Kitsch Art: When Beauty Becomes Excess

Kitsch is a term that comes from the German language from the verb kitschen , very common in southern Germany, in Bavaria, where it belonged to the colloquial language and had the meaning of " to do something silly " or " to mess around " and denotes a style of bad taste, often in connection with artistic dilettantism. The term kitsch was first used in the Munich art market around the years 1860-1870 as a descriptive term for art of minor quality, cheap, popular.

kitsch art in painting

Kitsch has nothing to do with the unique, the individual, the intermediate nuances, the tendency to differentiate. It needs simplistic truths and images, easily understood by the masses, capable of provoking a collective tearful secretion.

Kitsch art in decorative objects

If we look at creativity as a scientific research of a work of art, we will notice that it becomes valuable if it conveys a language with a high degree of complexity and ambiguity that can be deciphered only through some perceptual and intellectual effort. The level of uncertainty of the expression of a work of art (which includes complexity, ambiguity and variability) should be neither too high nor too low in relation to the receiver's capacity to perceive the aesthetic product. Ambiguity stimulates the imagination and empathic transposition of the receiver into the represented model, therefore the more pronounced the degree of particularity of the artistic expression, the greater the effort the receiver will make to approach the creation and thus will involve more deeply in understanding it and will try to receive it from within and not at the level of rudimentary perceptual associations. From the perspective of the creator of art, empathy with the represented model also reflects his degree of commitment to the creative act. Regardless of an artist's preference for one style or another, expressiveness lies in his or her ability to create communicative means at the intersection of simplicity and complexity, particularity and universality, individualism and humanism (in the philosophical sense), self and otherness, clarity and ambiguity, for what is static and repetitive is boring. What is dynamic and random is confusing. And between the two possibilities lies art.

While in the poor relatives of art, which only ape it, we encounter forms of platitude, simplicity, lack of ambiguity, banality that oscillate between hilarious and grotesque. Not only do they have no connection with beauty or any aesthetic goal, but they do not even try to follow even strictly imitatively the means of art. What, for example, an artist avoids with predilection, namely the uniformity of expressive tonality, trying to present a palette of communicating elements as rich and varied as possible.

Kitsch art in religious objects

The creators of these aesthetic fakes do not transpose themselves, do not identify themselves, do not leave the imprint of their own being in what they embody. It is precisely the lack of mimicry – of the existential real – and of narcissism (projective identification) of the creative self with the entire complex that the whole work represents, that make these products not art. In these pseudo-artistic objects, beauty is precisely absent, be it conceived as an aspiration, desiderata, ideal, feeling, stimulus or stake of creation. Both at the formal and causal level, beauty presupposes certain criteria in order to exist, criteria that are not met in the context of these creations.

At the end of the 1970s, the French theorist Abraham Moles turned the kitsch phenomenon upside down, writing in his book The Psychology of Kitsch: " kitsch is linked to access to well-being, asserting itself strongly during the evolution of bourgeois civilization, when it reaches abundance, an excess of means in relation to needs, therefore a (limited) gratuitousness..., when the bourgeoisie imposes its norms on artistic production". With the decline of the aristocracy and the fragmentation of large estates, the new social class, the bourgeoisie, began to aspire not only to wealth, but also to beauty. But, lacking the aesthetic education of the aristocrats, applying arbitrary criteria to artistic productions, their behavior led to the emergence of an art intended exclusively for ostentatious consumption.

Moles distinguishes, from an aesthetic point of view, several features of kitsch :

1. Principle of Inadequacy - Objects are oversized or miniaturized (tourist crafts or Christmas ornaments) or deviated from their original function. Their functionality is just a pretext, display being the goal.
2. The principle of accumulation - refers to the tendency to pile as many objects as possible in the same space or as many styles as possible in the same object or artistic production.
3. The principle of synesthetic perception - is related to that of cumulation, referring to the tendency to assault as many sensory channels as possible simultaneously.
4. Comfort and mediocrity – the former is both a principle and a value, and the latter is a fundamental aspect, kitsch being conceived as an art acceptable to the masses. Although it sometimes mimics the avant-garde and knowledge, it remains in the middle of the road.
5. Hedonism - is the supreme value in kitsch, something also visible in the symbol of this classical period, the "big store" (as opposed to traditional, small, narrow shops, without displayed prices).

Kitsch art in architecture

In Romania, the first to address the issue of kitsch was Lucian Blaga, who in his work Artă și Valoare , explains the notion of Kitsch as a displaced structure that has evaded the law of non-transposability. This deviation constitutes a structure “called para-aesthetics”, given that there is no term that better characterizes this aesthetic, displaced beauty. It is about a certain alleged beauty that some people find pleasurable. And when this category of consumers is on the rise, we feel obliged to pay it curiosity and attention.