Excerpted from The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Winter 1991). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
The term “kitsch” comes from the nineteenth century. One of several suggested etymologies is that the word is German for “smear” or “playing with mud,” and, toying with this, we might speculate that the “mud” in question is emotion and mucking around with emotions inevitably makes a person “dirty.” The standard opinion seems to be that kitsch and immorality go together and that sentimentality is what is wrong with both of them. For example, [Karsten] Harries: “Kitsch has always been considered immoral.”1 Of course, one culture’s or one generation’s kitsch may be another’s avant garde, and what is obligatory as “compassion” or “sympathy” in one age may be dismissed as mere sentimentality in another. Accordingly, the sentiments that are provoked by and disdained in “sweet” kitsch may vary as well. But whatever the cause or the context, it is sentimentality of kitsch that makes kitsch, kitsch and sentimentality that makes kitsch morally suspect if not immoral. Granted, kitsch may be bad art. Granted, it may show poor taste. But my question here is why it is the sentimentality of kitsch that should be condemned, why it is thought to be an ethical defect and a danger to society. …
The strong, shared contempt for kitsch and sentimentality is something of a standard for good taste, but there is all too little agreement about “what is wrong” with kitsch and sentimentality to back it up. We can accept, as simply irrelevant to our concern here, the claim that kitsch represents “bad taste,” but this is hardly a concession given the rarely rational vicissitudes of taste in an art market that now celebrates street graffiti, a pile of bricks and an artist’s dragging himself across broken glass as art. But culling through the literature in both ethics and aesthetics, I think we can narrow down the leading candidates for an argument to [the following]:
(1) Kitsch and sentimentality provoke excessive or immature expressions of emotion. It is true that kitsch is calculated to evoke our emotions, especially those emotions that are best expressed by that limp vocabulary that seems embarrassingly restricted to such adjectives as “cute” and “pretty” or that even more humiliating, drawn-out downward intoned “Aaaaah” that seems inappropriate even in Stuckey’s. It is also true that the emotions provoked by kitsch tend to be unsophisticated and even child-like (as opposed to childish). But is the charge that kitsch provokes too much of these affectionate emotions, or that it provokes them at all? And when the critics of sentimentality call an emotion “immature” or “naive” are they really contrasting it with more mature and knowledgeable emotions or are they, again, dismissing emotions as such? Now I would be the first to insist that emotions develop with experience and are cultivated through education, and there certainly is a world of difference between the emotions of a seven-year-old and the emotions of a seventy-year-old. But are the emotions of the latter necessarily better or even wiser than the emotions of the child? Indeed, don’t we often take emotions to be sophisticated precisely when they are cynical, even bitter, not only controlled but suppressed? There is something charming, even virtuous, about an adult who is capable of child-like feelings and something suspiciously wrong if he or she can never be so, even in the intimacy of a private apartment, a theater or an art gallery. To be sure, the ability to be so moved is no sign of aesthetic or artistic maturity, but neither is it evidence to the contrary nor an emotional flaw in character. To be sure, we outgrow some of our emotions, but one of the purposes of art is to remind us of just those tender, outgrown sentiments, perhaps even to disturb us regarding their loss. Better yet, art can help us feel them again, and move us to action on their behalf.
