The enduring power of kitsch

Kitsch feels easier to understand as just guilty indulgence. Some people do look at the calendar at the mall featuring cute babies playing jazz instruments and want to buy it for what it is: a series of cute images to delight you and your desk mates. I would personally buy it ironically, but still get a lot of enjoyment out of its genuine attempt. It would definitely make me smile by making me laugh inside every time I see it. FWIW I think both views validate the concept of kitsch.

Not covered in this article strangely, but kitsch is the most powerful when its genuine. I see the calendar of cats doing yoga poses and it only brings me fleeting joy, its trying to be kitsch, and it doesn't feel like the "artist" really put the effort in. When they do I can feel it, and for some reason I'm weirdly inspired by it (probably because if I really tried, I'd put out something like that).

I know movie examples way better than attempts at painting or sculpture. I watch bad movies weekly and its one of my favorite indulgences. When we watch a Neil Breen movie I can feel the genuine attempt to make a movie that says something...and failing spectacularly at it. When I watch Sharknado I see a pretty cheap attempt at a gag that might delight me for a bit, but feels empty in its attempt to make real entertainment. Ed Wood movies have that sort of charm, they score F's in every department from acting to sound editing, but you can feel the energy of the cast and crew as they try to make something special and fail. Hallmark Christmas movies are probably the best analogous thing to the sort of kitsch we think of when we use the word, they're ostensibly pro-Christmas spirit with a middling cast and plot line, but usually there's an element of genuine attempt to make something your 50-year old aunt would enjoy while she sips on egg nog. Personally, I love that shit.

Is GenAI art kitsch taken to its logical extreme ? I would think so especially given the backlash by artists.

I like kitsch. I like that post card in the article.* I also like the old masters whose works were often commissioned from uneducated patrons who were lacking in any notion of "achieving wisdom" as the article puts it. I enjoy those works even without the historical contexts. To me many of them stand on their own and the ones that don't I have little interest in regardless of the historical value.

Meanwhile I don't like much of the art that is supposed to have intellectual value. I read a book about van Gogh and I still don't like any of his works: not enough kitsch for me to enjoy it I guess. I also don't care much about the life of the artist or the symbolism (in the case of van Gogh, any symbolism was probably unintended anyway). In fact in literature now we are supposed to not care about the author and interpret it on our own because Roland Barthes told us to.

Nobody has been able convincingly to explain to me why struggling to understand the artist's feelings from his work makes those feelings worth anything, or why those feelings are any different or more complex than regular feelings if they are wrapped in layers of symbolism.

I suspect that is in part why modern/contemporary artists and their consumers keep falling into the kitsch trap as described in the article. Perhaps some art consumers can give convincing answers to some of the above issues but I believe a large enough number cannot which is distorting their market.

*And look - They even reused the same work for an Easter postcard. Now it is double kitsch: https://www.ebay.com/itm/275158490852

Needs a [2014] - the author, Roger Scruton, died in 2020.

Osbert Lancaster managed to sum up kitsch interior decor well in his cartoon book "pillar to post"

Of all people, Barry Humphries "dame edna" wrote about great Australian Kitsch: sauce bottles shaped like koalas climbing branches, the innumerable kangaroo and boomerang mantel shelf decorations, and of course the "big things"

https://louellakerrbooks.com.au/book/barry-humphries-treasur...

The notion of kitsch is ultimately an expression of disdain by the elite and the artisan classes that serve them towards common man.

The principle reason that the phenomena of kitsch -did not- occur in earlier eras (where we certainly had elites and servant artisan classes - painters, architects, musicians, ..) is that their yet existed a shared cultural context (in the widest sense including religious and ~metaphysical beliefs) between the ruling and subject classes. For example, Michelangelo's David afforded everyone access at some level to the work.

As the elite and the common man diverged in their existential outlook, this manifested (naturally) in the high culture artifacts. There has been a great deal of effort over the years to herd the unwashed :) to appreciating the art of the new masters but the peasants at most have acquiesced to respectfully holding their caps as they silently march through the galleries.

So it is important to have this periodic 'shaming' articles.