English Version | Kitsch is dead. Long live kitsch

Towards the end of 2023, TikTok was invaded by a "trend" (please emphasize the commas, because this trend was as silly as it was irrelevant) which consisted of touring mansions to the tune of Sophie Ellis-Bextor's Murder on the Dancefloor, just like Saltburn's protagonist did at the end of the hit film - or rather, more or less like it, since Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) was naked, while the bourgeois who picked up the phone and used #viral or #foryou to guarantee the validation of a few strangers were dressed, light years away from recreating the true meaning of the original scene. But none of that matters here. The curious thing is that this joke wouldn't be possible if someone, ten years ago or so, hadn't decided that things with a certain kitsch aspect were, after all, interesting. Rare. Valuable, even. After decades of ignoring the wrought iron beds that our grandmother wanted to give us (and which now cost upwards of three digits on dodgy websites), the bedspreads inherited from our paternal great-grandmother, the chandeliers rescued from the last estate sale, the knick-knacks that our aunt tried to foist on us, and all the other objects that carried the weight of the past - or of a hillbilly sentimentality that we wanted to avoid at all costs - the 21st century has allowed us to make peace with times gone by. A bit of an exaggeration? None of the internet users who now vainly flaunt their homes, many of them laden with trinkets that would make the best flea market stalls envious, would have been able to invite their friends to study in their dining room with its velvet armchairs and dark wood tables during the glorious years of minimalism (not those relating to the birth of minimalism as an artistic movement in the 1960s, but later, in the 90s). Any decorating magazine of the time will confirm this: pages and pages of a clean, stripped-down, antiseptic aesthetic, where anything "extra" was frowned upon. What would it be like, at a time when less was really less, to proclaim a taste for the vulgar, cheap and popular? It would be kitsch. But kitsch was then the child of a lesser God.

"Cheap and tasteless futility, adorned with artistic attributes; ridiculous conceit with dilettante platitudes that correspond to the culture of the grocer; something that means nothing and demands nothing from thought; adornment in the quiet conviviality of the bourgeois at the coffee table; [...] bluff that wants to bluff the heart and makes it shed tears like an onion; [...] in short, bargain-basement that speculates with childish joy for that which shines." This is the definition that Fritz Karpfen, art historian, gives right at the opening of Kitsch: A Study in the Degeneracy of Art, published in 1925. Karpfen's essay was one of the first major reflections on kitsch. In it, the author does not shy away from characterizing it as "petty, slimy and disgusting", as if it were an epidemic of bad taste. An epidemic that affected 90 per cent of the population, those who couldn't help but succumb to copying, easy design, the "blissful veneration of everything old", the unbearable "artistic lie" and the bland appreciation of everything that was popular (later we would end up calling it "commercial"). Kitsch, that seemingly innocent symbol of consumer society - who dresses up as a lamb to make a profit, who offers useless trinkets to gullible Westerners who leave rivers of money in souvenir shops, is indeed clever and manipulative, but that doesn't make him any less relevant. Nor does it make him any less captivating. In his book Kitsch and Art (1996), Tomáš Kulka makes kitsch depend on three conditions being met: the subject is beautiful or strongly imbued with emotion; the subject is easy and immediate to identify with; the work does not enrich or deepen our understanding of the subject. In short, kitsch is sentimental (and risks, without fear, being cheesy), it doesn't pretend to know what it doesn't know, it doesn't present itself with ulterior motives. Derived from the German verb kitschen, "to sell one thing instead of another", kitsch is invariably associated with a lesser type of sensibility, the taste of the majority of the non-scholarly population. The people who have O Menino da Lágrima (The Boy with the Tear) on their corridor wall.

