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Kitsch as Kitsch Can, or Can't:

An Introduction to a Symposium
on Kitsch, Class, and Political
Aesthetics
Jack Amariglio
Published online: 09 Dec 2009.

To cite this article: Jack Amariglio (2010) Kitsch as Kitsch Can, or Can't: An Introduction
to a Symposium on Kitsch, Class, and Political Aesthetics, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal
of Economics, Culture & Society, 22:1, 20-26, DOI: 10.1080/08935690903411552

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935690903411552

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 RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 1 (JANUARY 2010)

Kitsch as Kitsch Can, or Can’t: An

Introduction to a Symposium on Kitsch,
Class, and Political Aesthetics

Jack Amariglio
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This essay is an introduction to a Symposium on Kitsch, Class, and Political Aesthetics.

Kitsch, understood partly as ‘‘really bad taste,’’ holds a place in cultural circles as a
ubiquitous irritant, though one of ongoing curiosity because of its continuous
ambiguity. Kitsch provokes as much as it soothes, and the objects to which kitsch
refers are continually devalued in contrast to an authentic ‘‘class-conscious’’ culture.
Art historians and critics Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Gary Tedman, and Alexis Boylan
approach the historical legacy, the political fallout, and the contemporary use and
misuse of kitsch as a critical concept within art practice. The authors evaluate
whether kitsch can or can’t precipitate artistic and political opposition and
resistance. While kitsch’s main force may be directed toward class taste and
distinction, the authors also, to different degrees, bring forth kitsch’s appropriations
of historically constituted racist, sexist, elitist, and ethnic caricatures and repre-
sentations that have sapped kitsch of its potential critical strength.

Key Words: Kitsch, Art Criticism, Class, Marxist Art History, Political Aesthetics

Among the still controversial art/aesthetic moments and movements of primarily

twentieth-century modernity, kitsch, often thought of as ‘‘really bad taste,’’ holds its
place as a ubiquitous irritant, though an object of continuing curiosity.1 It provokes as
much as it soothes, and its pleasure is sublated quite frequently into guilty self-
gratifications, often, though, proclaimed out loud as a form of either aggressive or
sheepish defiance against the norms or demands of an ‘‘art establishment.’’ Its
enjoyments, to the extent there are any, are denied, sometimes vehemently and with
just the right amount of outraged, sometimes disinterested, disgust put forth. The
objects to which kitsch continues to refer are caught up in an eternal recurrence of
devaluation. They are regularly compared to an authentic*/not to mention ‘‘class-
conscious’’*/culture of preferred taste and correct aesthetic practice.

1. Right at the beginning of his highly influential and oft cited text, Gillo Dorfles blurts out with
good humor and a modicum of exasperation that it could not be said of ‘‘our age,’’ as it could of
all previous ones, that kitsch*/that is, ‘‘really bad taste*/did not exist (1969, 9/10).

ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/010020-07

– 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis
DOI: 10.1080/08935690903411552
 KITSCH, CLASS, AND POLITICAL AESTHETICS 21

What does kitsch do to deserve this particularly vexed dialectical existence? That
is, how does kitsch function discursively*/and specifically for our purposes or
concerns in Rethinking Marxism*/to elicit the foregrounding, and/but also the
supposedly paradoxical elision or elimination, of class as a decisive referral point in
the critical appreciation, practical implications, and actions inspired by art and
aesthetic experiences? In what ways can kitsch illuminate, if not closely trace, a
history of class struggle both in and out of artistic practices? Can kitsch overcome,
through deliberate expropriations, its imbrication and embeddedness in discourses
that promote elitism (or its opposite), discrimination (or its opposite), racism (what
exactly is its opposite?), and much else that is ‘‘reactionary’’ besides? Are the objects
and experiences that we refer to as kitsch always/already preconstituted, regardless
of the twists and turns of contemporary Western and non-Western global history and
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culture, to function as the privileged sign of an overimagined ‘‘fullness’’ to the point

