Episode 56 - Kitsch
Transcript
David: 0:06
Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán,
Ellie: 0:08
And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:11
The podcast where two friends,
Ellie: 0:13
who are also professors,
David: 0:15
philosophy in dialogue with everyday.
Ellie: 0:18
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
David: 0:30
Ellie, the time has come for us to ask for money.
Ellie: 0:37
This is an Overthink first. We have tried for a very long time and actually succeeded, you know, for the past, almost two years to pay our student assistants a very fair wage. They help us with audio editing, production, podcast management, all kinds of amazing stuff. Research, transcription for accessibility.
David: 0:56
Therapy
Ellie: 0:59
Oh my God. If only we had gotten to that point, that would be amazing. We have not gotten to that point, but we've been able to pay them a fair wage. And then what's happened is that our tiny little grants that we get from our universities have run out and now we need a more sustainable source of funding.
David: 1:14
A lot of people who listen to the podcast have told me that they assume that we have this just like gigantic pot of money that we're sitting on for like our production costs. And everybody has been surprised when I tell them, no, we have been financing this largely out of pocket with the occasional, like tiny little grant that covers us for like a month or two max. And so.
Ellie: 1:38
Yeah. Yeah. We've, we've paid the students out of grants, including me reallocating travel funds for trips I couldn't take because of COVID but you and I pay completely out of pocket for our recording services such that I Venmo you every month or I should Venmo every month, sometimes I forget. And then you get like a fat charge, six months later. Anyway, all this is to say, should, should we say, tell listeners what's going on?
David: 2:00
So, all of this is to say that we have decided to launch our Patreon account.
Ellie: 2:05
And we have launched it, you can join it now.
David: 2:08
Now. And it really would mean the world to us if you would check out our Patreon, consider the various tiers, they all come with different benefits because we really wanna make this a long term self sustaining kind of project. The money from the Patreon is not meant to be for us to make a personal profit. It's meant to be fed back into the project.
Ellie: 2:33
Well, yeah, there's, there's no way it could make us personal profit.
David: 2:37
So get us out of the red, please.
Ellie: 2:39
Yeah, no, what it, I would say what it, what it is, therefore is largely so that you can continue enjoying the wonderful audio quality that you have now gotten used to because back in the old days, I was editing the audio. And then David started editing the audio. And then finally, we were able to hire students who actually have audio expertise and things have been amazing ever since. And then we also, like I said, have had students working for us on making the show accessible by offering really good transcriptions and, you know, uploading things to YouTube, making sure that we have our podcast scheduling in order all kinds of great stuff. The students are amazing. Everyone that we've hired. Shout out to all of those of you who have worked for us are great. And we would love to continue paying them a fair wage because as you probably know, from listening to Overthink, we think it's important to pay people fair wages in this very non-ideal capitalist society that we live in.
David: 3:29
So with that, please consider supporting our Patreon. We love you, and we hope you love us back.
Ellie: 3:35
And if you do, you will also have the chance to get access to exclusive bonus content. And also don't worry listeners. We won't be doing that Patreon spiel every time. It's just because we're super excited and it's our first time. And that went on for longer than I anticipated. So now we are getting to it. I'm so excited to talk about this topic today, David. We're talking about kitsch and I have to say ever since we started researching this episode, which both of us have wanted to do for quite some time, I have started to notice more and more kitsch elements in my life to such an extent that I become a little terrified.
David: 4:08
Like in your personal life? Uh,
Ellie: 4:10
Yeah. And in the media that I consume, in the clothes that I wear, and the activities that I do, I've become terrified that my whole life is kitsch. And I started looking around my apartment. I have candles shaped like corn cobs. I have a set of marble grapes on my coffee table. I love Disneyland, especially the Storybook Land ride, which is a set of mini homes that are made to look like the castles from various Disney movies.
David: 4:38
Very kitsch. Yes, very kitsch. I mean, you also, live in LA. I think Disneyland is just something that frames your, your experience of a lot of things. Maybe even unconsciously.
Ellie: 4:52
No, definitely. I, I actually blame if, if I, if I have anyone to blame for my kitschy lifestyle, I blame LA. This is just the kitschiest city. There are all kinds of pseudo architectural styles that are built up next to each other, constantly referencing say like the English countryside in one home and the next home is referencing Spanish colonialism. And then the next one is built to look like an Indian temple, you know?
David: 5:17
Just a hodgepodge, yes.
Ellie: 5:19
Yeah, and okay. Actually, shout out for my LA folks here. There is this incredible kitschy building in LA. It's my favorite one. It's known as the David House and it's on 3rd Street and it's basically this kind of unremarkable, one story home that has reproduction after reproduction of Michelangelo's David on top of, or instead of its fence, just like all over the front yard.
David: 5:48
So like the fence is made of of statues? Is that?
Ellie: 5:52
I can't remember if the statues are on top of the fence or if they're in lieu of a fence.
David: 5:57
Okay. I think we're splitting hairs.
Ellie: 6:01
It's just seamed into my mind that there were Davids all over the front lawn.
