Kitsch Quotes


If works of art were judged democratically, that is, according to how many people like them, kitsch would easily defeat all its competitors.

- Tomáš Kulka

Were the present less painful, the lie of kitsch would be less insistent.

- Richard Leppert

Kitsch parodies catharsis…It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch’s emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art’s despairing efforts…

- Theodor Adorno

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.

- Robert C. Solomon

Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.

- Frank Wedekind

How can we prevent this telescoping of cultures and styles from ending up in kitsch eclecticism, a cool hellenism excluding all critical judgment?

- Nicolas Bourriaud

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

- Hermann Broch

A genuine work of art relates critically to the very notion of art and even more to aesthetical values, otherwise it becomes kitsch.

- Bart Verschaffel

I'm interested in the way of looking at the world through the kitsch lens, the more emotional response ... (So) you're getting something greater than the sum of the parts.

- Michael Pearce

A real Rembrandt hung in a millionaire’s home elevator would undoubtedly make for kitsch.

- Matei Călinescu

Shakespeare, in fact, is America’s favorite kitsch.

- Alden T. Vaughan / Virginia M. Vaughan

"She died pleased with him for whom she lived, and went to charm him in another world," that is kitsch. Kitsch, however, is unable to confront unromantic reality, turning suffering instead into saccharine fantasy.

- Robin Headlam Wells (On Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet)

Don’t we all have an itch for kitsch?

- Matei Călinescu

While a forgery illegally exploits the elitist taste for rarity, a kitsch object insists on its anti elitist availability. The deceptive character of kitsch does not lie in whatever it may have in common with actual forgery but in its claim to supply its consumers with essentially the same kinds and qualities of beauty as those embodied in unique or rare and inaccessible originals.

- Matei Călinescu

Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them

- Hermann Broch (notes on the problem of kitsch 1950)

Kitsch is the great hedonist vehicle of our time.

- Philip Crick

Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.

- Slavoj Žižek

Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true kitsch, which always strives to please.

- Dennis Dutton

We normally label as kitsch only those objects whose creation we believe was motivated by manipulative intentions. We do not label kitsch that which has been made by innocent or naïve people or children, although it may express kitsch qualities focusing on beautiful objects.

- Ruth Lorand

A natural object has no intentions behind it (metaphysical arguments aside), and therefore a natural sunset is never kitsch in the strict sense. We sometimes call natural scenes “kitsch” only because we are used to seeing their depiction exploited for kitsch purposes.

- Ruth Lorand

Children are easily tempted by kitsch because they do not have the required sophistication to see beyond the represented beauty and resist its temptation.

- Ruth Lorand

We are attracted to kitsch, just as we are attracted to sweet words or chocolate cookies, even though we know that these are bad for us.

- Ruth Lorand

Life without Kitsch becomes unbearable.

- Friedensreich Hundertwasser (after denouncing the rigid aesthetics in art in demand for more kitsch)

Mimesis in modernity moves between these two poles - the sublime and the kitsch.

- Graham Ward

David portrayed his subjects in kitsch-Roman heroic attitudes and costumes

- Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls, from South of France

[The Preraphaelite] works were risible kitsch that could never quite be accepted into the cannon of good taste and good art.

- Mark Hudson, telegraph

Must one become seventy years old to recognize that one’s greatest strength lies in creating musical kitsch?

- Richard Strauss

Indeed, kitsch shadows the whole of Strauss’s output. [...] If kitsch were purged, what would be left of him?

- Robin Holloway

Strauss was well aware of the kitsch aspect of his style, referring, indeed, to his later opera, Arabella (1933) as an exercise in musical kitsch.

- David Huckvale

Great names are just as vulnerable to kitsch: Tchaikovsky, for example, whose idolization of Mozart in the suite Mozartiana represents exactly such flight from contemporary reality.

- David Huckvale

It is true that people derive genuine consolation from the kitsch that’s an indispensable part of our own funeral culture, a taste that’s reflected in the long history of sentimental productions of Romeo and Juliet

- Robin Headlam Wells

Kitsch of genius.

