I

The term “kitsch” seems to have made its debut in Munich art circles around 1870. Whatever its origin,¹ the word was first used to describe a species of genre painting then in vogue with the prospering middle class. “Kitsch” were picturesque, somewhat sentimental and romanticized celebrations of simple pleasures and country life, forest scenes, and mountain vistas; also kitsch were dramatic portraits of alluring nudes or ethereal lovers, often laced with melancholy, tinged with an exotic religiousness or eroticism. The productions of the French Salon at this time are perhaps paradigmatic, though kitsch has no national allegiance and comes in many varieties: One could turn just as well to the pre-Raphaelites or to the work of Arnold Böcklin. In any case, kitsch served the double function of providing its clients with a vacation from the monotony of everyday life while at the same time managing to indulge their demand for culture and emotional stimulation.

Quickly assimilated and applied to kindred phenomena in other arts, the term acquired an aura of moral censure: Products castigated as kitsch were somehow falsely sentimental, cheaply and dishonestly titillating.² The dictionary supports this impression when it defines kitsch, a “sweet, sentimental product of bad taste,” as “characterized by worthless pretentiousness,” artistic “rubbish” that makes “no spiritual or intellectual demands on the viewer” and whose “distinguishing mark is untruthfulness.” Quite a litany. Yet if kitsch is to be more than a term of abuse, we must be able to use it to identify and analyze particular instances of kitsch.

The Question of Technique

If kitsch is bad art, it is bad in a peculiar way—not necessarily in any technical or formal sense.³ Of course, much kitsch is technically mediocre or worse, but it can also be technically adroit, even brilliant. This allows John Canaday, in Mainstreams of Modern Art, to admit Bouguereau’s “staggering” technical facility and the perfect harmony of his composition and yet to condemn his painting as meretricious and “perfectly false.”

George Orwell’s criticism of Salvador Dalí points in the same direction. Superbly drafted, the Spaniard’s work is nevertheless said to be obscene, not so much because of what he paints—this is secondary—but because of how he achieves his effects. As Orwell notes, there is something contrived and formulaic about Dalí’s excesses. Lurking beneath his slick surrealist surfaces are quite conventional, often Edwardian, elements that inspire “an intense feeling of sentimentality.” Despite his bizarre subject matter, “picturesqueness keeps breaking in.”⁴ What Canaday and Orwell condemn is kitsch, though neither uses the word.

The Problem of Distance

A second, more fruitful way of identifying kitsch emphasizes its cloying, sentimental quality, opposing it to the more disengaged or distanced character of art. We have “disinterested satisfaction, distance, and play on the one hand, and an all-consuming satisfaction, ‘taste’ [Schmecken], enjoyment, interest, lack of distance, and need on the other,” according to Otto Best.

Perhaps genuine art involves a kind of “psychical distance,” to use Edward Bullough’s term, that kitsch lacks. “The transformation by Distance is produced in the first instance by putting the phenomenon, so to speak, out of gear with our practical, actual self; by allowing it to stand outside the context of our personal needs and ends—in short, by looking at it ‘objectively,’” he writes.⁵ Bullough notes that the working of distance has two sides: “a negative, inhibitory aspect” through which we bracket our practical, everyday concerns and “a positive side” wherein we elaborate a new experience on the foundation provided by “the inhibitory action of Distance.”

The problem is that our experience is not so neatly compartmentalized. Is it clear that our enjoyment of art always is—or should be—“distanced”? Bullough himself notes that originally most religious art was not in this sense entertained as art at all. It made, and perhaps continues to make, a more immediate appeal. Or consider our experience of Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Do we properly appreciate it only when we manage to abstract from its subject matter and see a harmony of colors and forms or an idealized representation of “womanhood” rather than an individual woman? And if kitsch “lacks distance,” so does our everyday experience of the world. The satisfaction we take in a good dinner, for example, is unabashedly immediate and “interested.” Desire continually defeats the distance that art is said to require. But we do not conclude that our usual experience of the world, lacking distance, is therefore kitsch.

Without further specification, the concept of psychical distance can help us distinguish between everyday experience and a certain species of aesthetic experience, but it does not capture what is peculiar to kitsch.

The Loss of the Other

Bullough hints at a crucial distinction when he observes that “Distance appears to lie between our own self and its affections. . . . Usually, though not always, it amounts to the same thing to say that the Distance lies between our own self and such objects as are the sources or vehicles of such affections.”

Not always. For if aesthetic contemplation requires that we interpose a distance between ourselves and what we contemplate aesthetically, kitsch dissolves this distance by surrendering to the experience. Unlike “art for art’s sake,” then, kitsch remains subject to its own creations. This shows itself clearly in the phenomenon of “camp,” which we may define as kitsch with increased distance.⁶ Distance, breaking the illusion that kitsch depends on, is what makes camp more “aesthetic,” more “artsy,” more playful than kitsch. But unlike simple experience, kitsch gives itself up not to the object but to the mood, feeling, or excitation that the object inspires. “The kitsch experience,” writes Karsten Harries,

lacks the distance separating subject and object which alone makes a genuine encounter possible. In this respect it is like simple enjoyment. The difference between Kitsch and simple enjoyment becomes clearer when we ask what gives Kitsch its appeal. . . . It is not that Kitsch creates desire for an object. . . . The interest has shifted from the object of desire to the desire itself. What was originally an object of desire is transformed by Kitsch to what, with Kierkegaard, we may call a mere occasion which is used to stimulate desire. The consciousness of the object is peripheral.