David: 6:05
That's amazing. Point it out to me next time that I'm in LA, which is my way of saying, invite me to LA sometime soon. And, um, you know, as you're talking about kitschy places, I'm thinking about a very different kitschy place. Last year, I went on vacation with a bunch of friends to Malta, which is a Mediterranean island. And we went to this town in the north of the island, where there is this tourist attraction called Popeye Village, which was the set for the 1980s live action film Popeye with Robin Williams.
Ellie: 6:40
I have heard about this, yes.
David: 6:43
So, yes, we went there and it is kitsch as kitsch can be. It's this set of houses that are built into the side of a cliff right next to the ocean. And the houses are all so exaggerated and cartoonish that they don't fit into the landscape at all. So they, they are almost absurd and there, there's just this jarring quality to this Popeye Village in the middle of, of the Maltese, uh, landscape and it's beautiful, but it's also kind of comedic and I think that's something essential to kitsch.
Ellie: 7:20
Oh, definitely. And I've also heard that it's a very popular place for British tourists to get married. I'm just gonna go on record here and say that contemporary British culture is probably among the kitschiest cultures in the world, but I think it's interesting, cause Malta is so far from the only place where this is the case. It's definitely the case in Croatia, where people are obsessed with Game of Thrones tours and all this stuff where places that have been inhabited by humans for a very, very, very long time and have super old architecture and tons of history end up attracting tourists because of the, the media appearances that they've made. These fake elements are more interesting.
David: 7:57
Yeah. And I mean, thinking about Popeye Village in Malta, it was literally a movie set and now it's become a tourist spot. And as we will discuss later today, there is a very close connection between kitsch and media and consumerism and commodification. So it's just this melange of things that produce this effect of something that shouldn't be there in the first place, right. So when you talked about various architectural features of LA, what stands out is that they don't go well together and neither does Popeye Village.
Ellie: 8:29
there's both a bricolage and an inauthenticity to them.
David: 8:34
Yeah, and a very forward inauthenticity, I would say. An inauthenticity that doesn't conceal itself.
Ellie: 8:40
Today, we're talking about kitsch.
David: 8:42
How does kitsch define an aesthetic category that is different from art?
Ellie: 8:47
Why has kitsch become so prevalent in the 20th and 21st centuries?
David: 8:52
And how does the kitschy get used as a tool of political propaganda? In 1939, the American art critic, Clemen Greenberg, whom I teach regularly wrote a really influential piece about kitsch called Avant-garde and Kitsch. And he argues that kitsch is basically the alter ego of avant-garde art. And by that he really means modernist painting from the late 19th and early 20th century. We know that for a very long time, painting was representational. It depicted real objects in the world, you know, a royal family, an animal, a natural landscape. And the idea was that painting would create an illusion of reality and it would fool the viewer into thinking that they are watching the thing itself. But according to Greenberg, at some point in the late 19th century, again, painting as an art form becomes essentially conscious of itself and a group of artists known as Avant-garde started trying to break away from this tradition of representationalist painting by moving in the direction of abstraction. And that is the essence of modernist painting. It's abstraction and an attempt to paint painting itself.
Ellie: 10:14
And I think it's worth noting here that this is a direct response to the invention and proliferation of photography, right. I think this is also part of the narrative is that once photography is able to perfect representation, painting goes through this identity crisis. And so it makes a turn towards a meta reflection upon itself.
David: 10:33
Yeah, because photography can beat painting at representation, but painting cannot beat photography. And so that's why painters start moving toward pure abstraction, which is something that you cannot get out of photography. Now, Greenberg, who is also an art historian says that we ought to think about the emergence of the avant garde through two historical and philosophical events. The first one is the legacy of Immanuel Kant, which is a slightly weird choice because he doesn't even go to Kant's writings on art in the third critique. He goes to the very first critique and he says something like this, in the same way that Kant used the tools of reason in the first critique in order to expose the limits of reason itself, so too the Avantgarde artist, the modernist paintings, started using the tools of painting in order to expose the limits of painting itself. And so, again, that's what modernism in painting is. It's an, it's an attempt to delimit the proper domain of painting. The second event that is important for making sense of Avantgarde modernism is Marx. And that's just his materialism. So, Marx very famously draws our attention to material practices of production and the way in which they shape social relations. And there's a way in which modernist paintings are doing the same thing at the level of art. So they start asking the question, what are the modes of production of painting? Well, that's literally paint brushes. It's a flat canvas. It's color. It's paint. And so what modernist painting tries to do is it draws our attention to those things. To surface, to line, to texture, again, as an alternative to maybe trying to be more representational.
