Around a week ago, a friend recounted how one of his uni lecturers had told the class that kitsch is the most difficult art form. As someone who claims to "love kitsch", I've since been thinking about exactly what it is that attracts me to kitsch, and whether that is even a suitable name for some of these things I like.
I avowedly love bright colours, bold jewellery, pop cultural artefacts and retro styling. I much admire the annual Eurovision Grand Prix, garden gnomes, the film
Xanadu, T-shirts with jokey slogans, my parents' old tile-topped coffee table that I hope to rescue from storage one day, the 1966
Batman movie, garden flamingos, the
Star Wars Holiday Special, and practically anything made of orange Bakelite. In most instances, there is a large degree of entertainment involved: they make me laugh, or at least bring a smile, perhaps a smirk, to my face.
But that's where I also start to feel uncomfortable about kitsch, because to recognise it as such ultimately means considering yourself to have some insight that others didn't.
Stephen Bayley in the UK
Independent (in a 1999 review of
The Artificial Kingdom by Celeste Olalquiaga), comes close to describing my feelings:
There are two sorts of kitsch, innocent and experienced. Innocent kitsch is uneducated taste in the fine and decorative arts: glass ornaments, bad reproductions of gallery art, lava lamps, flying ducks. Experienced kitsch admires the very same objects, although viewed through the contemptuous eyes of the cocksure, the self-important and the smart. Kitsch is bad art: the innocent don't know any better, the experienced, intoxicated by a lethal brew of existential doubt, multicultural relativism, postmodern irony and, recently, millenarian anxiety, think they are being clever.
So, what, appreciating kitsch comes down to one of two things: either you are some poor pleb who has no innate good taste and no art history degree to bless herself with, or you are an objectionable smart-arse who sails through life laughing at everything? Oh, and by the way — I like lava lamps, too!
While I would hate to be accused of having bad taste, I often wonder if there is such
a thing when it comes to aesthetic preferences. Surely it is sometimes as simple as what you like or don't like, what you find visually appealing or not. And, while Bayley is referring more to the kitsch-as-high-art-movement of artists such as Jeff Koons, I would equally hate to be surrounding myself with objects that please me only on an intellectual level. My love of kitsch lies in that happy middle ground. I believe garden gnomes to be little emblems of superficially comfortable suburbia. I also know them to be pleasantly non-functional and characterful products of the desire to stamp some individuality on houses and gardens, even in the face of their obviously mass manufactured nature. I'll go further:
I just think they look good.Kitsch is democratic, generally more affordable than its more "proper" cultural counterparts, and often bound up with specific memories for its owner.
Bayley goes on to write:
Kitsch is knowing and sly. It is patronising and condescending. As Eric Hobsbawm knew, "The less sophisticated the mass public, the greater the appeal of decoration." Kitsch is wicked because it makes fun of the less sophisticated, the credulous and the uneducated.
Modern design, on the other hand, aims to educate and dignify them.
How kind of modern design to want to help me! But I maintain that, after I have admired all the sophisticated, edifying high-end design and great art I can find, it is not through sheer ignorance that I enjoy going home to look at a few movie posters on my walls.
