A century and a half old, if you start with the appearance of the word itself in the second half of the XIXe century, the history of kitsch was that of an irresistible extension of which, in 1939, the American critic Clement Greenberg announced the imperious (and imperialist) character: “He has carried out a triumphant world tour, invasive and disfiguring the particular cultures of each of the countries which he has successively colonized. He is in the process of establishing himself as a universal culture, the first universal culture that has ever existed. ”
It has also been, for a quarter of a century, in particular, that of an ascent no less spectacular, having allowed it to access the most prestigious places. In the exhibitions of Pierre and Gilles at the game of Paume (2007) or Takashi Murakami at the Château de Versailles (2010) is a kitsch rid of any releasing of marginality, geographic, social or artistic. The success of Jeff Koons-detecting the title of the most expensive living artist in the world-is perhaps the most certain index of an invasive and sometimes insolent triumph of kitsch.
But the very possibility of an apotheosis is paradoxical for a phenomenon involving in its definition, in its very essence, a common, low or unworthy character. It is impossible to define in a few lines a term of which almost all the thinkers who approached it underline the eminently fleeting character. “The kitsch escapes like an elf for any definition”writes the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno.
However, you can usefully remember your probable etymology. This relates it to the verbs expressing in the German dialect of Mecklembourg the action of Boacler (“Kitschen”) or to deceive the goods (“Verkitschen”). Could it be in this lie the germ of wisdom? That the arrogance of victory sometimes mixes the lucidity of a failure?
Kitsch dialectic
He arrived several times in the history of art that a movement takes over the word by which we first wanted to denigrate it, then erases or overthrows any pejorative nuance. The words “Impressionism” or “Cubism” were in their beginnings imbued with an accent of mockery which quickly dissipated.
It is quite different for kitsch. This continues to involve, whatever the brilliance of its triumph, the presence of a sub-layer, a false value or a counter-value. In the variety of nuances to which it can give rise – humour or cynicism, provocation or irony and until sincere enthusiasm -, adhesion to kitsch is always split: not the pure and simple forgetting of an original stigma, but a way of doing with it, of integrating it into a form of dialectic.
Isn’t that unnecessary sophistication? Is it really necessary to introduce a dialectic into the attraction that the garish colors of a garden dwarf can inspire or the costly overloads of the Luxor de Las Vegas hotel? Yes, ultimately. The apprehension of a kitsch work supposes the active presence (even when buried) of an inversion of its value, of a possible reversal. The aesthetic experience – and, if necessary, criticism – is part of a tension or the virtuality of a possible tilting between the authentic and the artificial, the unique and the series, the derisory and the grandiose.
This is the responsibility of mediocrity aspires to rise, so the spoon or the salt covers themselves, the mug is affected by the symbols of high culture (from the joconde to the self -portraits of Frida Kahlo). Conversely, which aims for the sublime (that of the great ideals or beautiful feelings) is sinking – or more prosaically, stumbles and breaks the figure – in the click or the mièvre: the pharaonic shards of theAïda de Verdi or the smooth innocences of William Bouguereau’s canvases.
TOC intelligence
“You gave me your mud and I made gold”writes Charles Baudelaire in an epilogue project at Evil flowers. As curious as the rapprochement may appear, the pride of an alchemy in turn animates this aesthetic of comfort, this “Art of happiness” What is kitsch (as the sociologist Abraham Moles defines in the 1970s). Except that here, it is enough to scratch a little to recognize in gold the gilding. However, there remains something of this alchemy in OCD once the golden scales fell: the failure itself, in the richness of its nuances. We can fail a little, a lot, madness, passionately or miserably. What we lose in Promethean grandeur, we gain it in complexity.
We can call intelligence, as close as possible to etymology, which, in kitsch, encourages us to read and link together elements that have nothing precious or enlightening in themselves. It is only by the network they form, by the way in which they articulate and often overthrow tangled materials, that they throw a certain light on the world.
Against those who saw it as a frivolous and without consequences, Theodor W. Adorno advocated the need to take kitsch seriously, specifying “Critically seriously”. To the intelligence of the kitsch required by the thinker of the Frankfurt school, outside the object examined, we could add another: no longer that which overlooks him to unravel the insidious and harmful mechanisms, but that which is lodged with him and in him. This does not contradict the first. It would be impoverished and absurd not to take into account the incentive to political conformism as much aesthetic, the alienating dimension denounced by the great thinkers of this kitsch becoming “Evil in the system of art values”according to the famous formula of the Austrian writer Hermann Broch (Some remarks about kitsch1955).
But an intelligence of kitsch can also pay attention to the idea formulated by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin: the one that an art that has become accessible to the body, an art which is finally touched, opens the possibility of a new relationship to human interiority. Or that of the Italian writer Umberto Eco retorting the “apocalyptics”, frightened by the irrevocable forfeiture of culture that betray the success of jazz and Hollywood films, that the world of mass communications is, whether we like it, our world. Or that of the New York author Susan Sontag reporting on sensitivity campThis “Dandyism of the era of masses” where the most delicate and blassed connoisseur finds his delight in the Kitsch object precisely because he is such: “Avant to be beautiful!”
Kitsch everywhere?
If it may not be wrong to say that kitsch is omnipresent in our contemporary world, it is not that the possibility is no longer offered to us from experiences entirely foreign to kitsch, it is that it is always likely to arise unexpectedly or to project its shadow anywhere. Whatever the field in which we are, artistic, social, economic, political or religious, we run the risk of sliding or tinting towards him, with innocence or lucidity, tenderness or irony, by provocation or by instinct, sentimentalism or demagoguery.
Greerly sirupers of Donald Trump’s electoral campaign, to the Bigarrures of the last collection of Miuccia Prada, where the transgression of luxury codes is also their parody, from the Orientalo-Hellenic Plutocratic of the Atlantis Hotel from Dubai to Romano-Byzantinism mystical of the Parisian basilica of the Sacred Heart, Rieu to Richard Wagner (example of a “Great kitsch”according to Hermann Broch), of the “western pink” barbie on sale in a Mall of Miami or Manila in the film Barbiefrom Greta Gerwig (2023), where the universe of the Mattel doll invests the screen in such a literal way that it amazed a form of reflexivity …
The monolithic, overhanging and dogmatic positions are less and less capable of accounting for a kitsch which, proliferating, also amplified its registers, multiplied its dimensions or its strata. And which then obliges us to consider it on a case -by -case basis, taking into account, each time it seems, of all the elements involved within sometimes very elementary equations, sometimes very subtle. And which we are not sure to be able to say, in the best of cases, in some rare works, if they lead to success or failure.
“Still better. Or better. Miss even more badly. Even even worse. “ Which of these quests, stated by Samuel Beckett in his new Cap to the worst (1983), is that of the one who accepts in his art of having part linked to the kitsch?