The Retreat from Experience

This shift from the object of desire to desire itself suggests a connection between kitsch and boredom. Boredom, said Tolstoy, is the desire for desires. The craving for stimulation, for thrilling or exotic experiences, for diversion that we associate with boredom belongs equally to kitsch. If kitsch differs from aestheticism in its relative lack of distance, it remains an essentially aesthetic phenomenon in its peculiar lack of openness. Both abort experience by shutting themselves up, by refusing to open themselves to the other.⁷

In essence, this refusal is a refusal of freedom, where freedom refers not to personal sovereignty but, more basically, to the willingness to let the other be what it is.⁸ Kitsch denies freedom by denying the dialogue with the other that makes freedom possible. It thus undermines the very possibility of experience, at least so far as experience depends on a relation with what transcends the self.

The monological or narcissistic character of kitsch accounts not only for its transformation of all enjoyment into self-enjoyment—the only “other” here is an aspect of the self—but also for its perpetual dissatisfaction with whatever is at hand. Reality, whatever it offers, is by definition unacceptable since it continually intrudes on the isolation that kitsch demands.

This lack of openness helps explain why kitsch so often trades in clichés. By offering us only what we already expect, the cliché buffers us from any real encounter; it gives us the comforting impression of genuine experience while protecting us from its chief risk: an openness to something new.

Yet the cliché is Janus-faced. Besides protecting us from experience, it caters to a thirst for emotional stimulation. Man turns to kitsch as a refuge from the drabness and spiritual emptiness of life. Cut off from a simple, direct relationship with the world, he compensates for his shadowy, insubstantial experience by cultivating “experiences.” This accounts for the oft-noted tendency to “romance about the self” in kitsch, which is part and parcel of the hypertrophy of the imagination at the expense of the more pedestrian but worldly activities of common sense and sound judgment. The cliché answers perfectly to this need despite—or rather because—it pre-packages experience, thus dispensing with a major deficiency of the real: its unpredictability. In this sense the cliché functions as a kind of signal for certain emotional effects. Unlike genuine symbols, which constitute meaning by pointing beyond themselves, clichés depend on a pre-given and generally familiar spectrum of emotional response and aim not so much at meaning as effect.

This helps explain what seems at first surprising: the ability of cliché to convey a powerful feeling of sentimentality. The power of cliché is suggested, for example, by our response to hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner” when standing in the bleachers at a baseball game. Often, it is difficult not to be moved, though one’s feeling has little to do with patriotism and even less with musical appreciation. Undoubtedly many elements conspire to produce these familiar feelings—high spirits, the bustle of the crowd, anticipation of the game—but perhaps most important is the way a cliché, in this case the national anthem, plays so predictably on our emotions. The effect is pure sentimentality.

Kitsch vs. the Unrepeatability of Art

At least since Kant, it has been practically axiomatic that art cannot be produced by rules, that it not only arises from the artist’s intention but is also in some sense a gift.⁹ The tradition spoke here of inspiration. But in order to receive this gift, man must be receptive. Kitsch, in its retreat from experience, places a premium on being unreceptive. While its love of effect may encourage high-flown talk of inspiration, soul-piercing visions, and so on, it tends in fact to rely on clichés and accepted artistic conventions. Its relation to a genuine work of art has been summarized by Paweł Beylin as follows: “In the beginning there is the authentic work of art; then there follows a flowering of conventions, which congeal into stereotypes and then pass over into kitsch.” Similarly, Clement Greenberg charges in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” that “Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same.”

Unlike genuine art, then, kitsch, relying on readily available conventions, is eminently repeatable. It can be made according to rules, turned out according to recipe. Behind these diagnoses is the fact that kitsch is, in Hermann Broch’s term, a system of imitation.¹⁰ Imitating genuine art, kitsch looks like art (indeed, it is often more “aesthetic” than what it imitates¹¹) but lacks art’s spontaneity and connection with experience.

The Sacrifice of the Particular

Kitsch thus resembles what we call academic art in its lack of openness, its reliance on clichés, formulas, tried-and-true devices. But it is not, as Greenberg seems to suggest, simply the same as academic art. Even if academicism provides a fertile breeding ground for kitsch, it usually displays a spiritual reticence and modesty foreign to kitsch.

Consider Dwight Macdonald’s criticism of Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea. Noting Hemingway’s “fake biblical prose” and his striving for “Universal Significance,” Macdonald complains in Masscult and Midcult that the book has

no people, just two Eternal, Universal types. Indeed, for three-fourths it has one only one, since The Boy doesn’t go along on the fishing trip. Perhaps a Kafka could have made something of it, but in Hemingway’s realistic manner it is monotonous. “Then he began to pity the great fish”—that sort of thing. At times the author, rather desperate one imagines, has him talk to the fish and to the birds. He also talks to his hand: “How does it go, hand?”

Here too we see a great reliance on the stock response; Macdonald speaks of “Built-In reactions” and notes that “it is impossible not to identify the emotion he wants to arouse.” But we also see a striving for “Universal Significance,” for profound emotions and deep feelings not typically present in academic art.

This insulation of kitsch from experience helps to explain its peculiar abstract quality: Kitsch is always ready to sacrifice the particular for the general, the specific for the universal, the concrete for the abstract. Accordingly, Veronica Geng’s review in The New Yorker of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now laments that with the introduction of Colonel Kurtz, who is modeled all too conspicuously on Joseph Conrad’s character in Heart of Darkness, Coppola foregoes the attention to detail and particularity that strengthen the first half of the movie. Kurtz is not a character, not an individual man who has gone mad and does evil things; he is an abstraction of all this. As Geng insists, the attempt to “show the unshowable,” to portray “not just evil but Evil,” succeeds only in emptying the movie of whatever significance it might have had. The effect in the end, which is replete with dramatic readings from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” is one of “maudlin falsity.”

