Kitsch

Definition

Kitsch, in the Batchelor extract's specific usage, is the name Le Corbusier (and after him the modern movement) gave to the degeneration that the modernist purity-position diagnoses — a specifically modern, industrialized degeneration, distinguished from Loos's anthropological one. Batchelor: "But for Le Corbusier, ornament, clutter, glitter and colour were not so much signs of primitive 'degeneracy,' as they had been for Loos, as they were the particularly modern form of degeneration that we now call kitsch. The difference is important, because at no time did Le Corbusier attack what he saw as the authentic 'simplicity' of the folk cultures of the past, cultures which, he conceded, had their own whiteness: 'Whitewash has been associated with human habitation since the birth of mankind.' The problem was, rather, modern industrialized ornamentation and colouring, a problem which, for Le Corbusier, reeked of confusion, disorder, dishonesty, imbalance, subservience, narcosis and dirt."

The kitsch/colour link is exact: kitsch is where the chromophobic purging-move of the 'foreign body' re-enters as industrial commodity. Le Corbusier's Decorative Art of Today passage ("What shimmering silks, what fancy, glittering marbles… Such stuff founders in a narcotic haze… It is time to crusade for whitewash and Diogenes") stages kitsch as narcosis — the seductive, drugging, Byzantine/Oriental commodity-haze against which whitewash operates as cure. Kitsch is thus the chromophobia extract's bridge between colour and commodity: the drug the architect was "done with" since the Great War.

Note the concept's wider career in the wiki (postmodern aesthetics, Camp, Venturi's "ugly and ordinary") exceeds this extract's specific sense — the page tracks the modernist diagnostic sense Batchelor's extract theorizes, with the broader senses as complements.

Key Thinkers

• David Batchelor — the kitsch/colour link: kitsch as the specifically modern form of degeneration that colour, clutter and glitter signify for Le Corbusier; the narcosis imagery.
• Le Corbusier — the concept's modernist author-figure: "The architect was done with drugs… In their place: Order. Reason. Purity. Truth. Architecture. Whitewash."
• Adolf Loos — the contrast-case: ornament as primitive 'degeneracy' (anticlassical, anthropological) rather than kitsch (modern, industrial); Loos's own practice complicates the contrast (see architectural-ornament).

Related Concepts

• Chromophobia — the prejudice kitsch serves: kitsch as the 'foreign body' into which colour's danger is consigned.
• Whiteness — the cure kitsch is defined against: whitewash as moral act, the commodity-haze as disease.
• Architectural Ornament — kitsch's building-materials: the ornament/glitter/clutter set the purity position targets.
• Ornament vs. Purity — the debate kitsch refines: the purity position's diagnostic shifts from anthropological (Loos) to industrial (Le Corbusier).
• Ugly and Ordinary — the Venturi counter-concept: the commercial vernacular the purity position would call kitsch, defended as legitimate.
• Consumerism — kitsch's home ground: "modern industrialized ornamentation and colouring" as commodity.
• Streamlining — the diagnostic's object-scale case: the "absurdly theatrical" styling verdict and its psychoanalytic re-reading.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Chromophobia (Batchelor 2000/2006) — kitsch as the specifically modern form of degeneration vs Loos's primitive 'degeneracy' (p. 33); the narcotic commodity-haze and the whitewash crusade (p. 33); folk cultures' "own whiteness" exempted from the attack (p. 33).
• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the kitsch-management thesis at the scale of the manuals: "The proliferation of mass-produced decorative goods and the successive movements of reform and education are bound together; manuals of interior design and programs of public art education attempt to manage or suppress the proliferation of kitsch, camp, and low art" (p. 59, citing Calinescu's Five Faces of Modernity) — with The International Style and Emily Post's The Personality of a House as the canons of taste that "must everywhere negotiate the political and class distinctions inherent in this process"; and the anxiety in the doctrine itself: bright colour "ceased to startle and began to bore; its mechanical sharpness and freshness became rapidly tawdry. If architecture is not to resemble billboards…" (Hitchcock & Johnson, quoted p. 56) — kitsch as the fear of boring, of the tawdry, of the billboard. See taste, natural-finishes.
• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — the concept's postmodern, hyperscale instance: Portman's own 1986 follies at the Westin Peachtree Plaza — "polychromatic pavilions" reinterpreting the Tivoli Gardens, "Described by his publicists as 'modern interpretations of a classic Venetian piazza'" — which "embraced postmodernity as fashion in the form of consumer kitsch." The self-kitsch twist: the modernist author of the Brutalist podium applied kitsch to his own work ("the follies seemed strangely out of place within the Brutalist concrete podium; they quickly collected dust and grew outmoded and worn"), and "the banal and vulgar follies proved to be a temporary intervention which met their own demise." Kitsch here is not the industrial ornament of Le Corbusier's diagnostic but temporal interiorities addressing "conventional preferences and consumerism" at hyperscale (see atrium-hotel, postmodernism).
• Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — the diagnostic's object-scale case: Raymond Loewy's teardrop pencil sharpener (1934) "became a mythic object lesson in the misapplication of streamlining, cited by later critics as styling at its most absurdly theatrical" (p. 209) — the kitsch-verdict ("styling" as the theatrical, functional lie) applied to the streamline shell. Lupton & Miller's re-reading doubles the interest: the accused styling is also the truest object of its economy — "its bulbous form reflects a pleasure in manipulating plastic matter, as well as a fastidious interest in hiding a messy interior behind the hard, clean physique of a 'streamlined' body… recalls the biological extrusions of feces, the child's first work of art" (p. 211). The "absurdly theatrical" surface, in other words, is the honest symptom: kitsch-diagnosis and psychoanalytic truth-claim collide on the same sharpener (see streamlining, psychoanalysis).

Open Questions

• Is kitsch, in this precise sense, the point where chromophobia meets consumerism — colour's commodity-form rather than colour itself as the target?
• The folk-exemption ("Whitewash has been associated with human habitation since the birth of mankind") — does the kitsch diagnostic require an authentic 'folk' pole to define its modern corrupt one, and is that pole itself a whiteness fantasy?
• Does the kitsch/ornament/colour cluster have a postmodern afterlife in which kitsch is defended (Venturi's "ugly and ordinary," Camp) — and does the whiteness regime respond by rebranding its own colours as restraint?
• Batchelor's narcosis imagery ("founders in a narcotic haze," "done with drugs") — what does the drug-metaphor do that the disorder-metaphor cannot, in the purity position's rhetoric?
• Marinic's Portman follies give kitsch a postmodern, hyperscale form ("consumer kitsch" as "temporal interiorities") — applied by the Brutalist author to his own Brutalist podium. Is self-applied kitsch the end of the modernist diagnostic (the purity position's author defecting to kitsch), and does the follies' decay ("quickly collected dust and grew outmoded") confirm kitsch as fashion's built form?