Kitsch

Kitsch is art or design regarded as cheaply sentimental, excessively decorative, or imitative. It often relies on familiar emotions and readily accessible pleasures.

Camp: An aesthetic that treats artifice, exaggeration, and theatricality as sources of pleasure. Camp can embrace exaggeration knowingly, while kitsch is often judged as unreflective or sentimental.
Munich: A city in Germany that became a major center of art and culture in the nineteenth century. The word kitsch emerged in German-speaking art markets, with Munich often named in accounts of its early use.
Modernism: A movement in art and literature that broke with inherited forms and pursued new modes of expression. Modernist critics often opposed kitsch as formulaic, comforting, and aesthetically compromised.
Clement Greenberg: An American art critic who defended modernist art and attacked mass-produced cultural forms. His essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” made kitsch a major foil in modernist criticism.
Hummel Figurines: Mass-produced porcelain figures depicting idealized children, based on drawings by Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel. Their sentimental subjects and collectible production make them a familiar example in discussions of kitsch.
Taste: The capacity to make aesthetic judgments and the social standards that shape those judgments. Calling an object kitsch expresses a judgment shaped by contested standards of taste.
Gottfried Keller: A Swiss writer whose 1870s correspondence includes early uses of the word kitsch. Keller's letters provide evidence for the term's early circulation in German.
Avant-Garde: Innovative artistic work that challenges established conventions and institutions. The avant-garde's demand for difficulty and rupture sharply contrasts with kitsch's familiar pleasures.
Hermann Broch: An Austrian novelist and essayist who wrote influentially about kitsch and aesthetic values. Broch treated kitsch as an ethical and artistic problem, not merely a matter of decoration.
Black Velvet Painting: A popular painting style in which images are rendered on black velvet fabric. Its vivid imagery and inexpensive materials have often made it a target of kitsch judgments.

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