- Hermann Broch (about Tchaikovsky)

Kitsch directs our attention to pictured concepts, events, and objects. We respond to the subject of an example of Kitsch, not to the painting as an object of value in its own right.

- George Ellis Burcaw

Kitsch is designed to entertain, to divert, to persuade, or to propagandize; the painter wants the viewer to look through the painting “as if it were a window into nature” and respond to the subject matter.

- George Ellis Burcaw

whatever the cause or the context, it is sentimentality of kitsch that makes kitsch, kitsch and sentimentality that makes kitsch morally suspect if not immoral.

- Robert C. Solomon

Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition

- Robert C. Solomon

It seems to me that the real objection to kitsch and sentimentality is the rejection (or fear) of emotions

- George Ellis Burcaw

How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it. This too is kitsch

- Karsten Harries

The need for Kitsch arises when genuine emotion has become rare.

- Karsten Harries

Most theorists who praise camp as a subversive strategy view it as an ironic practice in opposition to sentimental kitsch.

- Kimberly C. Davis

Surely, the most kitsch painting in the world is the Mona Lisa

- Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

- Theodor Adorno

With the passage of years, not all of Dicken’s readers remained infatuated with his pathos. One generation’s sublimity became another generation’s kitsch.

- Peter Gay

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation… kitsch

- Theodor Adorno

It is possible to call Tolstoy Kitsch.

- Robert Scholes

Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas.

- Clement Greenberg

If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of…kitsch.

- Balthus

High kitsch, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be openly dismissed as cheap.

- Robert C. Solomon

High-class kitsch may well be “perfect” in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.)

- Robert C. Solomon

Kitsch “is German for ‘playing with mud’ and toying with this , we might speculate that the ‘mud’ in question is emotion, and that mucking around with emotions inevitably makes a person ‘dirty.’

- Robert C. Solomon

The chapel is classic kitsch.

- Frank Burch Brown

Kitsch of course only comes into existence when we recognize how and why it works.

- John Bayley

One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch.

- John Bayley

Vermeer’s woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

- John Bayley

Once kitsch is interpreted ironically, it ceases to be kitsch

- Dennis Dutton

Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch.

- Dennis Dutton

One of the hallmarks of kitsch is that lack of irony.

- Wendy Ryden and Ian Marshall

Irony could be marshaled as a resource to combat kitsch.

- Kathy Ferguson

Most theorists who praise camp as a subversive strategy view it as an ironic practice in opposition to sentimental kitsch.

- Kimberly C. Davis

Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.

- Karsten Harries

The Kitsch consumer wants to be enchanted.

- Karsten Harries

Not all kitsch is sweet.

- Karsten Harries

To call a work of art Kitsch is to condemn it for being bad art. But there is a great deal of bad art that we do not condemn as Kitsch. To condemn something as Kitsch is to condemn it on moral grounds.

- Karsten Harries

We meet thus in kitsch with a reappropriation of the results of past struggles.

- Karsten Harries

Broch spoke of the kitsch personality, which, faced with what is all too often ugly and disgusting, demands a more beautiful world.

- Karsten Harries

The goddess of beauty is the goddess Kitsch.

- Hermann Broch

Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical.

- Hermann Broch

The epitome of damp Victorian pseudo-Romantic kitsch

- Slavoj Žižek (on the Pre-raphaelites)

The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it’s subject from it’s deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.

- Slavoj Žižek

Did Wagner really accomplish the first step towards the kitschy ‘fetishization’ of music that reaches its apogee in classical Hollywood?"

- Slavoj Žižek

Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch

- Slavoj Žižek

Kitsch is a time capsule with a two-way ticket to the realm of myth - the collective or individual land of dreams.

- Celeste Olalquiaga

Art and irony would disintegrate the personality, kitsch makes it whole.

- Michael Curran, from Sentences

Kitsch makes things that are pretty as representations, but ugly as art, modern artists made things that are ugly as representations but beautiful as art.

- Michael Curran, from Sentences

Artists now decline to go to bed with beauty, fearing they’ll wake up with kitsch.