of saturation and nausea (think black velvet canvases) of class, race, nation, and
gender distinction? Or, in stark contrast, is kitsch, or the objects to which the formal
concept gestures, the archetypal expression of the bankrupt and equally nauseating
emptiness of class dreams deferred?2 If it’s kitsch as kitsch can (or can’t), then what
exactly can kitsch do in this or any conjuncture looking for a (revolutionary) class-
inspired culture?
What would it mean, for example, to rely on, as a principal cultural weapon in the
class wars as Monica Kjellman-Chapin (2010) puts it, ‘‘a category of production that
deliberately panders to popular tastes,’’ one that ‘‘is considered illegitimate,
insincere, inauthentic, and without redeeming aesthetic merit’’? As Kjellman-Chapin
explains, from its earliest use as a term within cultural circles, kitsch has described a
form of outright lying, or counterfeiting, whereas real art and the prodigious vision,
insight, and effort it requires was historically substituted for by mass-produced,
knock-off, knick-knackish icons designed for a growing tourist trade based on rising
disposable incomes. That kitsch objects were market commodities often sealed the
deal, but this, of course, left mostly untouched as an object of radical objection the
political economy of ‘‘legitimate’’ art and also exposed the labor and production of
kitsch workers/artists to a kind of critique that obscured their own exploitation and
that of every other producer of cultural goods. In this way, one notion of class*/I

2. Let us go a little further. In the absence of such Marxian-influenced research, or at least to my

knowledge, what difference could we discern in the class position of kitsch workers from those
whose output does not consist of the manufacture of kitsch objects? (And here, with the term
‘‘manufacture,’’ I include all those we label ‘‘artists,’’ making no distinction between them and
their kitsch-producing sisters and brothers.) Though it may not be immediately plausible, I would
like to place under interrogation a hypothesis that there could be a notable difference in many
dimensions of economic, political, and cultural life that may adhere to the production of surplus
labor in kitsch production processes as opposed to surplus labor provided and exploited in
nonkitsch production. Among other things, I would want to investigate if there is any variation
and, if so, of what sort, in the kind of exploitation (capitalist? feudal? communist? self-
exploitative? and so forth) that tends to fall to the realm of kitsch, assuming that one could even
identify and distinguish kitsch from its others. Likewise, I would also suggest that a proper
Marxian class analysis might ask the question of the ways in which class exploitation stimulates,
modifies, and overdetermines the visions for their objects and practices that occupy kitsch
workers and their colleagues.
 22 AMARIGLIO

would argue a Marxian version based on the key significance of the form of surplus-
labor production and extraction*/was left out in preference to reading class struggle
from the standpoint of the veracity of art objects, the taste that these objects
inculcate or express, and the affections that are embodied or released in the doing
and consuming of such objects.
While kitsch may be multifarious and come in all shapes, sizes, and colors (Kjellman
asserts that ‘‘Kitsch is understood to have few properties unto itself, except in the
negative’’), its prevailing function, or so its critics have believed, is to subtend and
subvert the main sites and events that could otherwise carry out class transforma-
tion.3 Yet, though always impoverished as to producing a veritable class culture and
reputable, because inspiring, art, kitsch’s negativity does in its way call attention, as
few other art movements and manifestations have done, to the commodity and class
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status of art and artifacts. Not necessarily capable of autocritique (but then, what
concept or movement is or should be expected to be?), its existence as a falsehood,
first sharply distinguishing and then blurring the difference between ‘‘high’’ and
‘‘low,’’ unfurls a kind of dialectic that, for some, is at least a place for critique to
begin, as Marx often advised. For her part, Kjellman-Chapin notes the class prejudices
that initially inclined left and Marxist critics to employ kitsch as a discursive lens to
reveal traces of class in art and culture*/though often by way of bemoaning the
emulative and easy instincts, and not creative or intellectual potential capacities, of
ground-down workers under capitalism (this despite the fact that, when name-calling
was needed, kitsch was disparaged as the near biological character of the ‘‘middle
class’’).
Perhaps, though, the wave of change that has been hailed or reviled under the
name of ‘‘postmodernity’’ has also given way to a more intricate view such that, as
Kjellman-Chapin notes, no particular class position or taste maps on to a kitsch/
nonkitsch (or even commodity/noncommodity) difference in art and consumption.
This argument, which Kjellman-Chapin begins to explore in her essay, is crucial to a
view of class struggle in which culture and class don’t meet up in a mirror dance (it’s
more like a dance of mirrors instead). The possibility for class position to have no
particular relation to taste, or art, or types of consumption*/the idea that workers
don’t prefer to be lied to, or to lie down, as a persistent form of their consciousness
and pleasure*/may release kitsch from its assigned heavy lifting as an industrial or
postindustrial mystificatory steel curtain, a rusty fetishism in which kitsch objects are
treated as unique in never really being themselves (how this should differ from
‘‘real,’’ supposedly nonfetishized objects is the challenge I would pose to modernist