Instead of attempting to communicate individual beautiful, true, evil, human phenomena, kitsch strives to incarnate beauty, truth, evil, and humanity without loss. Art is more modest. It sees the universal in the particular, true, but it does not thereby dispense with the particular; its gaze remains focused on the particular because it realizes and accepts that, for man, the world speaks not abstractly or all at once but piecemeal, in fragments, through this tree, this landscape, this face, this web of relationships in which I find myself. Kitsch refuses to acknowledge this reality. It deals in what Broch calls “Platonic objectives” [platonische Zielsetzungen], adjectives illegitimately hypostasized into nouns. “Has any earthly eye,” he asks, “ever looked upon the beautiful or the truth? Certainly not . . . for finite [irdischen] men beauty and truth are available only in the form of individual beautiful or true phenomena.”

The Confusion of the Infinite with the Finite

Kitsch, like Romanticism, tends toward idealism. Thus its fondness for grand abstractions, for lofty religious or philosophical themes, for “spiritual” Tristan and Isolde–type relationships. Yet there is something peculiar about this idealism.

Noting Hegel’s observation that “chance and external factors completely determined the material” in traditional genre painting, Berthold Hinz points out in Art in the Third Reich that Nazi art, though indebted to the tradition of genre painting, underwent a telling metamorphosis: “Every child and every cow was now supposed to embody ‘the sacred mysteries of the natural order.’ This meant that children or cows . . . could no longer be what they were.” This transformation is in perfect accord with Hitler’s prescription for a new “German Art” that “shall and will be of eternal value.”

The difference between kitsch, with its idealism and talk of eternal values, and a genuinely religious art emerges when we consider more carefully what kitsch claims. Behind its idealism is the attempt to make the ideal completely available, that is, to render it finite and hence no longer ideal. At the same time, kitsch compounds this confusion by elevating some fragment of reality to an ideal, or pseudo-ideal, status. The great advantage of this double confusion is that the ideal, which is by definition not fully accessible, is now easily grasped and still has the afterglow or aura of ideality.

Fully available, kitsch relieves man of the unhappy necessity of having to confront an ambiguous future with no certain values to guide him; the question, What should I do? is now answered. Nor need man be content with the merely mundane. The aura of ideality that surrounds kitsch continually translates even simple, everyday tasks into cosmic events. Kitsch is thus a kind of idolatry; it refuses to recognize the ideal as ideal but at the same time sentimentalizes some aspect of reality, hoping to find in it a substitute for the lost ideal.

We see this idolatry clearly in Hitler’s quasi-Platonic description of art as a sensuous presentation of the idea. The difference is that for Hitler the ideal has degenerated into a pseudo-scientific concept of race: “As long as a people exists . . . it is the fixed pole in the flight of fleeting appearances. It is the being and the lasting permanence. And, indeed, for this reason, art as an expression of this being, is an eternal monument.”

Theodor Adorno touches on a central point when he writes in “The Culture Industry” that the

factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realized, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those factors in which discrepancy [Diskrepanz] appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others—a surrogate identity.

Not content with a striving for identity, kitsch consoles itself with that “surrogate identity.” Here we can see the relevance of Ludwig Giesz’s claim that what chiefly distinguishes art from kitsch is transcendence.

Kitsch refuses transcendence by replacing it with an immanent simulacrum: instead of a genuine ideal we get the abstract yet readily available notion of an Aryan soul—or, we can add, dozens of other such “ideals”: the Romantic cult of beauty, the bourgeois fetish of “the good life,” the myth of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; kitsch is highly adaptable and can easily accommodate itself to changing political or social fashions.

Again we should note Broch’s description of kitsch as a system of imitation. Imitation is the secret of both its remarkable adaptability and its enormous popularity. Like a chameleon, kitsch can disguise itself as whatever it is attached to. But unlike the traditional notion of art as an imitation of nature, what kitsch imitates is only the outward forms, the conventions, of its mode. Usually, since kitsch concentrates on copying what is conventional and conventions, by nature, are generally familiar and recognizable, this imitation involves some degree of simplification. Hence kitsch can often be “easier” and thus more popular than genuine art. Further—and again unlike the traditional notion of imitation—kitsch arises not as a response to but as a refusal of nature. There is no question of anything like inspiration. The mimesis of kitsch aims not at revelation but at emotional gratification. Here, too, is narcissism: Kitsch holds the mirror up not to nature but to itself. Not surprisingly, kitsch makes up for this essential superficiality by investing its creations with great pathos.

The Prominence of Effect

Powerful effects not only give us the impression of something grand but also help us forget what is perhaps the chief weakness of kitsch: its lack of grounding in reality. In this context, Nietzsche criticizes Wagner’s dream of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art that promised a new myth capable of integrating a fragmented society.¹²

The evolution of Nietzsche’s relationship to Wagner—discipleship, disillusionment, repudiation—chronicles the development of his awareness of the character, and the temptations, of kitsch. Nietzsche gradually came to realize that Wagner’s grandiose productions initiated not a new myth but a pseudo-myth. They had their origin not in any genuine vision of reintegration but in a refusal to acknowledge disintegration as disintegration. It is precisely Nietzsche’s insistence on honesty, which he describes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as the “youngest” of his virtues, that distinguishes his own attempts at myth-making from Wagner’s.

