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By Root 941 0

is what we shed in the presence of a tragic, pitiful, or perhaps beautiful event. The second tear is shed in recognition of our own sensitive nature, our remarkable ability to feel such pity, to understand such pathos or beauty. A love of kitsch is therefore essentially self-congratulatory. In a withering critique of Sir Luke Fildes’s The Doctor (1891, Tate Gallery), Clive Bell says that this famous portrayal of a thoughtful physician with a sick child creates what he calls a “false” emotion. What the painting gives us “is not pity and admiration but a sense of complacency in our own pitifulness and generosity.”

The kitsch object openly declares itself to be “beautiful,” “profound,” moving,” or “important.” But it does not bother trying to achieve these qualities, because it is actually about its audience, or its own er. The reference point for kitsch is always me: my needs, my tastes, deep feelings, my worthy interests, my admirable morality. Thus an and ostentatious set of “great works of literature bound in hand-tooled leather” does not exist for the sake of the actual literary works contains. Rather, it is displayed in a living room as confirmation of sophistication and good taste of its owner. (Authentic literary sophistication would be better evidenced by a shelf of dog-eared, broken-spine paperbacks of Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, and the like. But that would reading the books.)

Kitsch shows you nothing genuinely new, changes nothing in your bright shining soul; to the contrary, it congratulates you for being exactly the refined person you already are. Depending on the subject (Dürer’s Praying Hands as sculpture, a tapestry of The Last Supper, baby fur seals, whales), kitsch objects can function to display their owners’ deep spirituality or elevated moral, not to mention environmental, sensitivity. Literature and philosophy too can offer kitsch by way of undemanding analysis life’s problems through trite insights into the secrets of the universe. In the respect, Hermann Hesse’s pretentious mysticism and Khalil Gibran’s messages dressed up in pseudo-biblical cadences count as kitsch. And let us not forget glitzy Broadway productions that mimic serious opera (so boring!) but offer instead a morass of bad music, loudly miked, dramatic clichés. These cold, white peaks are cardboard props.

Of course, honest reproductions of Renaissance masterpieces Cézanne landscapes hanging in dorm rooms or homes are no more kitsch than recordings of great musical per performances. Nor are simplified objects directed to the tastes of children. It’s wrong for adults to turn up their noses at the Pastoral Symphony episode in Disney’s original Fantasia (1940) with its gods and baby Pegasus; that sequence may be corny, for many a young mind it was a first thrilling view of Mount Beethoven. Nor when we return to art works that touched us as children we always disappointed: get hold of a copy of Charlotte’s Web and you may find it an enchanting book still.

Marcel Duchamp is vilified to this day for having placed the most disagreeable object he could find, a urinal, on a plinth and called it his witty gesture, while not much to look at, was an act of ironic and irony of any kind is the great antagonist of kitsch. High kitsch demands solemnity and high seriousness—entirely fake and parasitic. succeeds not by expressing deep emotions but by reminding you them. This, incidentally, throws light on a curious recent development history: by insisting on taking Duchamp so seriously as an artistic and overlooking the layers of irony in Fountain, Duchamp’s contemporary followers and their art-theory champions have returned the traditional, bourgeois art ideal of high seriousness. What next, bust of John Cage on the piano? In this respect, readymade knockoffs such as Tracey Emin’s unmade bed or Damien Hirst’s shark formaldehyde smell suspiciously of kitsch, as does the turgid prose self-serving tripe can show up anywhere, even in cutting-edge dealer-galleries. It is not just for the middle-class living rooms so despised art elite.

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The oft-described