Ellie: 12:24
I think this is a great exposition that you're giving David of some of Greenberg's main points. And I think just to kind of recap that because there's so much to unpack here and it's so rich. It's interesting to think about there being these sort of two divergent influences on what then becomes avant garde or modernist painting to which kitsch will be the response. And we have on the one hand, this legacy of Kant that you mentioned, which is the reflective moment of this internal critique. And then on the other hand, this Marxist pull into the material conditions of the world. So one example to maybe think about here would be the work of the modernist painter Piet Mondrian. And if you look at a Mondrian painting, I'm saying Mondrian, Mondrian, I always pronounce it Mondrian, but I guess I've never had to like say it in public before. So I
David: 13:16
Well, I, I can't help you with my ESL status. You're on your own girl.
Ellie: 13:22
But Mondrian paintings usually have a white background with then a few lines in primary colors. So if you look at a Mondrian painting and you see these basic lines on a canvas, what you see is that this painting is about color and shape, right? The work of Mondrian is about nothing besides the canvas, the painting itself, right. It encourages you to look at it as a surface.
David: 13:48
Yeah, it's abstraction, right? It's a, it's an exercise in abstraction.
Ellie: 13:52
Put simply, yes.
David: 13:53
Yeah. And you know, one of the really important arguments that Greenberg makes when thinking about Mondrian pieces, about the whole entourage of modernist painting is that modernist painting has a fundamentally revolutionary drive because there is a critique of the tradition of representationalism that had been so dominant. So it's sort of taking an ax to the root of what has been mainstream in painting. But, he says, the problem with thinking about the Avant garde as necessarily revolutionary is that ultimately every artist needs to get buddy, buddy with a rich person who's going to pay them for their art. You know, basically every artist has to ally themselves with somebody from the higher class in order to have some form of income. And historically they did this through the practice of aristocratic patronage. Basically artists would do representational art, which would at the same time appease their patrons because they could paint their rich buildings or their families, or even do a portrait of them. And also be understood by the general masses. So historically representationalism allowed artists to serve two
masters: 15:10
their patrons, and then the general masses at the same time. But in the early 20th century artists, again, like Mondrian, they want to be radical and critical and reject tradition, but they also still need to find a sugar daddy, which is according to Greenberg, the paradox of modernism that they want to be both revolutionary and also ally themselves with the higher class. And so the way they solve this dilemma is precisely by turning to abstraction because by painting abstract themes, they can appeal to the high culture value and education of their new patrons. While at the same time offering a critique of social institutions, especially internal to the art community. And unfortunately, this has the effect that their work ends up not being accessible to the general masses, which is why a lot of people complain about not understanding abstract art.
Ellie: 16:14
Okay. So all of this that you're talking about, David is explaining the rise in modernism and the turn towards abstraction within the sort of high brow art community. Kitsch, of course, is not at all high brow. So, we are kind of setting ourselves up to talk about kitsch. How then does the move to kitsch happen?
David: 16:33
That's a really good question. And the answer here is precisely in terms of the masses. So suddenly the masses are being given art that they don't understand by the Avant garde.
Ellie: 16:44
They see the Mondrian piece and they're like, if I had a ruler and some tape and paint, I could make that myself.
David: 16:49
I could do it myself. Yes. Yes. Classic line. And Greenberg does recognize that the reason that they don't have access to it is largely for social and economic reasons. They don't have access to education. They don't have access to museums and galleries. So it's not anything essential about the lower classes that prevents them from understanding it. It's their material reality. Nonetheless, the point is that a vacuum is created. An artistic vacuum, where suddenly you have all these people from the lower class, including a lot of people who have suddenly moved into cities because of the industrial revolution who don't have any access to culture and the culture that they see getting attention in the city, Avantgarde painting, they don't get. And so you have all these people who are hungry for some form of entertainment and culture. But who just don't get the culture that is around them. And so kitsch steps in, in the early 20th century to fill this void. It's, according to Greenberg, it's "art" for the lower classes, with "art" in, in air quotes.
Ellie: 17:56
Okay.
David: 17:57
cause it, it's like not really art, according to him.
Ellie: 18:01
Yeah. And there's a void filled by what we might otherwise call folk culture in the countryside, right? With all of these people moving now into cities and feeling alienated by the, the art that they're seeing in the fancy museums, these public museums around them. Okay. Because this is an episode largely about quote art or maybe, kitsch is not art. We will get to that in a moment. Let's think about another example here. And as you and I were researching this, David, we were thinking about examples of kitschy art and one that came to mind is the classic painting of dogs playing poker . And they're actually different versions of this painting, but one of them that's kind of old school is the 1894 painting called Poker Game by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge. And in this painting, There are a few different dogs who are sitting around a table playing poker, and there's like some alcohol in the foreground. There's a lamp
David: 18:54
Yeah, whiskey specifically.
Ellie: 18:56
Oh yes. Wait. It was an advertisement, right? Oh. But it was, it was an advertisement to advertise cigars, not to advertise whiskey, but the painting is actually exemplary of a pretty high brow representational style. But the content is pretty low brow, right. It's very silly and ridiculous. It's these dogs who are playing poker in an otherwise human setting.
David: 19:18
One of 'em has a pipe in his mouth or her mouth with glasses and they're trying to like
Ellie: 19:23
We're gonna say his it's an 1894 painting of dogs playing poker. It's definitely his.