According to Nietzsche, Wagner was an “actor” who trafficked in “poses” and who had changed art into “histrionics.” As he writes in The Case Against Wagner, “Why then, have beauty? Why not rather that which is great, sublime, gigantic—that which moves masses?” Beauty, on Nietzsche’s essentially eighteenth-century model, implies order, restraint, distance, sobriety. Wagner subverts all this. A master at inducing “intimations” [das Ahnen], Wagner seeks to “throw” people. “What he wants is effect and nothing but effect,” complains Nietzsche, noting that “what is meant to have the effect of truth must not be true.” Wagner’s music is a “counterfeiting of transcendence and beyond,” a passionate rigmarole, a passionate posing; but, as Nietzsche points out, “nothing is cheaper than passion.”

II

But the essence of our time is ambiguity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on this slippery restlessness [das Gleitende] and is conscious of the fact that what other generations believed to be firm is really just slippery restlessness [das Gleitende].

—Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit”

Relative lack of distance, reliance on clichés and accepted artistic formulae, a penchant for the abstract over the concrete, a striving for effect, sentimentality, pretentiousness—these are some especially noteworthy characteristics of kitsch. There are other, related characteristics—for example, its tendency to “dress up” contemporary subjects with garb from the past (the same tendency can be seen in nineteenth-century architecture, which systematically plunders the past for suitably “impressive” façades) and its love of the exotic and far-off coupled with its celebration of home life and (slightly romanticized) domestic virtues.

Kitsch would be of limited interest—merely a curious aberration—if it were an isolated phenomenon. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In kitsch we see mirrored the spiritual situation of our age. This is what leads Orwell to diagnose Dalí as “a symptom of the world’s illness” and Nietzsche to interpret Wagner first of all as epitomizing modernity: “Through Wagner modernity speaks most intimately”; Wagner is the “modern artist par excellence,” purveying “all that the modern world requires most urgently.”

What is it about modernity that breeds kitsch? And what is the need that kitsch fulfills? Orwell looks to the “perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine age,” while Nietzsche points to an awareness of the homeless, fragmentary character of modern life together with a refusal to acknowledge that same reality.

Wherever we look for its origin—in the social upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or, with Nietzsche, in the subjectivism that underlies the “Copernican” turn of modern society—kitsch appears as an attempt to deny the insecurity that attends the collapse of traditional value structures. If modernity bequeathed man a new freedom, this freedom brought with it a new homelessness. Kitsch bears witness to man’s desire for home.

Yet the modern age has no monopoly on kitsch. Kitsch has its origin not in modernity but in the disintegration of values. “Every age of value disintegration [Wertzerfalls],” Broch notes, “is at the same time an age of kitsch.” He points to the last years of the Roman Empire as an example of another culture and time in which kitsch flourished.

Nevertheless, the precariousness of the modern situation makes it especially susceptible to kitsch. The rationalistic optimism of the Enlightenment marked man’s emancipation from superstition and his spiritual coming of age, but it also exiled him from traditional sources of support and solace, thus exhibiting how fragile his new freedom really was. Ironically, the triumph of reason seemed to signal the defeat of man. Nietzsche speaks here of nihilism, of the failure of values in the face of scrutiny by reason, and notes that “enlightenment is always followed by a darkening of men’s souls and a pessimistic coloring of life.” Kitsch is the predictable response: Freedom confronting its own groundlessness retreats to unfreedom. Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein (“It is so comfortable to be immature”). In this context, kitsch describes not only a kind of art but also—and perhaps more importantly—a Lebenshaltung, a sensibility or attitude toward life; Broch speaks here of “kitsch man.”

But this raises a problem. Perhaps the difficulty of arriving at a critically useful definition of kitsch is due to the simple fact that this effort has no legitimate place in art criticism. For what sense does it make to condemn a work of art as kitsch? Do not all such judgments—involving a moral criticism—rest on a confusion of categories, on a contamination of aesthetic judgment with ethical concerns? Didn’t Kant formulate the correct approach once and for all when he argued that our appreciation of art should be “disinterested”—disinterested, and hence excluding moral and practical considerations in principle as extraneous to the aesthetic value of an object?

There is no easy solution. To speak of kitsch is indeed to address art from not an aesthetic but an ethical standpoint. Yet there is obviously something right about the injunction to view art disinterestedly: Disinterested, we bracket what concerns us merely as individuals and, by “putting ourselves in the place of any other man,” achieve something like objectivity, the “enlarged mode of thought” that Kant commends. On the other hand, to deny kitsch a place in art criticism is not only to insist on the autonomy of the aesthetic realm but also to admit that much of what has been criticized as kitsch—think, for example, of Bouguereau—is in fact great art.

Few of us are willing to do this. At stake here is not only the legitimacy of formalist aesthetics but also the question of the vocation of art in our culture. In what sense does art still speak to us about what matters? Can we still assign it something like an ethical function? Or are all such attempts doomed from the start, undercut by the secular-rationalistic shape of our culture on the one side and, in response to this pressure, besieged by the constant temptation to sentimentalize on the other? The former threatens to reduce art to little more than refined entertainment; the latter encourages an aestheticizing self-deception.

A study of kitsch may help us to mediate this quandary. For in one sense the formalists are right: Kitsch does betray a “confusion of ethical and aesthetic categories.” Any view of art that hopes to do justice to kitsch will have to account for this confusion, for it is the essence of kitsch.¹³ Kitsch is thus said to be a border phenomenon, a hybrid.

It has its home in art but makes continual sallies abroad, not only intruding into the ethical but infiltrating it, transforming it into something aesthetic. In such border conflicts, the limits of an aesthetics committed to the autonomy of art are illuminated; perhaps here we can glimpse, if but dimly, what a genuine alternative might look like.

III

Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we wish to be deceived?

—Bishop Butler

Kitsch has been treated to interpretations almost as various as its manifestations.¹⁴ Out of the potpourri two distinct, though at bottom related, groups of interpretations come to the fore.