3. The sheer number and diversity of things that can and have fallen under the category of kitsch
hints that the arguments made by the contributors to this symposium are, of course, dependent
upon what particular attributes are associated with either this or that object or this or that
artist/producer. The recent death of Robert Colescott, for example, or the sparkling review of
Lyle Ashton Harris’s 1994 exhibition, detailed in Gen Doy’s Materializing Art History (1998),
reminds me that the choice of what one uses for a boundary marker between kitsch and
whatever is its other or opposite as critique can determine in an instant one radical’s devastating
sendup of all things class-designated or racialized or gendered, while it likewise can bring out
strong denunciations of the ‘‘too playful’’ dimension of a painful history that shouldn’t be played
with. But, certainly, no contributor has argued the opposite.
 KITSCH, CLASS, AND POLITICAL AESTHETICS 23

Marxist critics of kitsch and, extending further, of most consumption within

capitalism). Whether kitsch appropriation for these somewhat more oppositional
and radical purposes requires kitsch appreciation, as Kjellman-Chapin discusses, is
dubious and, in the end, I think, unnecessary as a cultural tactic or motivational
sentiment. However, Kjellman-Chapin raises some prescient questions when she asks,
‘‘are there other ways of considering kitsch and its place on the map of modernist and
now postmodernist artistic practices? Can boundaries be redrawn, categories
reconceptualized, the terms we as art historians and material culture theorists use
be rethought? Some might ask whether indeed they should or need be; after all, the
traditional hierarchies of high/low, mass/upper class, popular/elite, art/kitsch, and
so on have largely been dismantled, the boundaries that separated them revealed to
be illusory, cultural constructions of an academe bent on maintaining its own
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hegemony.’’ Indeed, can the rethinking that Kjellman-Chapin optimistically describes

follow a path similar to that taken by the revaluation of modernist Marxism? And will
class and the war against all forms of economic exploitation be part of the subsequent
transvaluation?
For his part, Gary Tedman (2010) situates kitsch as a ‘‘material manifestation of
class struggle,’’ thereby historicizing kitsch as an adjacent or perhaps determining
cause to the centuries-old battle over economic exploitation. Here, class does double
duty, first as a designation for politically divided, social groupings of workers and
their dominant others, as they emerged in the late Middle Ages out of a guild-
controlled, feudal European past. But the concept of class also glosses a morally
suspect economic process*/one that persists in capitalism as much as it had in
feudalism*/in which surpluses are produced and appropriated by largely different
socioeconomic agents. The freedom that capitalism brought to craft and artisanal
workers and the displacement or transfer of control over art objects and practices
brought forth as well new powers and actions of an increasingly repressive bourgeois
state. By the early sixteenth century, Tedman avers, the rise of the particular art
movement known as Mannerism (first in Italy, then in the beginnings of the French
Academies) gave impetus to the inaugural expressions of kitsch, culminating in the
nineteenth century with bona fide ‘‘souvenirs’’ from such high places as Versailles as
representations of a taste and aesthetic sensibility associated with both sedentary
elites and modern, mobile, and middle-class tourists.
And this development occurred on the basis of the increased prevalence, supported
by the state, of what Tedman (1999) has previously labeled (following Althusser)
‘‘aesthetic state apparatuses,’’ such as the Academies. In these aesthetic state
apparatuses, a fundamental and portentous split emerged between art and art
practices that were either ‘‘classical,’’ history- and text-based, or those more
redolent of individual creative genius and an updated romanticism. Moving his class
analysis of art movements and aesthetic practices forward in time, Tedman sees in
the July Monarchy of 1830 the dénouement of the tension in which violently opposed
royalist and republican forces were faced with the state’s rotation to an aestheticized
resolution, art competitions in which artists, such as Fragonard, began to fully
unleash anthropomorphic and animalistic ‘‘alienations’’ (in the canvases, images, and
pseudonarratives) of workers and peasants that had been growing, in number and
influence, most likely as an expression of aesthetic class estrangement. Tedman
 24 AMARIGLIO