David: 19:29
And like, you know, they have glasses and they're holding their cards with their little paws and it's fun. It's ridiculous. And you can look at it and enjoy it without having to go into the highly intellectual terrain that you would have to, if you're looking, say, at that Mondrian, right. And so if you just put this painting next to a Mondrian abstract painting, you see the difference that Greenberg is getting at between avant-garde art and kitsch art.
Ellie: 19:58
And thanks for going with us, listeners, on our description over an audio format of a painting. But the reason that we wanted to mention this painting example is because the term kitsch was originally applied exclusively to paintings. So I wanna talk a little bit about the etymology, you know, I'm a big fan of etymology. One of the interesting things about the word kitsch is that people don't know for certain how it originated. We know when and where it originated. It was in the 1860s and 70s among painters and art dealers in Munich, in Germany. And they used it to designate cheap artistic stuff. So just like what they thought was like crappy. They were like, this is kitsch. And later the word entered other European languages, such that by the end of the 1920s, it had become by and large, an international expression. And scholars have offered a few different potential candidates for the origin of this word among art dealers in Munich in the second half of the 19th century. One is that it's related to the German word "kitchen," which means to collect rubbish. But then I also read that it might be related to the English word "sketch." So a sketch as opposed to an actual artwork or painting. Maybe that entered the German word as kitsch. But whether or not this is the case, or maybe it's a different origin altogether kit is usually associated with what is vulgar, what is cheap, what is shallow, right. It's, it's superficial in a word. It's kitschy.
David: 21:26
And for me, kitsch does mean rubbish, maybe more so than sketch, but who knows, nobody knows the origin of the term, but Greenberg talks about the shallow point, the shallowness of kitsch itself. And he says that kitsch is mechanically produced. That's just what kitsch is. And it means that it can be consumed. Without any thought or effort. So it's like basically the Urban Outfitters of early 20th century culture, because as he says, it operates by formulas. It just repeats things without originality. And one phrase that he uses that stood out for me is he says that kitsch produces vicarious experience. It fools you into thinking that you are having a genuine aesthetic moment when in reality, you're just consuming something that has been mass produced.
Ellie: 22:16
Okay. So, let's think about these different features of kitsch, then, in relation to an example of a song, I have chosen the country song by the Zach Brown band called "Chicken Fried," which was very popular when we lived in Atlanta, David. And yeah, let's listen to a little bit and, and go through this.
Music:: 22:36
"You knew, well I'm a chicken fried, a cold beer on Friday night, a pair of jeans that fit just right. And the radio."
Ellie: 22:52
Okay. So, what does it mean to say that this song, if we're gonna call it kitsch, which I am very comfortable doing, operates by formulas? Cause that's one of the characteristics that you mentioned Greenberg associates with kitsch. Now, we can think about the fact that this song has a very classical verse chorus bridge type of structure, right? It's not reinventing the wheel. It is using existing musical formulas that are very tried and true within country music to produce a certain effect. And I don't know for certain about the way that this song in particular was produced. It's from 2008. So it might be a little bit before the rise of autotune and truly algorithmically driven songs, but it's super common nowadays, especially to find songs that literally are created by software systems rather than by people in order to maximize viral appeal on say, TikTok.
Music:: 23:49
"That mean the most, not where you live, what you drive over the price tag on your clothes."
David: 23:55
Well, and even beyond the musical formulas that are used within country music, people have been talking about the crisis of country music itself, recently, as being the fact that country music itself has become its own formula. So basically a lot of country songs sound the same and have the same structure. You just change a few words here and there. And so there, it, it might be that it's not just this country song that is kitsch. It might be that the entire genre of, of contemporary country. Um, I'm not going to include, uh, amazing ladies
Ellie: 24:29
Old school, Dolly Parton.
David: 24:31
Or like Loretta Lynn, you know, like that would not be kitsch in this particular sense.
Ellie: 24:36
I Mmm. Mm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And this also relates to another thing that you mentioned from his view, which is that kitsch produces vicarious experience. For Greenberg kitsch induces stock emotions, invoking emotions on a superficial level for a mere moment that gives the illusion of depth rather than actually creating a genuine emotional response, which, you know, maybe you're getting from a Loretta Lynn song, David.
David: 25:02
And I do. Yes.
Ellie: 25:03
Yeah, there is in this song, the warm, fuzzy feeling of a cold beer on a Friday night, a pair of jeans that fits just right and the radio on, right? Like it's over determined by this nostalgic sense of tapping into an already familiar emotion rather than creating a new emotion. And it kind of reminds me of John Dewey's theory, which we talked about in the Art as Commodity episode, that we're no longer invested in truly perceiving art in the present day. We're rather just recognizing it so often, right? It's like, oh, that is familiar to me. It's a symbol of emotional significance. Right? "Chicken Fried" is a symbol of emotional significance rather than having emotional significance in itself.
