We All Have Kitsch In Common
October 15, 2007
The word kitsch may not be familiar, but we live in a world drowned by its representations. Do garden gnomes and Precious Moments ring a bell? How about festivity inspired sweaters and bobble-heads? Kitsch is considered a clumsy way to reproduce and market higher art forms: judged to have emerged out of a rising middle class desire to imitate the status of the higher classes’ cultivated aesthetics. So how does this desire for sentimental and artistic expression fit into our identities?
We cannot all be accountable for good taste. Kitsch is the inevitable result of a capitalist society where art is no longer reserved for the aristocratic elite. So everybody has access to art, and the state of mass art reflects the taste of its mass audience. But can kitsch be good for us when we rely on exaggerated melodrama to express our feelings about the world?
After all, it’s not kitsch’s fault that we rely on Precious Moments’ merchandise to express sentimentality. Human beings have always relied on some medium to avoid the embarrassment that comes out of awkwardly expressing love or emotion. Companies, such as Hallmark, have created greeting card empires on the insecurities of the average person stuck trying to explain to their significant other how much they mean to them. We end up choosing the image or expression that comes as close as possible to how we feel, such as the following Hallmark birthday card: “For the Woman of My Dreams: The first time I saw you, I somehow knew you’d be important in my life. In my eyes, you were beautiful in so many ways. There was no doubt that I wanted to spend forever with you . . . Happy Birthday”.
Normalizing everyone’s experience of love for them isn’t exactly going to set the standard for beauty. Perhaps it might be comforting to know that millions of consumers feel the same anxiety, and find relief in sentimental packages. Yet having everyone resorting to the same greeting card to articulate their appreciation and love for someone special removes the significance when millions of other people will receive the exact same card.
Sometimes it seems that our tradition is headed towards an inheritance of cheap packages marketed to the crowds. We comply with warm and fuzzy feelings, but meanwhile our conception of art and feeling is becoming shallower. It may be satisfying to find an item that expresses your emotions to a person you care about, but it feels cheapened by the millions of other people who will find the exact same medium to express their own emotions. Can there still be room for individual expressions of sentiments, or do we let kitschy things do it for us because we’re too lazy?
I would rather not be judged for having a soft spot for sentimentality; but relying on a superficial medium to communicate our strongest passions seems to demean what we are capable of. Perhaps it’s better to allow ourselves room to ungraciously stumble out our feelings than let a smoothly packaged product do it for us. Not everyone can cultivate an aesthetic appreciation for art, but that doesn’t mean we can’t feel just as deeply about our reality in this world. It’s better to leave room for improvement and deepen our personal emotional communication than cheapen and stunt it.
Now you go...
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