regards this as a veer toward the ‘‘Disneyesque,’’ a form of ‘‘kitsch aesthetic’’ that
sublimates class struggle into an ‘‘ideological counterfeit dialectic.’’
Concluding that ‘‘kitsch is ultimately a reactionary force in class struggle,’’ Tedman
acknowledges the ugly seduction offered by French painters during the revolutionary
periods of the nineteenth century as kitsch becomes popular culture. This culture
manifests the ‘‘glorification of alienation,’’ thereby interpellating workers to believe
their alienations are surpassed by an identification that offers them the illusion of
being a part of the ruling class, all the while projecting for those elites cultural/
artistic elements that reify and confirm their superior economic and political power.
As Tedman shows, the increased use of animals to stand in for people, workers mostly,
provides the bourgeoisie with a high humanist impulse to see itself nobly, humanely,
and differently. If kitsch is ‘‘bad taste,’’ it is a type*/perhaps the prototype*/of taste
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distinction based upon differential economic status and alienations and depicted in
its own internalized, though public, aesthetic.
If Tedman ends by decrying the fact that kitsch is a concept/movement that even
‘‘some communists have been fooled by,’’ Alexis Boylan (2010) indicates that such
deception cannot bear up when one considers the use or neglect of kitsch in the work
and lives of contemporary African American artists. For our purposes, it should be
clear that in discussions of kitsch, race and class are sometimes stand-ins for one
another, and this should come as no surprise as the expressions and representations of
the denigration of all those socially/economically downtrodden are met, often
enough, with an idealization of what is authentic and popular in the lives of various
oppressed groups. While Boylan makes no formal equivalence between class fractions
and their constitutive economic processes with racially designated ‘‘minority’’
groupings and their particular social determinations, I do think that the histories of
race and class analyses have close parallels.
Yet, in the realm of art and aesthetics, it is perhaps primarily the romantic visual
ennoblement, from time to time, of largely white working-class men that signifies a
main distinction for at least much of the history of art within Western societies since
the birth of capitalism (and with this birth, the forced slavery that colonialism and
then imperialism likewise employed to often bolster capitalist ‘‘primitive’’ and then
ongoing accumulation). While kitschy caricatures of workers and other ‘‘lower
classes’’ abound in modernist art and culture (and certainly in the ‘‘craft’’
commodities that have been incessantly produced*/think Toby jugs, for just one
small instance), there is nothing still that quite matches the omnipresent, overt,
grotesque, and nefarious constructions of black men, women, and children during the
same period. That these objects served a specifically racist purpose or, at the very
least, were part of a broader white supremacist and racist social imaginary*/made so
very material*/should by now be undeniable.
Boylan’s main point is to refuse the possibility that, as an ironic or self-correcting
gesture, kitsch could ever now be turned back on itself, to effect a distance, in order
to shed a cold but glaring, incisive light on these racist purposes, their discursive
appearances and uses, and their hideous employment in ‘‘real’’ acts of exclusion and
violence. Not unlike Tedman, Boylan sees a form of self- or other-deception in the
idea that African American artists (she focuses, with different appraisals, on the work
of Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles) could reverse the course of visual and social
 KITSCH, CLASS, AND POLITICAL AESTHETICS 25

history by showing the absurd foolishness and ridiculous brutality, though kitsch, of
such objects and images. There is no particular dialectic in operation here except one
that recycles the poles of ridicule and dismissal and who gets to stand exactly where
when the shame is doled out. There is little similarity, then, to the possible use of
kitsch in a class struggle in which some transcendence is to be hoped for, if not
expected, as the forms of exploitation are directly challenged and then overcome
(though often by the next class-divided structure), aided and abetted, though also
held back, by transformations in kitsch culture. In such a dialectic, even capitalist
commodities can work against themselves*/and here, again, kitsch may have
something of a revolutionary role to play*/as the reversal in sentiment, objects of
endearment, the emerging desires of the multitudes, and what constitutes the
popular are all emblematized and then made to function as battlefront armaments in
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turning the class world upside down.