David: 25:47
Yeah. And Greenberg would say it's a vulgar symbol of emotional significance. Uh, he, he does talk about the vulgarization of aesthetic experience through kitsch. And so far as, I mean, think about that, like the feeling of a cold beer on a Friday night, like what kind of emotion is that that's like, literally just a sensation. It's coldness in your hand with jeans that fit just right. Okay. That that's something that doesn't force you to any critical horizon of, of any sort. Whereas if you compare that to again, uh, Loretta Lynn song, that is a reflection on white poverty in, uh, the Appalachians, there, you evoke a critical emotion or at least an emotion that has critical potential. So like night and day.
Ellie: 26:32
Yeah, well, and one of my favorite aspects of this song is that he goes from the cold beer on a Friday night to this weird invocation of American patriotism and the role of women in it. So he says, "See the love in my woman's eyes," my woman's eyes, "Feel the touch of a precious child and know a mother's love." And then says, "I thank God for my life and for the stars and stripes. May freedom forever fly, let it ring." And then it's, he says we have to salute the troops who have died. So there is American military industrial complex, vague invocations of the Christian right, notions of women's domesticity and maternal love. It is all there. And this reminds me of the work of the philosopher Tomáš Kulka whose work on kitsch I read in researching this episode. And one of the things that's quite interesting about Kulka's view of kitsch is that he adds something that is not already there in Greenberg. It's what he calls the third feature of kitsch in addition to this vicarious experience and operating by mechanical formulas. And this third feature of kitsch for Kulka is that kitsch doesn't substantially enrich our associations that relate to the depicted objects or themes. It just ends up reinforcing what we already know about a topic or theme. So I think this is obviously closely related to vicarious experience. That was kind of how I was already describing it. Maybe I'm influenced by Kulka, but I think what is important is that it's a reminder or reference point rather than an invitation or reflection. And this means that in addition to having that vicarious experience, whatever that vicarious experience is, a feeling of nostalgia of patriotism, of comfort, what really rises to the fore above all is a dominant theme of reassurance. And this is for Kulka is what distinguishes kitsch from art, because art invites reflection through complexity and distance from the observer. Whereas kitsch invites reassurance based on simplicity and, uh, kind of proximity to the observer.
David: 28:31
Well, in the simplicity or, I mean, we could say the basicness of, of kitsch.
Ellie: 28:37
Does it get, does it get more basic than "Chicken Fried?" does it?
David: 28:40
No, it really does not. And it seems that for Kulka, the basicness of kitsch is what allows us to differentiate it from art so that we can say kitsch is not really art. For Greenberg, that basicness is what makes kitsch also so politically dangerous because it sinks us into an experience of what he calls unreflected enjoyment. Yeah, we can enjoy it, but we don't reflect either on the thing itself or our enjoyment of it. And so it makes us passive in the face of the status.
Ellie: 29:12
So, David, in prepping for this episode, we really wanted to have a debate about kit. But what we realized is that there's actually very little by way of defenses of kitsch. The vast majority of what is written about it seems to be an agreement that it is a dangerous form of pseudo art and its dangers can range from it being banal, kind of deadening us to the status quo to actually being extremely politically harmful. Let's talk a little bit about the senses in which kitsch can be politically harmful.
David: 30:05
So to do that, let's go back to the Greenberg piece because that's where we find what I think is one of the most acute criticisms of kitsch along political lines. Because Greenberg just straight up says, kitsch is fascist. So it's not just politically dangerous, it's like the highest political danger in some way. And he gives a really interesting historical example, which highlights his theoretical point, which is that kitsch is a form of propaganda that speaks to the masses by regurgitating back their values so that they don't have to ever engage in any kind of reflection about their condition.
Ellie: 30:46
And that's that notion of unreflected enjoyment that you mentioned a moment ago. Mmm.
David: 30:50
Yes. And his concern is that when kitsch is deployed by somebody in a position of power, it allows that person to ingratiate themselves with the masses. So it, it has a populist appeal so that you can win over the masses very easily just by feeding them kitsch independently of what sort of political program you have in mind for those people. And here he uses the example of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. He says, "In the 1930s, there were two different views within the Nazi party about art. One was Hitler's view and another one by this Nazi high ranking general named Goebbels. Now, Hitler we know was a Philistine who really did not like, uh, modernist art because he thought it was degenerate. Goebbels on the other hand was somebody that really like avant garde art and he would try to get modern painters to come to Germany and show their work in Germany because he thought it was the artistic embodiment of the superiority of the Aryan race. So anyways, among the Nazis, they really couldn't agree whether it was avantgarde painting or kitsch that really reflected Nazi values. Greenberg says in the end, Hitler won. He won this cultural battle and the official party line became that we move away from modernist painting and we start using kitsch as political propaganda, which is why, if you look at Nazi posters from the 1930s, they are all super kitsch. Like they are the definition of kitsch itself and so the success of the Nazis, he says, was directly linked to the fact that they mobilized art as propaganda, which is kitsch.
