Kitsch

About

Kitsch names sentimental, showy or mass-produced imagery that borrows the look of art and feeling without their difficulty: souvenir figurines, sugary prints, gilded plaster. The word spread from the Munich picture trade in the later 19th century, and in 1939 the critic Clement Greenberg cast it as the avant-garde's opposite in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’. The novelist Milan Kundera later described it as the second tear, the one shed at how moving it is to be moved.

Since the 1960s artists have used kitsch deliberately. Jeff Koons had Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) made in life-size gilded porcelain, and Pierre et Gilles hand-paint glossy photographs of saints and sailors. Vladimir Tretchikoff's Chinese Girl (c. 1952), endlessly reproduced, became a byword for kitsch and later a cult favourite. John Waters's films revel in bad taste, and Einar and Jamex de la Torre fuse blown glass with Mexican pop and religious imagery.