I think that it is worth noting that our limited vocabulary and expressions indicate a cultivated inability to recognize or publicly express the more gentle emotions. (How rich our vocabulary of abuse and disgust, by way of contrast.) How much of an emotion is “too much”? How is this to be measured? Of course, one can condemn the public expression of emotion as “inappropriate” or as “immature,” depending on the context and its customs, and we might well agree without argument that the childish expression of even the most sophisticated emotion is inappropriate in the public space of an art museum, but it is not excessive or childish expression that is being criticized here. It is the emotion as such, whether expressed or not, and the idea is that a sophisticated viewer will be mortified at his or her emotional response to a piece of high kitsch. The usual cultivated response, accordingly, is a sneer. So what is “too much” emotion? What is an “immature” emotion? If we are embarrassed by the gentle emotions I suspect that it is because those emotions themselves make us uncomfortable, in any “amount” and remind us of our own residual naiveté. Of course, it may be that good taste requires subtlety (though one might well object that this is a very cold-blooded and whiggish conception of good taste) and it may be that certain emotions are indeed inappropriate and out of place, e.g., getting sexually “turned on” by [William] Bouguereau’s [painting of] two little girls—which may in a few troubled souls be difficult to distinguish from more appropriate feelings of affection. (This sort of pathology is hardly “immaturity.”) But the bottom line seems to be that feeling “cuddly” just isn’t “cool.” Feeling our “hearts going out” to a painting of two little girls in the grass makes us uncomfortable and indicates incipient poor taste if it is not also a mark of some sort of degeneracy (sexual overtones quite aside). But why should we feel so guilty about feeling good or feeling for the moment a childlike affection? In real children, of course, such gentle feelings may well coexist with meanness (I am not trying to sentimentalize children here) and they may play poorly in the rough and tumble world of business outside of the museum. But in such a safe, relatively private context, what would it mean to feel an excess of kindness, even “cuteness”? And why should the unsubtle evocation of tenderness be ethically blameworthy, distasteful or dangerous? Bad art, perhaps, but why any more than this?
(2) One obvious suggestion is that kitsch and sentimentality manipulate our emotions. Of course, it must be said immediately that one puts oneself in the position of being so manipulated, by going to the museum, by standing or walking in front of the painting, and so the “blame” is properly placed on the viewer as well as the artist and the object. Indeed, kitsch is manipulative. It utilizes what Kathleen Higgins calls “icons” to guarantee an instant and wholly predictable emotional response. Why else depict little girls, puppies and other subjects guaranteed to tug at our “heart-strings”? The argument, presumably, is that manipulation of emotions, even with the initial acquiescence of the “victim,” is a violation of a person’s autonomy. Of course, it is just as manipulative to depict the same subjects being beaten to within an inch of their lives, and while we might object to the latter (on moral grounds to be sure) the objection is not of the same sort as our objection to kitsch. But, again, my suspicion is that the objection, while cast in the language of violation, is a covert reaction against the emotions themselves. We do not talk about a violation of autonomy when a person is “reasoned with,” so why do we do so when the appeal is not to reason but to emotions? The presumption is that our emotions, unlike our reason, are not truly our own, and they are humiliating rather than ennobling. Of course, this may be true of some emotions but it does not follow for all of them. One would think that feelings of tenderness would be ennobling and not humiliating, but then why should we feel “manipulated” by their provocation?
What does it mean, to “manipulate” someone’s emotions? I suppose it means to intentionally bring them about. We do this all the time, of course, in our every social gesture, but one does not ordinarily complain when his or her emotion of gratitude, for example, is intentionally brought about by a gift. The accusation of “manipulation” only emerges when the emotion in question is an unwanted one, e.g., if the gift is given by an offender whom one does not (for whatever reason) want to forgive—or at least not yet. But, why should we find even saccharine sentiments so unwanted that we resent their provocation, particularly in the sanctuary of a museum where such feelings would seem to be appropriate. …