- Michael Curran, from Sentences

Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that’s not modern, which is most of it.

- Michael Curran, from Sentences

Art daunts us with its cold exacting dullness, kitsch gratifies us (with cosy democratic largesse).

- Michael Curran, from Sentences

Now we will throw these mediocre kitschmongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God.

- Arnold Schönberg, denouncing the music of Bizet, Stravinsky and Ravel in a letter to Alman Mahler, dated 1914.

At a certain point in history monuments became associated with kitsch, (it had never previously been so) and one might well ask why this unforeseen aesthetic and ethnic debasement of their values came about, or why monuments have not adapted to the times. Perhaps, instead of evoking authentic religious, patriotic or mystical sentiments, they evoke only the customary ersatz for these sentiments and have suffered the fate of becoming sentimental.

- Gillo Dorfles

If the embodiment of the fundamental idea of our age were to be found in Victorian architecture, in the Church of Cristo Re in Rome or the Church in Brasilia, in Moscow University or the Capitol in Washington, then our age would undoubtedly be called the ‘age of kitsch.’

- Hermann Broch

Kitsch aims to evoke the individual, in emotion and in intellect.

- Scott L. Montgomery, from Science as Kitsch

kitsch is a product of groups which do not posses their own cultural traditions and therefore adopt some stereotypes from other cultural traditions

- Jadwiga Jarnuszkiewiczowa

Tradition comes down from some canon of beauty: kitsch simply trusts those canonized beauties which exist and it is proved

- Krzysztof Piatkowski and Wojciech Burszta

I’m not entirely convinced that this can be done in this day and age - to revisit the past like Poussin or David. There are too many obstacles within our own modernness that prevent it. Too often the sincere artist ends up with pastiche or, worse, kitsch. It's virtually impossible to suspend belief and seriously accept models dressed in togas.

- David Ligare

One of the characteristics of kitsch is precisely the neutralization of 'extreme situations', particularly death, by turning them into some sentimental idyll.

- Saul Friedländer

Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths.

- Saul Friedländer

There is a kitsch of death. For example, death transformed into sweet sleep: The ‘good night, sweet prince’ of the last scene of Hamlet.

- Saul Friedländer

Kitsch generates pseudonovelty with no new insight into reality, or else does not concern itself at all with the new and produces its effects with more or less academic eclecticism.

- Hermann Broch

The imitation of beautiful nature becomes kitsch, because physics as embraced by infinite subjectivity cannot be imitated by thesis, by artifice, or by technology.

- Agnes Heller

Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.

- Walter Benjamin

In the dream world of commodity culture, kitsch is also the key to the awakening from the dream state of consumer capitalism in its baroque qualities of overabundance and excess.

- Catherine Russell

Were the present less painful, the lie of kitsch would be less insistent.

- Richard Leppert

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

- Theodor Adorno

The ornament as ornament is not kitsch. It first becomes kitsch through use in the wrong place, and through exaggeration.

- Hans Reimann

Kitsch... a bluff that seeks to bluff the heart, producing tears like an onion.

- Fritz Karpfen

The work of an artist who attempts lovingly to embrace reality, will ring false, will degenerate into kitsch.

- Karsten Harries

Things that are formed after old models in an epigonic manner, they are kitsch, since they fake the style and will of the time. Those objects that are formed without any existing models, they may be bad, but they are not kitsch! Because they do not fake anything past or present, because they do not lie.

- Fritz Karpfen

Melancholic kitsch utilizes allegory to invoke the ephemeral nature of life and to preserve memory.

- Celeste Olalquiaga

Kitsch is not identical with imperfect art; otherwise one would not have to find a new term for the thing in question.

- Hans-Dieter Gelfert

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

- Walter Benjamin

Kitsch is charged with stock emotions that spontaneously trigger an unreflective emotional response.

- Tomáš Kulka

There is a sort of mystery to kitsch. When did it begin? If it is just simply another name for faking emotions, it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition.

- Roger Scruton

The intention to make kitsch is far from enough in order to create kitsch. You must also have the talent for it; otherwise it becomes a parody.

