“Kitsch” has become a key category in critical evaluations of the aesthetics of “mass society.”  Thomas Kincaid, Hummels, sentimental novels and manipulative Hallmark movies are all branded with the label.  I think it’s a useful label, but a student paper on the subject left me with some suspicious.

1) The student, David Dalbey, noted how paranoid people become when confronted with the question of kitsch: “Did I get something kitschy for my mother for Christmas last year?” they ask, anxiously.  That’s a revealing response, I think.  It indicates how much we take our aesthetic cues from others, and how much taste is a matter of liking the things that people who know what to like like.  And it also raises questions about the category of kitsch: How much of kitsch-criticism is just a power-play, cultural bullying by elites against their “lessers”?  To put it somewhat differently, is the rise of interest in kitsch directly linked with the rise of aestheticism?

2) Clement Greenberg, who wrote one of the seminal articles on the subject, connects it to rising literacy rates, the development of a middle class with disposable income, mass society.  That raises the same kinds of suspicions expressed above: Is the invention of the category of kitsch a self-protective move on the part of artists against unwashed non-aesthetes (that is to say, financiers, businessmen, capitalists) who want to and now have the wherewithal to purchase art?

3) Greenberg suggests that prior to the nineteenth century, art patrons had leisure and comfort to cultivate themselves, and therefore had more developed tastes than the industrial patrons who took over funding art during the nineteenth century.  But: Did pre-19 ^th -century art patrons really have leisure and comfort to cultivate themselves?  They had leisure and comfort; did they use it for self-cultivation?  How many were just as philistine as 19 ^th -century robber barons?  How much kitsch-criticism is a matter of aesthetic revulsion against modernity, mass production, mass society?  That is, it’s not mainly an aesthetic judgment but a social and political one; or, its an aesthetic judgment about modern political society?  Were nouveaux riches the only ones who purchase or commission art as a status symbol, a marker of good taste?  Surely many a Renaissance prince did the same.

4) The category of “totalitarian kitsch” raises similar suspicions: Is this category used to link fascism with the middle classes in a democracy?  That is: How much is this category being used as a political weapon to try to paint traditionalists as fascists?  I’m also curious about the number of “cultivated” intellectuals and artists who supported Stalin and the Soviet Union; what did they think about Soviet kitsch?