Image - Odd Nerdrum 'White Hermaphrodite' oil paint on linen 1992

Odd and Kitsch

While dichotomies are not representative of truths they do effect our perception, action and history - i think this is very much the case with the origins of the dichotomy of Art and Kitsch. These terms shift and evolve with time - are redefined according to politics, philosophy, economics, fashion -and are malleable because they are simply abstract ideals. The question "what is Art?" - is not something i'm interested in interrogating here... this is a question that is both far too infinite and far too subjective. Kitsch on the other hand seems to be far more identifiable - to the point of common assertion "oh its so Kitsch!". 

So Kitsch... just what is it? when did it begin? and why? As a descriptive term, Kitsch originated in the art markets of Munich in the 1860s and the 1870s - describing cheap, popular and marketable pictures and sketches. Kitsch is a derisive word that was put into use by the modernist elite and became associated with artefacts of mass culture, which were seen as sentimental, illegitimate and inferior.  In the 19th century, painting as well as the other arts held a much more influential role in society then we can imagine today. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862), which met universal hostility from the likes of Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Taine, who derided it for being sentimental, vulgar, artificial, and containing “neither truth nor greatness” - nevertheless became so popular with the public that the issues raised were soon on the agenda of the French national assembly.

Kitsch criticism is born from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of aesthetics. Kant had an enormous influence on the concept of ‘Fine Art’ as it came into being in the mid to late 18th century, he described the Kitsch appeal to the senses as “barbaric”. The presence of sentimentality, pathos and a lack of originality were the main accusations against it. Kant identified genius with originality and one could say that he was implicitly rejecting kitsch.  Another influential philosopher writing on fine art was Hegel, who emphasised the idea of the artist belonging to the spirit of his time, or zeitgeist. As an effect - working with emotional and 'un-modern' or archetypal motifs was referred to as kitsch from the second half of the 19th century onward. Kitsch is thus seen as ‘false’. Tomas Kulka (kitsch and art) asserts that the term was originally applied exclusively to paintings and soon spread to other disciples, such as music and composers such as Tchaikovsky, whom Hermann Brock refers to as “genialischer kitsch”, or kitsch of genius.

The word became popularised in the 1930s by Theodor Adorno, Hermann Broch, and Clement Greenberg, all of whom attempted to define Kitsch and Avant Garde as polar opposites. As with the origin of the term, this redefinition took place during a turbulent and violent era. Hitler was rising to power in Germany, Stalin held Russia in an iron grip and their propaganda was filled with illusionistic depictions of nude, athletic youths. Their films depicted beauty and sincerity with a sickening sweetness and so it was an easy task for Adorno, Broch and Greenberg to twist the popular definition of Kitsch into a deceitful tool of totalitarianism. Kitsch unlike Camp is tinged with negativity and a sense of alienation, even degradation. This has much to do with how 20th century modernist critics have dealt with the category of Kitsch. Hermann Broch, for example called it “the element of evil in the value system of art”, Theodor Adorno called it “poison” and clement Greenberg in is famous ‘Avant Garde and kitsch’ determined Kitsch to be “criminal”, “parasitic,” “mechanical” and even “pornographic”. All of these critics agreed that it was a “paradigm of aesthetic failure”.

For half a century or more Greenberg’s view was orthodoxy. To be a modern artist you had to turn your back on the literal image. Then in the 1980s the lines separating kitsch and art became blurred (think of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami).   Early in my career I developed an interest in the Nordic painter Odd Nerdrum - and his school of ‘Kitsch Painters’. Founded in 1998 upon a philosophy proposed by Odd Nerdrum, Kitsch painters embrace Kitsch as a positive term, not in opposition to art but its own structure of values and philosophy, which are separate to ‘Art’. Odd Nerdrums definition, introduced in his book ‘On Kitsch' (2001) suggests that Kitsch is synonymous with Humanism - the same conceptual framework employed during the Renaissance - and up until the beginning of the 19th century.  

Whatever we think of the history of modern art since Greenberg, we have to admit that the kitsch question is still with us. Just what is Kitsch? And if it is awful, why is it awful? The thing that strikes me is the strange fact that Kitsch is a modern phenomenon. No art, music or literature before the end of the 18th century seems to display it. Those medieval frescoes of sinners being forked into hell or wafted to heaven are primitive, even absurd. But somehow the feeling is real. What made the difference and what kind of difference was it? Mass production? The Enlightenment? The loss of religious faith? Or is it just that taste is a fragile thing, and not every age of civilisation can really provide it? and... where do we go from here?