Kitsch

            A restaurant on College is called “Folly”. I wonder if it would be a mistake to eat there.
            As Professor Russell was setting up for class, the music he played was Celine Dion. I asked if he was doing that because the lecture was on the topic of “kitsch”, and he smiled and nodded. I confessed that I still don’t understand exactly what kitsch is. He said he didn’t think anyone does. I told him that I’d always thought it was those cute ornaments that people put on their shelves and windows. I told him about the house that I’d found in the east end that has it’s entire front covered with dolls. He suggested that might be beyond kitsch and in the realm of a different kind of art.
            He showed me some examples on his phone of the balloon animal sculptures by Jeff Koons that are considered to be kitsch as high art. He then found a Celine Dion song that he thought was even kitschier than what he’d played before. As we listened to “The Power of Love” by Jennifer Rush, Gunther Mende and Candy deRouge, as sung by Dion, one of the students asked, “We’re not allowed to like this, right?”
            Before we got to kitsch though, we started class with a continuation of the Cluster Theory for distinguishing between high and low art that we talked about the week before. Art’s mixture of True, Coherent, Masterful and Intuitive, on the high art side and Illusory, Formulaic, Masterless and Practical on the low art side are not about good and bad art. It would be better to say Fine art and Pop art, but all terms are misleading. One ingredient is not sufficient.
            We looked again at the images of Monet’s “A Bar at the Folies Bergere” beside Norman Rockwell’s “After the Prom”, and we voted with our iclickers to assess each work of art by each of the categories. Monet came out as high art, but our view of Norman Rockwell was mixed.
            We then moved on to Kitsch. Devlin showed us samples of the paintings of Thomas Kinkade that are extremely soft, sentimental and pretty portrayals of rural cottages that look like the settings for fairy tales. Then he showed us photos of the Hummel figurines that are based on the pastoral drawings of mostly children by Sister Hummel, a famous nun. All of the work is gaudy, garish, bright and pretty. They portray sentimental love, nostalgia, sweetness and cuteness. They are crude but evoke tender emotions. Kitsch gets a bad rap and people seem to have a moral problem with it.
            It is argued that kitsch is excessively immature, but so what? We have mature, tender emotions and it’s a sign of maturity to be childlike.
            It is argued that kitsch is manipulative but that is only true if you don’t want to experience it. It is argued that Kitsch is cheap and not deep, but damn you hipsters! What’s so great about being cynical snobs?
            It is argued that Kitsch is self-indulgent because it only values emotions for their own sake. But how is that any different from valuing irony for irony’s sake?
            The final argument is that Kitsch distorts reality by focusing only on a particular aspect of reality, but these critics just hate tender emotions.
            Javid came to class for the first time in a few weeks. He was so impressed with the lecture that he applauded, causing at least one other person to applaud as well.