Ellie: 32:46
Yeah. And you know, I actually don't know that I agree with Greenberg entirely on that point because the filmmaking of Leni Riefenstahl for instance, is complete Nazi propaganda. But I, I don't know if I would consider it kitsch. Actually it's much more on the avantgarde side of things. But I hear that general point, David, which is that Hitler found a way to tap into the desires and the identity of the Aryan people living in Germany. And one of the ways that he did that was through propaganda stick quote art, which we would actually call kitsch. But I think this raises the question. Is kitsch an aesthetic category in the same way that art is? Right, that can be used for politics, or is there actually a category of political kitsch? Right. So is it, is it an aesthetic category that can be used for politics or can it be a political category itself? And I think the view that you're describing is more the former you're thinking about kitsch as an aesthetic category that can be employed for propagandistic political purposes. And I think that's definitely the dominant view, but there's a book by Catherine A. Lugg that asserts that there is actually a political category of kitsch that she calls political kitsch and she defines political kitsch as a type of propaganda that incorporates familiar and easily understood art forms aka kitsch to shape the direction of public policy. And she mentions all kinds of examples from early 21st century American politics that she considers to be political kitsch, whether it's in the speeches of politicians or in Forest Gump as a film-- hilarious example of this, um, although, you know, she actually thinks it's quite nefarious.
David: 34:28
Yeah. I mean, I can see how one could think about a political kitsch, especially if we define kitsch in terms of mass production, following formulas, things that produce these fake vicarious experiences. When I think about things like, you know, the political platforms of contemporary politicians, they fit that category. You know, there're mass produce repeated, they repurpose elements independently of context. And in general, regurgitating ideas to the masses that have mass appeal with a pretense to being original and new and countercultural. So, so in that sense, I think a lot of politics can very easily be described as kitsch.
Ellie: 35:09
And one thing that you might think about here is what happened with 9/11. There was a unthinkable tragedy that occurred and then an almost immediate move to processing this national trauma through kitsch because kitsch is American culture. Like I said, I've just started to see it truly everywhere. There was a news article that came out around the time, noting things like all of these sweet and kind of pat messages of children with big eyes mourning the tragedy of 9/11, or we have the Dixie Chicks who are now known just as the Chicks, super kitschy name, right? Dixie Chicks. This kind of reference to a nostalgic American culture. Going back to the country music. The Dixie Chicks at the time then saying the star Spangled banner, there were all of these inspirational quotes that were going around and such and such. And so this way that as a culture, we oversimplify through kitsch in order to process what cannot actually be processed, especially in this kind of pat immediate way, we wanna just get over it. And so we have the inspirational quotes.
David: 36:19
Yeah, and the political category of kitsch exerts this pull downward at the level of thought where it's not only that you are just lost in this unreflected enjoyment, but that, that enjoyment prevents you from formulating interesting nuanced thoughts, because I think about the, in the aftermath of 9/11, and by the way, I moved to the U.S. as a teenager, like two months after nine 11. So this was my first experience of American culture. It was that attempt to process what had happened and what was very fascinating to me as a foreigner is that you couldn't possibly say anything nuanced about 9/11 or about international politics or about the nature of terrorism in that context, without it leading to the reaction that you're just anti-American. So yeah, you have this reductive pool that undermines critique, which again, as we saw Greenberg associates, not with kitsch, but with modernism. So maybe we would wanna think about whether there is a political modernism that offers an alternative to political kitsch.
Ellie: 37:31
Yeah, because, you know, when I was first thinking about whether there is a category of political kitsch, my instinct was no. Because my instinct was well, when we're talking about these kind of responses to 9/11, for instance, we're talking about aesthetic responses, the inspirational quotes, the cheesy paintings, the songs, right? And those are being used for political purposes. But I think one of the things that comes up a lot in the critiques of kitsch is that kitsch is bad because it is a replacement for art and art invites, that critical reflection that kitsch does not. And I actually think that you see kitsch in this context as a replacement for politics, right? It's not necessarily that what we needed was the modernist art piece reflecting on 9/11, although perhaps we also needed that. What we actually needed was open dialogue, a coming together through processing trauma, policy changes, these things that have to do with the social and political life and go beyond the aesthetic. And so kitsch is foreclosing those by offering an illusion of depth in their place.
David: 38:31
And I really feel like the term formulaic is apropos here, because once you have a formula that you have to apply mechanically, you know, like a cookie cutter to very different settings, well, it means that you yourself are becoming kitsch in the sense of a mass produced subject, right? Like who thinks mechanically in the same way that artistic kitsch is produced through mechanical reproduction.
Ellie: 38:56
Yes, hence my fear that my entire life is kitsch because this is the society that we live in. And, you know, I, I was also thinking so much after starting to reflect on kitsch about the Instagram explainers that were everywhere in June 2020 after the death of George Floyd. And even before the Instagram explainers, there were the infamous black squares. So people were posting these black squares on their Instagram then realizing like, oh no, this is preventing people from getting valuable information about racism in the U.S. And so then there was this move to all of these pat Instagram explainers, like the history of slavery in the U.S. and how that leads to racism today. And post after post about racism in one to four slides. And I think the black squares are political kitsch. And I also think that the Instagram explainers are political kitsch. And that's not to say that there wasn't any purpose for those. Like there was, I think some education that happened through those Instagram explainers, but I also think that at the end of the day, reposting those Instagram explainers became a replacement for meaningful anti-racist political action and work.
