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Kitsch: Its Meaning & Etymology

As to whether or not the picture above desecrates all that is holy in the worst taste possible, I cannot say. To help one make up one’s mind, I would remind deciders of a sentence by George Bernard Shaw. He said that every time a savage becomes a Christian, Christianity becomes a little more savage. Shaw’s statement proved a trifle too deep for the cross-clutchers, but that diminishes not one whit its veracity. Shaw had a mind that could picnic on a razor blade.

Today we’ll define the word kitsch and then seek its origin as a word.

Defining Kitsch

Kitsch is a tricky word to define with precision. In loose, slangy parlance, kitsch is merely ‘bad art.’ Wow, that really helps. Who decides what is bad art? Better definitions of kitsch include attention paid to the purpose of the object. Is it trash parading under a flag of high artistic purpose? Then raise the kitsch warning flag too. Does it claim aesthetic purpose, only to prove upon close examination that the object is cheap and tasteless? What about an inflatable, life-size, Mona Lisa, Japanese sex doll with adjustable breasts and “multi-depth” vagina? Yes, it exists. Would it be kitsch to give new meaning to the term art lover?

The really classy “Headless Dog Speaker Set”

Is it sleazy, mass-produced sentimental crap, like the Jesus lamp I once saw being offered for sale one block from the Vatican in Rome ? When one switched on the lamp, the plaster Jesus figure revolved slowly through 360 degrees and, upon each revolution, Jesus’ right arm moved to make the sign of the cross and bless the entire room. Two tiny LEDs, one inside each of Jesus’ eyeballs, lit up each time he lamp-blessed the room. For, yea, he is a lamp unto my crossword puzzle. All that was needed was for Jesus to sing, “Take me out to the ballgame.” What utter tat!

 

Exquisite sterling-silver penis pendant

 

There are bad definitions too. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary puts far too tight a choke-hold of the semantic neck of the word. Opines the lordly OED: kitsch is “art or objets d'art characterized by worthless pretentiousness; the qualities associated with such art or artifacts.” Way too narrow a definition!

Cleverer by far than the OED’s bollocksed statement of meaning is this one by Clement Greenberg in the Partisan Review (1939: Rev. VI. 40): “Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same.”

Once upon a pleasant 1970s autumn afternoon, in the Toronto kitchen of painter, poet and art critic Gary Michael Dault I took part in a discussion about kitsch with Gary’s dear friend, Canadian painter Harold Town, one of the most adept draftsmen Canada ever produced, Town insisted that a definition of kitsch centered on the purpose of the art under judgment. Kitsch, said Town, is the product of a creative gesture that only imitates the superficial appearances of art, by repeating clichés and formulae. The purpose of kitsch to reproduce the “look” of original art without any originality brought to bear upon the process, but only copying. In print, Harold Town had earlier stated that "art has no middle ground. Either it works or it doesn't. Bad art is not the enemy; mediocre art is the enemy. Ironically, the impetus for great art seems to grow from the chasm between failure and aspiration..."

Kitsch happens when there is no contest between failure and aspiration.

 

Hey Dudes, remember:

Only Jesus puts the puck in the net!

 

Watch Kitsch Live on TV!

You may watch the manufacture of kitsch every week on instructional television during those “learn-how-to-paint-a-Christmas-card” programs. You have probably already seen these 30-minute-per-episode sucker-bait shows.

Wee Wanda Webhand has wanted to paint like Georgia O’Keeffe ever since she made a Kleenex flower that day at Spastic Village. Now, at 65 years young, Wanda knows she lacks only the time to try. As for talent? Wanda has oodles; just ask her. We all do. Why, there’s nothing to this art scam, is there? So Wanda tunes in to “Paint With Fritz.”

A fat Eurotrash con artist, always with a trim goatee, waddles in front of the camera and shows Wanda six easy ways to “do” a pine tree impression, with minimum strokes-per-tree. The professor of painting and resident “artiste” is usually a failed Austrian yodeler. His is a sad story — he swallowed a cuckoo clock whole one morning when breakfast was late and, thereby rendering his uvula insensate, brought to an untimely and lamentable close his career as a professional yodeler at Swiss Cheese fairs.

No tardy fool he, Fritz forthwith skedaddled to America on a tramp steamer and set up as an art teacher in Beaverpubis, Oregon. Fritz’s exhibition catalogue is confined to a list of Midwestern budget motel lobbies. The painting tips that Fritz delivers to his TV viewer-students permit them to conjure from unfathomed reservoirs of aesthetic sensitivity the winter scene of a frozen stream trickling down a pine-bristled valley. “O Wanda! I just love the way you made the water look so real! Like, with little waves and all. But there’s no people. Couldn’t you add Santa Claus sodomizing one of the Three Wise Men behind a sheltering spruce bough? Just to give it that little je ne sais quoi of nouveau Noël?”

Clement Greenberg & Kitsch

The word kitsch had appeared in English early in the twentieth century, but it really entered the vocabulary of North American English after becoming a buzz word during the 1870s among German art critics. It drifted into English during the next 50 years and flourished in American art criticism from the 1920s onward.

American art critic Clement Greenburg defined it famously in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” a widely-reprinted Partisan Review essay as ersatz culture, “for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide.” Kitsch can be deceptive, he warned, adding, “It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naïve seeker of true light.”