The Social Dimension

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt observes that “the much deplored devaluation of all things, that is, the loss of all intrinsic worth, begins with their transformation into values or commodities, for from this moment on they exist only in relation to some other thing which can be acquired in their stead.”

As Arnold Hauser shows in The Social History of Art, this reduction to commodities accompanies the triumph of economic liberalism, which, with its guiding principles of laissez-faire and individual freedom, reflected itself equally in the bourgeois “privatization” of life and in an essentially private art, an art that spoke to man not as part of a community but as an isolated individual. But art was no mere reflection of economic liberalism; it was also a “protest against the mechanization, levelling down and depersonalization of life connected with an economy left to run itself.”

Noting the rise of the autobiographical form, the novel of letters, and the historical romance, Hauser shows how this protest led to the “spiritualization” of art, to its withdrawal from the stage of outward, social reality. When the world is unresponsive to man’s demand for meaning, he turns away from the world and seeks meaning within. There thus developed a cult of feeling and sentiment that provided the perfect environment for kitsch. It is this sentimental flight from reality that lets Hauser condemn even such apparently harmless—indeed, edifying—works as Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela:

Richardson’s moralizing novels contain the germ of the most immoral art that has ever existed, namely the incitement to indulge in those wish-fantasies in which decency is only a means to an end, and the inducement to occupy oneself with mere illusions instead of striving for the solution of the real problems of life.

What Hauser diagnoses in its incipient manifestations already in Richardson we see full-blown in Romanticism. Despite its obvious achievements—enlargement and renewal of the poetic vocabulary, inauguration of a new and perhaps deeper appreciation of the texture of experience, the delicacy of moods, the shading of our interior life—Romanticism remained in essence a product of aestheticism.

Its inwardness and idealism and its alleged triumph over the limitations of time and space only call attention to its alienation from society and concrete social relations. “Life is so horrible,” writes Flaubert, “that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.”¹⁵

But why is life so horrible? As Hauser notes, “Whole classes of society and generations do not voluntarily relinquish the world.” Behind Romanticism he notes a feeling of homelessness and loneliness that became

the fundamental experience of the new generation; their whole outlook on the world was influenced by it. It assumed innumerable forms and found expression in a whole series of attempts to escape, of which turning to the past was merely the most pronounced. The escape to Utopia and the fairy tale, to the unconscious and the fantastic, the uncanny and the mysterious, to childhood and nature, to dreams and madness, were all disguised and more or less sublimated forms of the same feeling, of the same yearning for irresponsibility and a life free from suffering and frustration.

The soil for this change was prepared by the breakdown of the courtly tradition and the development of enlightenment rationalism on the one side and a sentimental emotionalism on the other. By the nineteenth century, as Broch shows, the rising middle classes, still guided by their ascetic-ethical patrimony, were confronted with the seemingly insoluble task of assimilating themselves to the disintegrating, and primarily aesthetic, aristocratic courtly tradition while still maintaining their fundamentally moral ethos.

Drawing on their pietistic background, they solved the problem by spiritualizing asceticism, transforming it into something essentially aesthetic. This explains their sentimentalization of love, home life, religion, fatherland, and all that belongs to the middle-class ethic. It is important to note the appropriation of the inward, subjectivistic dimension of pietism, the emphasis on the “priesthood of all believers,” which interiorized divine authority and made the individual soul the locus of revelation.

Not surprisingly, the results were a new arrogance coupled with a new homelessness—arrogance because the spirit had been lifted up with promises of the absolute and homelessness because this absolute, being at bottom a merely poetic projection, alienated man from the world and threw him back on himself. Here, according to Broch,

we have the origin of Romanticism: on the one hand the origin of the exaltation [Überschwänglichkeit] of the man who seeks with the exercise of all his powers—not least his artistic powers—to raise the mean, earthly, everyday round of affairs into the absolute or pseudo-absolute sphere, and, on the other hand, the origin of the frightful recoiling from the tremendous risk involved.

Romanticism escapes being kitsch to the extent that it preserves a critical relationship with reality, but its techniques and the situation that gave birth to them continually issue an invitation to forget this relationship and withdraw to another, “higher” reality. Thus Broch, while not identifying Romanticism with kitsch, argues that kitsch derives from the spiritual outlook of Romanticism.

Kitsch and Aestheticism

So long as we limit our discussion of kitsch to a discussion of art, we are on familiar turf. Kitsch is a certain kind of bad art. And if we have so far failed to develop criteria precise enough to enable us to define kitsch, we at least have identified a number of characteristics that let us recognize particular instances of kitsch and point out family resemblances among its varieties. Thus we can see how, say, Rod McKuen’s poetry, Erich Segal’s Love Story, and Cabanel’s Birth of Venus belong together as kitsch. And most of us—correctly, no doubt—are probably convinced that we could identify inhabitants of the various and well-populated realm of kitsch even though we may not be able to furnish convincing reasons for our choice.

We may balk, however, when told that kitsch, conceived in self-deception, in its refusal to acknowledge “opposites as opposites” (Nietzsche), is a problem belonging as much to ethics as to art criticism. It seems a long way from Cabanel to Broch’s assertion that kitsch is “the element of evil in the value system of art.” Evil? And what are we to make of his identification of Hitler and Nero as “kitsch men” par excellence whose canvases included the fates of entire nations? Can we take Broch seriously when he suggests that “he who produces kitsch is not someone who produces art of meagre value. He is not someone of little or no talent. He is definitely not to be judged according to the standard of aesthetics but is ethically depraved; he is a criminal who wills radical evil”?

