Kitsch

Kitsch is an artistic category and aesthetic denoting mass-produced, replicated goods aimed at an undemanding taste, easy emotional sentiment and instant effect in place of depth or innovation. The term took hold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries alongside the growth of the entertainment and consumer industries. The kitsch aesthetic rests on excessive sentimentality, sweetness, ostentatious luxury and the imitation of "high" art in a cheap, simplified form. Its formal marks are garish, saccharine colours, a surfeit of ornament and gilding, formulaic touching subjects (weeping children, kittens, romantic sunsets), exaggerated showiness and the mechanical copying of acknowledged masterpieces. Modernist theorists, notably Clement Greenberg in his programmatic essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), opposed kitsch to genuine art as its surrogate and a symptom of mass culture. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, attitudes grew more complex: Pop Art and later postmodernism began deliberately to play with kitsch, to quote it ironically and to aestheticize "bad taste." Jeff Koons transformed kitsch souvenirs and toys into monumental objects, Pierre et Gilles created a glossy camp imagery, and the notion of "camp" legitimized a love of deliberate excess. Thus kitsch turned from a term of abuse into a fully-fledged instrument of artistic strategy. Today it remains an important field for reflection on the mechanisms of taste, the mass production of images and the boundary between irony and sincerity in consumer culture.