Kitsch makes you cry twice, and the second tear gives it away
Milan Kundera said kitsch works in two steps. First you are moved by children running on grass; then you are moved by how nice it is to be moved along with everyone else. That second, self-congratulating feeling is the whole trick, and it helps explain why dictators love sentimental art.
The word came out of the Munich art trade in the 1860s and 1870s, where it labelled cheap, saleable sketches and pictures. Hans Reimann's 1936 Das Buch vom Kitsch called it a studio term among painters. For decades serious study of it happened almost entirely in Germany, with Walter Benjamin a leading voice, and theorists tie its rise to industrialisation, cities, plastics, radio, television and a growing middle class hungry for art.
Definitions tend to be sharp. Hermann Broch said kitsch imitates the beautiful while ignoring the good. Benjamin saw it as a useful object with no critical distance, offering instant feeling without effort, and in 1927 mocked artists who recycle the past as "furnished" men, like tenants of a ready-made flat. Roger Scruton called it fake art peddling fake emotion. Tomas Kulka offered a test: the subject is beautiful or emotionally loaded, instantly recognisable, and the work adds nothing to what you already associate with it.
Kundera's 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, set in Prague around the Soviet invasion of 1968, pushed the idea into politics. His narrator describes kitsch as an ideal that edits out everything unacceptable in human life, and where one movement rules, it becomes totalitarian kitsch that bans doubt, irony and individualism. Scholars have applied the phrase to the art of Stalin's Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Not everyone sneers. Since Pop Art in the 1950s, kitsch has been used ironically, humorously or with sincere affection, and the Dogs Playing Poker paintings are loved as harmlessly quirky. Cultural historian Celeste Olalquiaga, in a 1999 book, separated a nostalgic kitsch that freezes a tidy memory from a melancholic kind, seen in paperweights, aquariums and mermaids, that carries a hopeful charge.
Source: Kitsch
