Marginalium

The Power Of Kitsch.

we all recognize kitsch when we come across it. The Barbie doll, Walt Disney’s Bambi, Santa Claus in the supermarket, Bing Crosby singing White Christmas, pictures of poodles with ribbons in their hair. At Christmas we are surrounded by kitsch - worn out cliches, which have lost their innocence without achieving wisdom. Children who believe in Santa Claus invest real emotions in a fiction. We who have ceased to believe have only fake emotions to offer. But the faking is pleasant. It feels good to pretend, and when we all join in, it is almost as though we were not pretending at all.

The kitsch object encourages you to think, “Look at me feeling this - how nice I am and how lovable.” That is why Oscar Wilde, referring to one of Dickens’s most sickly death-scenes, said that “a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell”.

And that, briefly, is why the modernists had such a horror of kitsch. Art, they believed, had, during the course of the 19th Century, lost the ability to distinguish precise and real emotion from its vague and self-satisfied substitute.

Something in this article sparked me to think about my other marginalia on the idea that ‘Innovation Bends Towards Decadence’. The artist pushes against it, but we work ever harder to embrace it? Something like that.