Following Broch, Milan Kundera analyzed kitsch as a deliberate sentimentalization of reality. Like Broch, Kundera viewed kitsch not so much as an aesthetic as an ethical or metaphysical reality. What we generally think of as kitsch art is for Kundera merely one, rather minor, product of kitsch. At bottom, he says, kitsch is an instrument of forgetting. It offers man an escape from the burden of individuality. “Kitsch,” Kundera writes in his essay “Man Thinks, God Laughs,” “is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling.” In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera remarks that kitsch has its source in the “categorical agreement with being,” meaning that kitsch involves what he would call an “angelic” blindness to everything problematic and unaccommodating about experience. Ultimately, the ambition of kitsch is to set up “a folding screen to curtain off death.” Hence, for Kundera, as for Broch before him, kitsch appeared as a universal human temptation. “No matter how we scorn it,” he writes, “kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.” In this sense, kitsch bears witness to man’s desire to secure himself against the incursions of a reality that can never be adequately mastered.

In order to understand the “existential” assessments offered by writers such as Broch and Kundera, we must uncover the real agenda of kitsch. In essence a flight to counterfeit values, kitsch is born of man’s attempt to escape from a world that has ceased to speak meaningfully to him. Its cultivation of sentimentality, its reliance on clichés, and its striving for effect all work in the service of a radical, if disguised, attempt to subvert this reality by replacing it as far as possible with a fictitious world projected by the imagination.¹⁶ Of course all art is to some degree conventional, and all art creates illusions and stimulates feelings, but the question, as Hauser observes, is whether it leads away from or back to reality.¹⁷

Conceptually, the project of kitsch has its roots in aestheticism. We recognize a progenitor already in 1735 in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry, which introduced the term “aesthetics” in its modern sense. Baumgarten describes the poet as a “second god” whose work “ought to be like a world”—more precisely, like the world according to Leibniz, for whom the whole is a perfect harmony in which nothing is missing and nothing is superfluous. “Hence by analogy whatever is evident to the philosopher concerning the real world, the same ought to be thought of a poem,” Baumgarten writes.¹⁸

Order, consistency, unity—these are prime poetic virtues. But truth belongs not to aesthetics but to logic. The problem is, as Adorno suggests in “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” that “Order . . . is not good in itself. It would be so only as a good order.”

This aesthetic conception of art, mediated by Kant’s analysis of free beauty as the object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction, reappears in Kierkegaard’s discussion of the aesthetic mode of existence in the first volume of Either/Or. Here the disinterestedness characteristic of reflective judgment is elevated from an aesthetic principle into a program of life.¹⁹ This elevation is at the heart of kitsch. In the section called “A,” we find sketched a life devoted to keeping reality at bay. The world is transformed into a picture, into a collection of objects for play.

Importantly, aestheticism in this sense is a necessary corollary of the reflective shape of our culture. It rests on the same subjective turn that underlies the ideal of objectivity and makes modern science and technology possible. To the extent that man views the world objectively, he at the same time exiles himself from the world. He is no longer in the world as a caring, desiring individual; the world is for him as a thinking subject.

Nor is this reflectiveness a matter of individual choice, as if we could simply choose not to be reflective. It determines not only scientific but also, to a great extent, common-sense thinking. Through technology man has remade the world in his image; the world we live in is inseparable from the understanding that made it.

What Nietzsche describes as nihilism—encapsulated in his pronouncement of the death of God—has its foundation precisely in this subjectivism, this turn inward, that makes reason the measure of reality. Kitsch is a revolt against the loss of meaning that attends this triumph of reason. Thus Harries writes that “kitsch makes a project out of ignorance. It is characterized by the recognition of man’s transcendence over what he has made the center of his projects and by a refusal to acknowledge this.” Kitsch replaces one abstraction with another, more comforting one. Put simply, kitsch is an attempt to escape from the consequences of the aesthetic while remaining within the aesthetic.

Kierkegaard’s discussion in Either/Or of Eugène Scribe’s play First Love illustrates this strategy. He shows how the ironic distance that keeps the aesthete in control of his play can disintegrate. With Emmeline we have an aestheticism that has forgotten itself, surrendered itself to its own constructions. Here we make the move from aestheticism proper to kitsch. Hence the abstract, unreal character of Emmeline’s love: Brought up on romances, “undisturbed by the reality of life,” she loves not Charles but a poetically embellished figment of her imagination. The real Charles is merely an occasion for her reverie. Thus she loves with “an objective, mathematical love.” And if Charles should turn out to be the hated Rinville in disguise? No matter. Emmeline’s “fixed idea” makes her “too good a dialectician to let herself be convinced empirically.” That is true which conforms to her poetic construction; anything that falls out of line with it is simply a nuisance that has to be overlooked or removed.

It is not difficult to make this admittedly abstract sketch more concrete. Particularly graphic is the example offered by Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century. In his insightful and wide-ranging book Fin-de-siècle Vienna, Carl E. Schorske shows how the confrontation of the crumbling aristocratic order with the rising bourgeoisie undermined liberalism and created an atmosphere conducive to the development of an extreme aestheticism and modern mass movements. By 1900, Schorske notes, “the usual moralistic culture of the European bourgeoisie was in Austria both overlaid and undermined by an amoral Gefühlskultur [culture of sentiment].” He continues,

In its attempt at assimilation into the pre-existing aristocratic culture of grace, the educated bourgeoisie had appropriated the aesthetic, sensuous sensibility, but in a secularized, distorted, highly individuated form. Narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling were the consequence. The threat of the political mass movements lent new intensity to this already present trend by weakening the traditional liberal confidence in its own legacy of rationality, moral law, and progress. Art became transformed from an ornament to an essence, from an expression of value to a source of value.²⁰

