Ernest, 28 Moffett, Charles S., 24 Monet, Claude, 28, 29, 35 Mourning, 45, 119–121, 124–131, 134, 135, 243 Murakami, Takashi, 15, 20, 35, 37, 39, 43, 44, 82, 196, 197, 264 N

Neo pop, 20, 24, 34, 35, 43 Neoliberalism, 21, 22, 43 Nerdrum, Odd, 15, 51n48

270 Index O

Olalquiaga, Celeste, 16, 211, 255–258 P

Photoshop, 46, 215–217 Pink (color), 4, 5, 14, 38, 40, 70, 71, 79, 97, 181, 194, 257 Pop art, 24, 30, 31, 33, 34, 43, 195–199, 208, 233, 240 Porcelain, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14, 22, 37, 181, 252 Postcolonial, postcolonialism, 16 Postmodern, 18, 21, 45, 111–112, 144, 167, 169–176, 182, 187, 188, 190, 206, 208, 210 Pretentious, 4, 5, 46, 104, 210 Pretty, prettiness, 9, 46, 124, 126, 210 Proto-kitsch, 26 Q

Queer, 187, 193–195 R

Richter, Gerhard, 20, 21, 35, 36 Rosenberg, Harold, 33, 34 S

Saatchi, Charles, 23, 41 Schlock, 9, 94

Scull, Robert ‘Bob, 33, 34 Sentimentality, 8–10, 13–15, 17, 76, 94, 96–99, 104, 122, 123, 182, 189 Servais, Alain, 19 Simon, Nina, 42 Solomon, Robert C., 15, 96 Sontag, Susan, 11, 12, 75, 100, 101, 182, 191, 192, 194, 195, 255 Spiegler, Marc, 38 Stallabrass, Julian, 20 Stępień, Justyna, 18 Sugared, 4, 5, 67, 263 T

Tacky, 92, 97, 98, 123 Taste, tasteless, 1, 9, 10, 12–15, 17, 26, 29, 30, 38, 41, 43, 46, 66, 73–77, 81, 82, 91, 93, 96–98, 105, 119, 121, 126, 133, 168–170, 172–174, 176, 181–200, 210, 211, 221, 231, 233, 237, 251 Thompson, Don, 39 Thornton, Sarah, 20 Tremaine, Emily, 33 W

Warhol, Andy, 34, 35, 40, 41, 43, 195, 240 Watson, Peter, 28, 30 White, Hayden, 24 Wiley, Kehinde, 20