- Hans Reimann

All of us alive today are or can be its prey, most of all the person who believes he is creating works of art when he is in fact creating mere kitsch objects.

- Gillo Dorfles

In paradise there would be no kitsch. The eye of the theologian sees the soil of kitsch in the consequences of the original sin.

- Richard T. Egenter

Kitsch is deep in its superficiality. Art is superficially deep.

- Odd Nerdrum

During the days of my youth, critics and art-lovers resorted freely to this term of abuse. Even some of the most renowned Old Masters were also pilloried as having manufactured insipid and sugary paintings that were offensive to good taste.

- E. H. Gombrich (On kitsch)

Kitsch lends itself to a definition in terms of a systematic attempt to fly from daily reality: in time and in space.

- Matei Călinescu

The precondition for kitsch, is the availability of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It draws its lifeblood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.

- Clement Greenberg

Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?

- Robert Musil

Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.

- Harold Rosenberg

The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality.

- Hermann Broch

I can't claim never to have wandererd over the border into kitsch myself. I knew when I began my project that making paintings of people in historical clothes was very problematic. That was one of the reasons I did it. It was dangerous, it was totally against the art laws.

- David Ligare

If I am not mistaken, the word "art" and "artist" did not exist during the Renaissance and before: there were simply architects, sculptors, and painters, practicing a trade.

- Maurits C. Escher

The destruction of images, the first signs of which reach back to the 1920s, eliminated a lot of kitsch and unworthy art, but ultimately it left behind a void.

- Pope Benedict XVI (On the new iconoclasm)

A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be...

- Hermann Broch

Since the purpose of kitsch is to please the greatest possible number of people, it always plays on the most common denominators.

- Tomáš Kulka

In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

- Roger Scruton

Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch.

- Robert Musil

Hollywood movies are a mass-produced and mass-reproduced medium and amount only to kitsch.

- Richard Taruskin

Kitsch is a symbol of the chain of generations, covering the raptures between past and present.

- Thomas Elsaesser

Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

- Clement Greenberg

Every ambiguous, false, tearful, emotional exaggeration brings about that typically kitsch attitude which could be defined as "sentimentality."

- Gillo Dorfles

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

- Theodor Adorno

Poetry is identified in the foundational essays on the subject as a primary exemplum and a genealogical source of kitsch.

- Daniel Tiffany

Kitsch lavishly relishes imitation. Art separates itself from nature as absolutely as possible.

- Richard Leppert

If you fall asleep on horseback, the horse will stop by the rock. Art is a car. Kitsch is a horse.

- Odd Nerdrum

Kitsch may be conveniently defined as a specifically aesthetic form of lying.

- Matei Călinescu

The objects or themes depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable.

- Tomáš Kulka

Kitsch does not represent the dichotomy of representational versus abstract painting, but rather that of the passionate versus the disinterested epxression.

- Jan-Ove Tuv

Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.

- Clement Greenberg

[Andrew Wyeht] our greatest living kitsch-meister.

- Robert Storr , former curator at MoMA

Kitsch is certainly not "bad art," it forms its own closed system.

- Hermann Broch

The festival: "Tristan." We all showed up in a big procession. First scene: magnificent! Second: slightly embarassing and kitschy. The final scene: not good either.

- Joseph Goebbels

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

- Milan Kundera

The peasant finds no "natural" urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort.

- Clement Greenberg

I listen to Tchaikovsky. He is both kitsch and profound. I love that lack of "Good taste."

- Cy Twombly

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

- Roger Scruton

You must neither completely nor partially copy the art of others. If so, you will be producing kitsch.

- Hermann Broch

We are all kitsch on our deathbeds.

- Odd Nerdrum

Kitsch and myth are both historical attempts to live outside history.

- Thomas Elsaesser

Kitsch is totally incompatible with even the mildest form of questioning; that is, with irony. Kitsch always means what it says, and says it literally. There are no two ways of reading kitsch. (Once kitsch is interpreted ironically, or as a parody, it ceases to be kitsch.)

- Tomáš Kulka