This was the milieu in which the dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk got a political twist. It was the birth of what Schorske calls the “politics of fantasy,” the discovery of the “voluptuousness of the great idea” that promised redemption from the fragmentation and confusion of modern life. It is thus not surprising that we witness here the development of a particularly virulent strain of anti-Semitism with Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Karl Lueger.²¹

It would be a mistake to identify kitsch with the totalitarian politics of the twentieth century. Yet it is important to see that the two rest on similar presuppositions. As Arendt points out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, it was precisely the breakdown of traditional class society that led to the development of the psychology of the European mass man. Hence his chief characteristic is “not brutality and backwardness, but . . . isolation and lack of normal social relationships.” At bottom, totalitarianism, like kitsch, is a product of aestheticism. Totalitarian movements, Arendt writes, “conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.”

Harries writes of the “pseudo-religious appeal of totalitarianism and of certain religious sects”: “The follower of a totalitarian regime is not one who coolly embarks on a career of crime, although criminals may exploit this desire to follow, but one who seeks intoxication. There is no deliberation, but only the desire to be swept away, to let one’s individuality be absorbed by a greater order.”²²

In this context Arendt notes the claim of totalitarianism “to have abolished the separation between public and private life and to have restored a mysterious wholeness in man.” Always ready to sacrifice men for man, the “parts” for the “whole,” totalitarianism’s oft-noted “idealism” shows itself as “an unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world.” What appears in extreme form in totalitarianism is present in a less consistent fashion in the ethic of “business is business,” “war is war,” “l’art pour l’art”—this too is an aestheticism, and one that lends plausibility to Adorno’s provocative claim in “The Culture Industry” that

the bourgeois whose existence is split into a business and a private life, whose private life is split into keeping up his public image and intimacy, whose intimacy is split into the surly partnership of marriage and the bitter comfort of being quite alone, at odds with himself and everybody else, is already virtually a Nazi, replete both with enthusiasm and abuse.

As Broch said, “Every age of value disintegration is at the same time an age of kitsch.”

IV

Kitsch rests on a deliberate—if, paradoxically, an unconscious—blindness, on a distortion of reality. This accounts both for the Protean nature of kitsch and for its conceptual slipperiness: Able to mimic any art or attitude, kitsch cannot necessarily be distinguished from its authentic counterpart by any positive characteristic.²³

Especially in an age of crisis, genuine art, seeking to give expression to new values, inevitably flirts with kitsch. It, too, will set itself against the prevailing understanding of reality, and in its effort to give voice to something new it will approach kitsch in its extravagance. Peculiar to kitsch is what Broch and others describe as a loss of the “sense of reality.” It is in this sense that Harold Rosenberg, warning against the danger of intellectualizing kitsch, insists in “Pop Culture and Kitsch Criticism” that “there is no counter concept to kitsch. Its antagonist is not an idea but reality.” Of course, “reality” is by no means an unequivocal term—that is real which speaks to, which moves, me. Could anything be more subject to the vagaries of individual interpretation than “reality”? Perhaps not. But I am not convinced that our sense of reality is as private as such considerations might suggest. Do we not in an important sense live in one world? And if we are separated from our neighbor by language, custom, and class, are we not bound to him by a shared humanity and the ability to transcend what defines us as individuals and share in his, and indefinitely many other, points of view?

In any case, it is crucial to recognize the fact that in order to criticize something as kitsch we must be able to appeal to a shared, if not fully articulate, alternative. The concept of kitsch presupposes at least some notion of what would constitute genuine art, Giesz argues. Otherwise, any criticism would be pointless. In this respect, kitsch resembles such concepts as “alienation” and “inauthenticity”: They all operate against the background of an (often only intuitive) sense of what is genuine, unalienated, authentic.

We can begin to understand such an alternative by reconsidering the mechanism kitsch employs in its search for security. Arendt gives us an important clue when she writes that one of the chief characteristics of modern masses is that “they do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.” She thus notes their refusal to acknowledge the “fortuitousness that pervades reality. They are predisposed to all ideologies because they explain facts as mere examples of laws and eliminate coincidences by inventing an all-embracing omnipotence which is supposed to be at the root of every accident.” At bottom, this flight from “reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency” is an abrogation of the very condition that makes experience possible: an openness to what transcends the self.²⁴

As a search for security, kitsch has its foundation in what the tradition called pride. Unwilling to affirm himself as a free, finite being, man absolutizes freedom and then flees from the impotence it reveals. The apotheosis of freedom that characterizes aestheticism thus degenerates into servitude. Freedom made absolute deconstructs itself. Kitsch is a product of that deconstruction, an expression of man’s insecurity struggling to secure itself.

In this sense, kitsch appears as an “experiment against reality,”²⁵ as an attempt to free man from the burden of freedom. In truth, there can be no convincing argument against kitsch, only something akin to a cure. Thus Nietzsche observes in The Case Against Wagner that one does not resist Wagner with reasons—“one does not refute a sickness”—but with an intuition of health that requires above all “the presupposition in one’s body.”

This emphasis on the body is essential. The return from kitsch appears first of all as a return from the abstract to the concrete, a return to a world of particular opportunities and frustrations, to particular relationships through which man works out his destiny in concert with others. The alternative to kitsch appears not in any prescription or program but in the simple, rather homely ability to act freely in a world where freedom is limited and meaning appears piecemeal and in fragments. 