There are at least fifty versions, but there are twenty-seven originals. O Menino da Lágrima (The Boy with the Tear) is a mass phenomenon that struck Portugal in the 70s and 80s of the last century, when almost every home had a replica of the famous painting of the crying boy. Nobody really knows how to explain the phenomenon (who was the first to buy this piece? Who said it was "cute"? Who advised entire families to have the same painting?), the truth is that it was difficult to enter a home and not come across the work of Giovanni Bragolin (or Bruno Amadio, or Franchot Seville, or Bragolin or J. Bragolin). Legend has it that the Italian came across a child, Don Bonillo, whose family had died in a fire, and was so bothered by his sadness that he decided to take him into his studio. He was happy, life was going well for him. But the parish priest soon advised him to get rid of the kid, as he carried bad luck with him - he was even called El Diablo. The painter ignored the warnings. Then one day his studio burnt down from top to bottom. People pointed the finger at the boy. Bragolin lost his head and, in the midst of the hysteria, followed the opinion of the herd. Frightened, the boy ran away and no one ever saw him again. Rumors began to spread that his curse had passed on to the artist, who was no longer able to sell his works. This is the less macabre explanation. The other, offered by Bragolin himself, is that the Crying Boys series was the result of a successful pact he made with the devil in order to achieve instant success and fame. Whatever its origin, O Menino da Lágrima (The Boy with the Tear) was the icon of a generation (it sounds terrible but it's true), the symbol of an era that is no longer coming back - nobody really knew why they had it in their house, and it didn't matter. After all, nobody was going to comment "why did you choose that for the office?" on our Instagram story because there was no Instagram, and nobody questioned other people's choices. Decoration was a matter of taste, not reason, and O Menino da Lágrima (The Boy with the Tear) was the closest thing there was to the melancholy caused by years and years of dictatorship, a kind of pain shared by everyone but never discussed. It was a memento mori of everything that had ended and everything that was about to begin. Of course, this bothered the elites who were the defenders of (good) taste and sophistication, who began to see it, and anything kitsch, as having a pejorative connotation.

Reduced to ashes, kitsch is the nightmare of the 1990s and the first years of the new millennium, when everything was supposed to be clean, minimal and simple. For those who grew up with the visual confusion of the 1980s, kitsch is just a homecoming - a home where there was room for orange lava lamps, carpets, Bordallo Pinheiro pieces that would be stuffed in a cupboard until some foreign entity told us that, after all, we were looking at very important works of art (it was in 2010 that the historic brand entered the prestigious MoMa in New York), napkins embroidered by our grandmothers, china dogs and plates that we proudly brought back from our travels, anything that represented our tastes and our way of being, without fear of being cool or not. That was a word that didn't even exist in our daily lexicon. It wasn't until the cheesy bogeyman entered our lives that we began to disown anything related to kitsch - which was quickly labelled "vulgar", "tacky" and "cheesy". We started to look askance at the neighbor who put his rosary on his car mirror, we started to pass judgement on the cousin who insisted on having Sunday lunch in a tracksuit and fanny pack, we rolled our eyes whenever a work colleague confessed to knowing a pimba song by heart, we shrugged our shoulders when, at the height of grunge, our best friend insisted on wearing cheerful colors. We've become boring, f****** snobs, annoyed by other people's joy and easy smiles. Now we blame technology for all the world's ills, but in reality it's us and our identity crisis that, as we enter the new century, have ruined the imperfect fantasy we used to live in. The people who hate kitsch, who shudder at colorful wallpapers and bargains of sentimental value, are the same ones who post highly curated Instagram dumps, where instead of aesthetically clean photos - the ones they would have chosen a couple of years ago - you now see still lifes of lunch/dinner tables with leftover food (extra bonus if you can see glasses of wine in the picture, ashes, bits of bread, a napkin or two, all things that appeal to the idea of "life happening"), blurred selfies, details of books, magazines, cameras and other pleasant objects, strategically placed to look messy, unthinkable zooms of bathrooms full of tiles (the horror! ) where the beauty products that are "in" sneak into a 1973 tap. Ah, it's taken so long to get here! And before you say it, what about politics, what about religion? Haven't they been (and are) excellent at using kitsch to convey messages, many of them dangerous? Yes. Unfortunately, yes. But the danger of appealing to extremism and fanaticism through a black poster with Helvetica font size 14 is the same. There will always be limits, imperfections and contingencies. Let's not blame a showcase of china dogs for all the world's ills. They don't even insist they are art, we were the ones who started that discussion.

Translated from the original in The Kitsch Issue, published February 2024. Full stories and credits in the print version.