David: 40:11
Yeah, and I mean, around the same time, if we wanna take the notion of political kitsch a little further, we could say that the whole Trump era was the ultimate form kitsch, not only because of the use of clear propaganda desired to ingratiate oneself with the masses.
Ellie: 40:28
Invocation of completely meaningless symbols.
David: 40:31
Exactly. Um, but now I'm just like imagining all of the people in Trump's cabinet as the dogs playing poker. political kitsch.
Ellie: 40:42
Oh, my God.
David: 40:52
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Ellie: 41:08
So, I mentioned earlier that I've been feeling like my whole life is kitsch after researching this and listeners will remember if you've really been with Overthink for quite some time, that in a very early episode on nostalgia, David and I had a critique of the cottage core fashion slash lifestyle trend, which is basically a return to a pastoral, idyllic dream of making bespoke pies and wearing fabulous prairie style outfits. And I was so critical of it at the time. And I just have to say, since we recorded that episode almost two years ago, I have kind of gotten into some cottage core style. I have bought a few like white flowy, lace Victorian type of dresses. And there's no way to explain this interest of mine other than out some kitschy nostalgia. Like I'm just gonna put myself on blast there. It totally partakes of this myth of like a film, like Picnic at Hanging Rock, which I love. 1975 Peter Weir movie, highly recommend.
David: 42:20
The myth of pure white femininity. Uh
Ellie: 42:23
Yes, yes, no, no, no. Like I said, putting myself on blast here. I, I think this is like one way that I'm finding myself getting taken in by kitsch culture.
David: 42:33
Okay. I, I'm. Well, first of all, I'm surprised because we literally did a whole episode about this and I thought you would've gotten the message.
Ellie: 42:40
I know, although part of my political view is that we can only limit our hypocrisy to a certain degree under the conditions of late capitalism. And so I do also espouse the fact that although we should try and minimize hypocrisy where possible some hypocrisy is bound to occur and you can't always force your feelings in line with your beliefs.
David: 42:58
No, that's fine. And I mean, who cares if you bought a lacy dress. Like, I, it's not as if this is like the most egregious political act that one can perform today.
Ellie: 43:09
Patreon subscribers, the bonus content will include, um, me holding up one of these dresses.
David: 43:15
And I do have some like postcards that are kind of kitsch that I like, and that I've saved over the years so whatever. I mean, like aesthetically, I think there is something interesting about some forms of kitsch. So you're not on your own here, which does bring me to ask a question that is really
important, which is: 43:31
what should we do? With kitsch. I mean, we mentioned already that we looked for defenses of kitsch and we couldn't really find any. Most people seem to be in agreement that it's dangerous in art and in politics. And I'm wondering whether we should spend some time thinking about either the potential benefits of kitsch or the dangers of emphasizing the benefits of kitsch.
Ellie: 43:56
Yeah, I have two responses there. One is that arguably a Greenberg style critique of kitsch in favor of modernist art is pretty classist. Seems kind of ironic that I'm following up my talking about buying a fancy Victorian style dress with this point . But if you think about the "Chicken Fried," for instance, or the dogs playing poker, arguably, because we live in a society where so many people don't have the educational tools needed in order to understand abstract art. We shouldn't judge them for having kitsch as a response to that. And sure, even if you wanna say they're okay, we're not politically judging them, but we're still judging kitsch as an overall dangerous trend, a potential response to that could be that it is out of the very impoverishment of art and the transformation of art for the lower classes into kitsch that the ground might be paved for more revolutionary art. So, so that's, that's one initial response. I have, I have another thought, but I'll but what, what do you think in response to that one, David?
David: 45:02
Well, yeah, let's put a pin on the second one, because I wanna talk about the class point and I am amicable to that argument. I do worry about valorizing things that are accessible only, or legible only to certain classes either because of educational reasons or literally economic reasons. Who has $20 to spend on each member of one's family to go to the MoMA, uh, on a, on a Sunday afternoon?
Ellie: 45:29
Yeah. And it's like, oh, you don't understand Picasso? That's not your fault, but it is contributing to the complete demolition of democracy. Like, that's problematic too.
David: 45:38
Yeah. So it, yeah, it definitely does seem like it blames the wrong target. Nonetheless, there's a way to invert the argument about classism and argue that kitsch itself is classist. And I'm thinking here about an argument that Greenberg makes in his essay where he says, look, what really bothers me about kitsch is that it spreads like a disease because it's mechanically reproducible. So, literally you can produce a lot of the same thing and because it's very cheap, suddenly it becomes hyper accessible. And the problem here is that a lot of the lower classes that he's talking about, he says, these are people that have pastoral or rural traditional values. Traditional music or traditional folk dance. And so the problem with kitsch is that it exists in a liminal space between that rural culture and the high class high brow culture of the modernist. It's somewhere in between. Unfortunately, because it is mechanically reproducible. It starts spreading in both directions and it starts destroying both avantgarde painting and also more authentic traditional modes of art that have historically belonged to the lower classes, the working class, and let's just say the rural class as if that's that's coherent category. I do think it is, by the way.
