What the thing is
Kitsch is a label for cheap, popular, marketable pictures and sketches.
In a wider sense it is a term applied to art and design perceived as naive imitation, overly eccentric, gratuitous or of banal taste, and it can be used of music and literature as well. The modern avant-garde traditionally opposed kitsch for its melodramatic tendencies, its superficial relationship with the human condition and its vulgar standards of beauty.
Where it came from
It emerged in Munich’s art markets in the 1860s–1870s among sellers and producers of visual goods.
In Das Buch vom Kitsch (1936), Hans Reimann defined it as a professional expression “born in a painter’s studio”. Kitsch is regarded as a modern phenomenon, coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, mass production, plastics, radio and television, the rise of the middle class and public education, all of which fed a perception that too much art was being made for popular taste. Study of kitsch was done almost exclusively in Germany until the 1970s, with Walter Benjamin an important scholar.
What it gets right
It names a real commercial category: cheap, popular, marketable visual goods.
In the first half of the 20th century the word was used of mass-produced pop-cultural products that lacked the conceptual depth of fine art. Since Pop Art emerged in the 1950s it has taken on highbrow appeal, often used knowingly, ironically, humorously or earnestly, and art deemed kitsch can be enjoyed sincerely. The Dogs Playing Poker paintings are an example.
What it gets wrong
It pretends to diagnose aesthetic failure, but offers no criteria beyond origin and price.
Theorists do propose criteria. Hermann Broch argued that the essence of kitsch is imitation: it mimics its immediate predecessor with no regard to ethics, copying the beautiful rather than the good. Tomáš Kulka proposed three conditions: kitsch depicts a beautiful or highly emotionally charged subject, the subject is instantly and effortlessly identifiable, and kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations with it. Roger Scruton called it fake art whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious.
Why it matters now
It reveals how moral language about taste still serves class distinctions in visual culture.
In Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, kitsch is a central motif: its narrator defines it as an aesthetic ideal that excludes everything essentially unacceptable in human existence, and links it to politics, including what he calls “totalitarian kitsch”. That idea has since been invoked in studies of the culture of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. There is also a Kitsch movement, an international movement of classical painters founded in 1998 on a philosophy proposed by Odd Nerdrum.
Is it worth your time
Yes—if you care how taste is weaponised in mass markets.