But, Boylan’s deeply considered and strongly rendered argument (through a close
reading of some work by Walker and Michael Ray Charles) is a powerful warning to all
those who would want to homologize the different struggles that kitsch may promise
to mediate. The debate over Walker’s by now infamous silhouettes (utilizing, among
other things, sexualized/racialized images of the Old South) is, to Boylan’s way of
thinking, ‘‘a distraction from considering the deeply racialized and racist constructs
of kitsch itself and the paradigm of high and low art that it defines.’’ This is mostly
because kitsch is not a stable property of objects, nor the opposite of truly
commendable avant-garde and/or high art. It is more because kitsch is quintessen-
tially a physiological and psychological stratagem, an indispensable*/for modernism,
that is*/sociocultural modality that inheres at the center of modernity, and, as such,
is used to produce and discipline bodies (for Boylan, most especially racialized
bodies). Kitsch is not racist by attribution or accident; it is, in itself, racist, even
though what it consists of changes or morphs according to preferred forms of
objectification from moment to moment and by the fact that the different bodies it
helps to create relate to kitsch objects in a variety of ways. Yet, for blacks in
particular, who have often been the ‘‘joke’’ in kitsch (Boylan speaks of Mammy
saltshakers and their collectors),4 kitsch both stands in the way by masking its
insidious supremacist background, and it also extends an invitation to join in the fun,

4. I tend to associate kitsch with the world of things, and so-called kitsch-men with the world of
collectors of those things. That is, kitsch most often springs to life as a category of mind in
relation to these saltshakers, and so on, and those who make it their part-time or permanent
business to produce, distribute, but mostly collect these objects. In that vein, it is the case that
collectors are a beset lot, constantly psychoanalyzed for their deviant obsessions, which, among
other things, produces a world of defensiveness and redefinition, on their part. In this world,
then, kitsch can also be denied, or rather, forsaken as the point of desire. In his essay on
collecting and identity, John Windsor attempts to distinguish the object(s) of his own collecting
practices, what he calls ‘‘tat,’’ with that taken up with accumulating kitsch. ‘‘When you see a
plastic frog or a plaster elephant or a wall decoration of praying children on a plastic tankard
marked ‘Went to P, leave this drink alone’, do you not suppress a curl of the lip? If you do not
keep your lip under control, what was tat will magically transmogrify into kitsch. Kitsch is self-
conscious*/self consciously awful. Tat is simple-minded. To bring about the change, all you need
to do is to withhold your attachment to the object, refuse to identify with it’’ (1994, 54).
 26 AMARIGLIO

to see the ironic and, by now, antiquated and discredited original racist ‘‘humor’’ in
its very palpability. In any event, the concept of kitsch, let alone the objects that are
imbued by it, is unrecoverable for antiracist (and antielitist), combat. This is not
unlike, Boylan states, the current situation with ‘‘orientalism,’’ a concept and
discursive formation that, she hopes is true, after Edward Said and his followers, is
dead and buried, at least as a starting place for a liberatory movement within art and
society.5 In a war of position, ‘‘kitsch is a weapon, but not of the low against the high,
or of banality against radicalism, but instead it is a weapon of a racist regime.’’
The symposium provides a rousing forum for all left premises (and others) about
what kitsch can and can’t do for radical social change and cultural transformation.
While class periodically steps forwards, it lurks more in the background since its
specificity is, possibly by design or by the nature of the discursive emergence of the
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concept over historical time, blurred to obscure or blend but also hybridize types of
class categories and processes. Kjellman-Chapin, Tedman, and Boylan have done a
true service, though, in highlighting the can dos and don’ts of the lows and highs, the
truths and falsehoods that kitsch foretells or produces. What, after all is said and
done, and in the name of a rethought Marxism*/one intent on a class line of
sight*/might readers make of this kitsch?

References
Boylan, A. L. 2010. Stop using kitsch as a weapon: Kitsch and racism. Rethinking
Marxism 22 (1).
Dorfles, G. 1969. Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste. London: Studio Vista Limited.
Doy, G. 1998. Materializing art history. Oxford: Berg.
Kjellman-Chapin, M. 2010. The politics of kitsch. Rethinking Marxism 22 (1).
Kovel, R., and T. Kovel. 2009. Rising new market. Kovels Komments, 24 June. http://
kovels.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html.
Tedman, G. 2010. Origins of kitsch. Rethinking Marxism 22 (1).
Windsor, J. 1994. Identity parades. In The cultures of collecting, eds. J. Elsner and R.
Cardinal, 49/67. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

5. Unfortunately, I have bad news for Boylan (and, indeed, for myself, since I have certainly
shared her hopes). The antiques and collectible giants*/the Kovels (2009)*/recently declared in
their widely circulated on-line newsletter that ‘‘Orientalism, the design tradition of the 19th
century that pictured scenes from Egypt, Morocco, and other glamorous Middle Eastern spots, is
gaining new respect. The paintings of harems and market scenes have gone up in price. The
jewelry, ceramics and furniture inspired by the art are also selling for much more now than they
did ten years ago.’’