Ellie: 47:01
Okay.
David: 47:01
And so yeah, there, there's a way in which it. It's actually serving the interest of the upper class to keep the lower class in a passive unreflective state.
Ellie: 47:12
Mm mm-hmm, well, and even from a high brow perspective, this is a slightly different point, so many of the gallery shows that you go to see in New York and LA are are just total kitsch at this point, too. Which I think also speaks to the way that the American education system works for all of the classes actually. So I mentioned Catherine Lugg earlier who has this category of political kitsch, and she thinks that the American education system operates based on kitsch. We have, instead of actual history lessons, we have a historical kitsch. We learn about George Washington and the cherry tree, rather than learning about the massacre in Tulsa.
David: 47:49
I see like a, kind of a political folklore, just these cute little stories and maybe even some rituals associated with the way in which we learned history. When I first moved to the US., I was taken aback by, by some of the ways in which they taught history here, like making you memorize the, the Declaration of Independence and like performing it in front of the classroom. I was just like, what is this? This is bizarre.
Ellie: 48:11
Totally. And this leads me, I think, into, to the second possible defensive kitsch that I'm thinking about, which is that kitsch is bad when it is replacing art or politics or something that invites more reflective, critical distance and action. Reflective, critical distance in the case of art, action in the case of politics. But when you have kitsch where otherwise there would just be nothing, that actually seems kind of fun and whimsical to me. So I'm thinking here back to the example of the David House on 3rd Street that I introduced at the beginning of the episode. That house is just like, you know, whatever one story house in LA that's mid-century ranch style. It's not particularly pretty, but by putting all of those David statues on the front lawn, the owners have created this super iconic house that brought me so much joy as a child that has been a conversation point over the years with various friends. And that just has, yeah, like, like I said, this whimsical element that doesn't seem to be in place of actual art. I, I don't wish that there were a single, genuine Roman statue in this person's random front lawn. It's just like in place of nothing. Seeing with the garden gnomes, which are a classic example of kitsch. Like why not have a garden gnome?
David: 49:26
Yeah, I, yeah, I think the whimsicality.
Ellie: 49:30
Whimsy?
David: 49:31
The whimsy. I think that's actually a much more compelling argument than it seems at first glance, especially because it can incite people into reconfiguring their relationship to their environment. So, you know, I, I imagine like a, a young kid whose first experience of art is something kitschy in their parents' living room, or, you know, you as a, as a young girl walking around and being like, "Oh my god, look at the funny house. I didn't know that you could play with architectural features like that."
Ellie: 50:02
Brief, brief sidebar. We're driving around, not walking around. This is LA we're talking about.
David: 50:05
In LA. Yes. Um, and additionally, I wanna make the point here that. It's not even as if catch and high art can be entirely dissociated from one another because there are forms of kitsch that are high art. We can think about something like a Warhol piece, which is kitsch, but it's also, you know, in the fancy museums, in large urban settings, or even a lot of contemporary art, like. Think about Koons', uh, balloon dogs, or really insert any of the major dudes in the contemporary art scene. There is something kitschy about them, especially because they do play with formulas. They do play with pop culture and there is an irreducible kitschiness to that. I have my own concerns about a lot of contemporary art, but it does fit into both categories, simultaneously. Kitsch and high brow art.
Ellie: 51:04
I don't know. I mean, I, I think one response to that though, might just be that the replacement of art with kitsch has transcended into the upper echelons of art nowadays. And that, that might actually be an even more dangerous phenomenon than what Greenberg was diagnosing, which was the replacement of art with kitsch for the lower classes.
David: 51:23
Well, and no, he does also talk about the replacement of the high forms of art in the, in the upper classes. And he says that because kitsch is so profitable because it has wide appeal, it's just like dangling this apple in front of artists who would otherwise do critical work to be like, "please sell out, all the people will love you," just like the fascist leader who wants to be in the arms of, of the masses. And in fact, one of the arguments that, that is often made about many of these contemporary artists is that they have sold out completely. Right. They've just like, like stepped on the gas and not looked back and given up any kind of hope or promise of, of launching a critique through their art. If anything, it's just a defense or an apology for the status quo.
Ellie: 52:15
Well, cause perhaps it's no surprise that the collectors of art are probably not the ones who are really gonna hold forth this torch of revolutionary artwork, right. They're likely to be the ones who are most invested in the perpetuation of the status quo.
David: 52:32
And they are the sugar daddies of the contemporary artists. And so you have to ally yourself with them.
Ellie: 52:38
And or try and find ways out of that. But in the meantime, maybe just get a garden gnome.
David: 52:48
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Ellie: 52:56
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David: 53:02
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Ellie: 53:13
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