Kitsch: what is kitsch Discuss the different relationships between kitsch, architecture and design - Essay Example

tsch may be sentimental and nostalgic.5 The classic examples of kitsch, as an art form, are garden gnomes and Elvis paintings on black velvet.6 Leach (1997) described the design of the nouveau riche’s mansions in relation to kitsch – “there were coverings everywhere, stuffed Renaissance furniture, overly high plaster ceilings, and plaster busts of Goethe and Schiller around.”7 Kitsch, then, is, among other things, artifacts that people buy when they are pretentious and are trying to be something that they are not - such as the no-nothing hillbilly who won the lottery and goes out and purchases a plaster of paris version of Michaelangelo’s David.

8 While this may impress his buddies, it certainly would not impress an art aficionado. Kitsch is not an original art form, but, rather, as argued by Greenburg (2005), co-opts other art forms – plunders them, if you will.9 According to Greenburg, a pre-requisite of kitsch is “the availability close at hand of a fully formed cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, strategems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system and discards the rest.

”10 In other words, kitsch takes an established art form and copies it in the crudest manner. Kitsch, some have argued, is a peculiar phenomenon of the modern and post-modern age, although Olalquiaga (1998), would argue against this, because her book on kitsch encompasses art from as far back as the 1700s.11 The sociologists and cultural sociologists who have studied the art form have concluded that this is because the conditions to produce kitsch were not right before modernism. Such factors as the rise of the middle class, the decline of aristocracy, urbanization, increased proletariat literacy, increased leisure time, mass production and technological progress are considered to be “preconditions for kitsch,” argues Kulka,12