1. The etymology of the word “kitsch” is controverted. Ludwig Giesz notes two theories concerning its derivation. The first relates it onomatopoetically to the English word “sketch.” Traveling English or American businessmen, wanting mementos of their travels abroad, would ask for eine Skizze, a sketch, of some charming landscape or picturesque village scene. The second, apparently more likely, theory relates “kitsch” to the old German word kitschen, which suggests playing in or scraping up mud—particularly suggestive when we consider the dull, muddy color of much late nineteenth-century academic painting. Possibly, kitschen is etymologically related to verkitschen, “to sell off cheaply.” (Phänomenologie des Kitsches). Cf. also Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, and Alfred Götze, Trübners Deutsche Wörterbuch, vol. 4. ↩︎
2. For examples of this sort of kitsch the reader may wish to consult Aleksa Čelebonović, The Heyday of Salon Painting. This volume is interesting not least because its author views kitsch—which he prefers to call “bourgeois realism”—as a legitimate reflection of the needs of the class that it catered to. The spiritual complexion of the phenomenon is suggested by a look at some of the chapter titles: “A New Form of Piety,” “The Temptations of This World,” “Torture and Mortification,” “The Cult of the Dead,” “Medieval Legend,” “The Empire of the Night,” “Orientalism,” “Warlike Patriotism,” and “Gesture and Eroticism.” Other collections devoted to kitsch include Les chefs d’oeuvre du kitsch, by Jacques Sternberg, and Gillo Dorfles’s Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste. ↩︎
3. Cf. Otto Best, Das klebrige Argernis. ↩︎
4. “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí.” Cf. Giesz on the essentially superficial nature of the exoticism that kitsch traffics in. As Giesz points out, in the kitsch experience, the exotic is domesticated, cast in terms of the ruling clichés of the day. ↩︎
5. “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology, vol. 5. ↩︎
6. Cf. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in which she points out that camp has a lightness not shared by kitsch. ↩︎
7. Compare Kierkegaard’s description of the demonic “shut-upness” in The Concept of Dread: “The demoniacal does not shut itself up with something but shuts itself up; and in this lies the mystery of existence, the fact that unfreedom makes a prisoner precisely of itself. Freedom is constantly communicating . . . unfreedom becomes more and more shut up and wants no communication.” Also telling in this regard is the similarity between boredom and dread. Kierkegaard observes that both depend on “the nothingness that pervades reality.” Boredom, he writes in Either/Or, “causes a dizziness like that produced by looking down into a chasm, and this dizziness is the infinite.” Similarly, he writes in The Concept of Dread that “one may liken dread to dizziness. He whose eye chances to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. . . . Dread is the dizziness of freedom which occurs when the spirit would posit the synthesis [of soul and body], and freedom then gazes down into its own possibility, grasping at finiteness to sustain itself. In this dizziness, freedom succumbs.” Kitsch belongs here as a response to both boredom and dread; it is the result of that dizziness in which “freedom succumbs.” ↩︎
8. Cf. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future for a critical examination of the traditional notion that freedom is first of all an attribute of the will. ↩︎
9. Kritik der Urteilskraft, section 46. ↩︎
10. Hermann Broch, “Evil in the Value-System of Art,” in Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age. ↩︎
11. Best writes that “from this it is obvious that kitsch basically has to be more ‘aesthetic’ than authentic art, more natural and more lifelike than nature and life.” ↩︎
12. Cf. The Birth of Tragedy: “Without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity; only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement.” At this time, Nietzsche still looked to Wagner for “the rebirth of German myth.” ↩︎
13. In fact, Broch argues that the very “essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical with aesthetic categories.” ↩︎
14. See Best for a handy survey of several approaches to kitsch. ↩︎
15. Quoted in Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 4. ↩︎
16. Modris Eksteins discusses this aspect of kitsch in his book Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. “The beautiful lie,” he writes, is the essence of kitsch. “Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to a daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum.” I write about Eksteins’s book in “Guilt Trip: Versailles, Avant-garde & Kitsch” (The New Criterion, September 2014). As I note there, while the sentimentalization of reality that kitsch involves can be “sweet,” it can also be sour, malignant: “Hence the phenomenon of Nazi kitsch. . . . It was not confined to preposterous images of Hitler in gleaming armor astride a white steed and the like. It went much deeper. It was the aestheticizing not just of politics but of existence as a whole. ‘The German everyday shall be beautiful,’ insisted one Nazi motto.” ↩︎
17. See Hauser’s Social History of Art, vol. 3, as well as his Philosophy of Art History: “Even if it be true that we have to loosen our hold upon reality to a certain extent in order to fall under the spell of art, it is no less true that all genuine art leads us by a detour, which may be longer or shorter, back to reality in the end.” ↩︎
18. Compare Greenberg’s approving description of the modern avant-garde artist who “tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid . . . something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself” (“Avant-Garde and Kitsch”). ↩︎
19. Thus Hauser notes that “The romantic is not content to be romantic, he makes romanticism an ideal and a policy for the whole of life. He not only wants to portray life romantically, he wants to adapt life to art and to indulge in the illusion of an aesthetic-Utopian existence” (The Social History of Art, vol. 3). ↩︎
20. This phenomenon is obviously not confined to Austria. ↩︎
21. In this context, Schorske provocatively presents the Zionism of Theodor Herzl as a product of “romantic aestheticism.” ↩︎
22. In a Strange Land: An Exploration of Nihilism, dissertation, Yale University. ↩︎
23. Best notes that “the concept of ‘kitsch’ is never used in the sense of an aesthetically positive definition: its ambiguity achieves clarity [Einheit] only in a negative sense.” ↩︎
24. Thus Arendt suggests that totalitarianism destroys the “very capacity for experience.” ↩︎
25. I write about this at greater length in the title essay of my book Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age. ↩︎