The word kitsch’s spread in academic discourse can be traced directly to Greenberg’s accurate prophecy. Greenberg had sensitive antennae, finely tuned to pick up alterations in the artistic Zeitgeist, and he early recognized that, in the twentieth century, high art (e.g., Mondrian’s experiments in space and colour) and mass art (the labels on food, plastic toys, advertisements) were distinct but — the wily prediction — destined to influence each other profoundly: all this he said, 30 years before Andy Warhol.

 

Does the hideous plastic flower interfere with the gloves’ cleaning efficiency? Of course. Form diminishes function. The gloves are therefore kitschy.

 

Mass art is trashy but has vulgar élan. One thinks of Noel Coward’s remark about “the potency of cheap music.” The artist can make the art objects he creates partake of this kitschy street energy by borrowing it. The artist picks up a used egg carton, sprays it orange, and glues it to his latest construction, which also contains a plastic birdcage, a Dinky toy, a doorbell that does not ring, and a whalebone corset with most of the stays missing. Kitsch is sometimes defined by this separation of form from original function. The egg carton has its dull, daily usefulness as an object that holds and protects eggs and then is tossed into the paper-recycling bin. But now, glued to an art work, the piece as kitsch gives off new visual and semantic vibrations as part of a campy construction. “It’s good because it’s awful,” wrote Susan Sontag in “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” in her book Against Interpretation. We admit the garish or sentimental crappiness of the original object; at the same time we enjoy its very kitschiness.

In less formal criticism of popular art, kitsch is still used in its original German sense to mean ‘low-brow junk of poor quality’: for example, “That painting of a bullfighter on black velvet is pure kitsch.”

 

     

“Pope Soap on a Rope” beside Gary Busey’s facelift. But, Gare, can you get your eyelids closed at night?

 

Etymology of the Word Kitsch

The origin is unclear. There are 3 or 4 suggested origins. The etymology I find most cogent claims that the word kitsch was borrowed from German Rotwelsch ‘thieves’ slang’ some time in the 1870s. In the cant of German crooks, kitschen was a verb that meant ‘to pull the old switcheroo on a mark.’ A dishonest antique dealer places in his shop window a genuine antique candlestick. When a naïve customer enters to buy it, the dealer shows the trusting customer the genuine article. The customer agrees to buy the candlestick. The dealer takes it to the back of the shop “und er ist gekitscht!” ‘He is tricked with a switch!’ The dealer substitutes a fake candlestick and keeps the original antique to sell to the next innocent who happens into the shop. German art critics borrowed the verb, made it a noun, and applied it to phoney art that only looked like real art but was in fact spurious.

Now, kitschen earlier meant ‘to scrape up mud from the street’ and hence ‘to put something together in a slap-dash manner.’ That too could be an influencing semantic hue on the eventual meaning of kitsch in art.

Another possible source, although it is later than the crooks’ cant, may be the German verb verkitschen etwas, ‘to make a knock-off, to manufacture a cheap imitiation of.’

One German verb meaning ‘to cheapen’ is verkitschen. Verkitschen also has a slang meaning ‘to flog shoddy goods.’

 

Artists Considered Kitschy

Norman Rockwell (American 1894-1978) was branded as American kitsch once upon a time, as were the pseudo-pornographic nudes of the Frenchman William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), the American illustrations of Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) and the treacly work of Thomas Kinkade (American, 1958-), whose spuming oceans and twee cottages with twinkling candles in the windows have been called ‘utter kitsch.’ But taste changes as time flows. None of the kitsch labels has prevented some of their paintings from fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars at art auctions.

 

This florid fountain of toddler flesh and adult pre-copulative entwinement, starring a porno Venus at its centre, is a classic of artistic kitsch. Note that the Queen of Lust’s yummy pudendum is all shaved and pumiced, so that timorous, boyish males viewing her will not be put off by the depiction of a mature and powerful female body with pubic and axillary hair that announces sexual allure and feminine potency. Such a depilatory fastidiousness almost always betokens pornography. This painting is referenced in serious academic studies of kitsch. Bustling with implicit pedophilia, it is “The Birth of Venus” painted in 1879 by a popular and rich French artist of the day, William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

During France's nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle, oceans of succulent pink flesh were perfectly fit for the nouveau-bourgeois Parisian parlour, as long as their pornographic subtext was disguised and filtered by a tasteful reference to classical mythology. After all, those ancient Greeks were pretty much a bunch of Boy Scouts, weren’t they? The proliferation of merit badges in Attic buggery was a mere coincidence of the era, right?

Once again, form overpowers function here, if we agree that the purpose of the painting is to depict a mythic event. But — all that criticism said — some viewers of this painting consider it “high art,” stating that it delivers an aesthetic frisson which entitles it to the label masterpiece. Do you agree?

 

In conclusion, I must let loose the etymologist in me. This birth of Venus depicts the goddess of love rising from a sea shell. The ancient Romans borrowed that origin story from Greek mythology, where it resides in the very name of the Greek goddess of love, their equivalent of Venus, namely, Aphrodite. Aphros means ‘sea foam’ and ditos ‘sprung from.’ A goddess named Aphrodite rising from a sea shell is a simple sexual graphic reference. The sea foam is sperm and the sea shell cloven open is the birth gate of the vagina. Here the sexual necessaries of human reproduction are pleasantly symbolized and civilly presented — to ancient viewers who knew what they were looking at and did not blush. Instead they smiled, recognizing art as opposed to kitsch.

 

© 2009 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

Any comments, emendations, additional word lore?

Please email it to me at

canadiansayings@mountaincable.net