(3) So, too, kitsch and sentimentality are said to express or evoke “cheap” or “easy” or “superficial” emotions. We should note with considerable suspicion the ambiguity of the word “cheap,” which on the one hand means “low quality” but on the other has unmistakable reference to the socioeconomic status of the sentimentalist. “Cheap” means “low-class,” and the suggestion is that we should be “above” such sentiments. We are not particularly surprised when class-conscious Oscar Wilde suggests that the feelings which constitute sentimentality are unearned, had on the cheap and come by too easily. (“To be sentimental is to be shallow.”) Irony and skepticism are the marks of the educated; sentimentality is the mark of the uneducated. One cannot understand the attack on kitsch, I propose, without a sociological-historical hypothesis about the fact that the “high” class of many societies associate themselves with emotional control and reject sentimentality as an expression of inferior, ill-bred beings, and male society has long used such a view to demean the “emotionality” of women. I am tempted to suggest that the attack on sentimentality also has an ethnic bias. Northern against Southern Europe and West against East, with only a few geographical modifications for ethical and aesthetic prejudice in North America. But such obviously class-based criticism is not restricted to those who would confuse aesthetic taste with political legitimacy. Indeed, much of the contempt for kitsch, I would suggest, is not the product of personal or cultivated taste at all but rather the “superficial” criterion that teaches us that kitsch—immediately recognizable by its play on the tender sentiments—is unacceptable. Those sentiments are “cheap” not just because kitsch is cheap but because the person who feels them is, emotionally speaking, cheap as well. In a society that strives for political equality, can we afford to tolerate such snobbery? (“Some of my best leftist friends … “). …
(4) [Milan] Kundera argues at some length that kitsch and sentimentality are self-indulgent. Let us repeat his most famous charge:
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.2
The idea that kitsch is “false” because it is the emotion and not the object of emotion that is the primary concern is part of the charge that kitsch and sentimentality are not only fraudulent but self-indulgent as well. Harries writes “kitsch creates illusion for the sake of self-employment” and suggests that love is kitsch, for example, “if love has its center not in the beloved but within itself.”3 We all know the phenomenon of being “in love with love,” but what is wrong with this, in our social lives, is that we know from experience that the supposed beloved usually gets the short end of it. Where the putative object is a figure in a painting or porcelain, there is no such danger of abandonment or fraud, and the locus of the enjoyment—in the object or in the emotion itself—would not seem to be a matter of concern. Indeed, is the reflectivity of emotion in such cases self-indulgence, or is it what we would call in philosophical circles “reflection”—the enjoyment of the seeing and not just the seen? What is wrong or self-indulgent about enjoying our emotions, even “for their own sakes”? Has any philosopher not suspected that enjoying the games and skills of reason—quite apart from the putative subject of discussion—might be similarly “self-indulgent”? Again, I suspect a deep distrust of and disdain for the emotions as such, and the ethical innocence of kitsch and its enjoyment thus becomes a suspected vice. …
(5) The most common charge against emotions in general and against kitsch and sentimentality in particular is that they distort our perceptions and interfere with rational thought and understanding. I want to argue—briefly—that this epistemological critique of emotions in general as “distorting” or “irrational”—a standard bit in the rationalist’s repertoire—seriously confuses both the nature of emotion and the nature of perception. The first argument is that sentimentality is objectionable because it is distorting. Mary Midgley, for instance, argues that “the central offence lies in self-deception, in distorting reality to get a pretext for indulging in any feeling.” Sentimentality centers around the “flight from, and contempt for, real people.”4 So too, Mark Jefferson argues that “sentimentality involves attachment to a distorted series of beliefs,” in particular “the fiction of innocence.”5 But the reply to this objection is, first of all, that all emotions are “distorting” in the sense intended and such “distortion” isn’t really distorting at all. In anger one looks only at the offense and fails to take account of the good humor of the antagonist. In jealousy we are aware only of the threat and not of the wit and charms of our rival. In love one celebrates the virtues and not the vices of the beloved, in envy we seek only the coveted object and remain indifferent to questions of general utility and the fairness of the desired redistribution. It is the very nature of an emotion to be engaged, even if only vicariously, to “take sides,” sometimes judiciously and sometimes not. Through our emotions we edit a scene or a situation in such a way that it matters to us, and in sentimentality we focus on the sweet and innocent aspects of a scene such that we are moved. Kitsch is art (whether or not it is good art) that is deliberately designed to so move us, by presenting a well-selected and perhaps much-edited version of some particularly and predictably moving aspect of our shared experience, including, plausibly enough, innocent scenes of small children and our favorite pets playing and religious and other sacred icons. But what must a critic be thinking of the world when she or he condemns these representations as “the fiction of innocence,” or worse (according to [Herman] Broch), as “universal hypocrisy”? …
1Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art (Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 74 with reference to Trubners Deutsches Worterbuch.
2Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 251.
3Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, p. 80.
4Mary Midgley, “Brutality and Sentimentality,” Philosophy 54 (1979): 386.
5Mark Jefferson, “What’s Wrong with Sentimentality,” Mind 92 (1983): 526.