by Anton Cebalo
Kitsch has become so broad a category as to be often meaningless. Kitschy art and products of the past can easily be repackaged as trendy these days, and sincerity is blurred entirely.
I had always considered kitschiness to be an aesthetic quality, a mass-produced knockoff of something genuine. Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being expands on kitsch though, as something necessary for politics and general social organization.
His definition is the most compelling I’ve found. It goes something like this: In one moment, you see children playing on the grass, and you are genuinely moved. In the second moment, you see the children playing, and you think how nice it would be to be moved. The latter is the substance of kitsch.
Kundera is harsh in ascribing kitschiness to all politics. Each nation has their own collection of symbols and stories that supposedly hold it together like glue. Cheap sentimentality—”how nice it would be if you were moved”— is how public-facing politics works. In historiography, Kundera’s idea of kitsch would be better called “invented traditions,” as popularized by historian Eric Hobsbawm. Invented traditions can include “rediscovered” cultural practices, stories, holidays, or anything we collectively adopt an eternal attitude toward despite being relatively recent. Many invented traditions or folk stories, like that of Paul Bunyan, do possess a clear kitschy quality.
Areas flooded with kitschy products, namely places of heavy tourism, are also unsurprisingly sites of the most invented of traditions. To give one example: on my family’s island of Korčula, Croatia, for some reason, it was collectively hallucinated that Marco Polo was born there. Even though he was not, this story was a boon for tourism and merchandise. So now, practically everything official on the island claims he was— or, at the very least, that he was “spiritually” from there (so he might as well have been). This is a distillation of kitsch.
One of the characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sabina, despises communism precisely because it is kitsch. Yet, if you ever find yourself watching the closing TV programs from the Soviet days, you may be transfixed by their earnestness: this Promethean desire to traverse the stars, harness nature, and have a global sense of belonging. Living in a time of so much ironic distance and cynicism nowadays, and given that we are also far removed from the old Soviet system, we view these programs more innocently as pathos. It can move us just by its relentless striving forward. And the fact that kitschiness belongs to our sentimental side means it can outlive its source, as it did for the Soviet Union. That regime then became kitsch in memory, with nostalgic tours and merchandise readily available for a new generation.
Even Kundera admits that “the brotherhood of man on Earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.” Said differently, clichés that bind us can be beautiful— because despite our desire for uniqueness and fortunate chance, it is equally as comforting to know there is a long, long line behind you with the same dreams and lessons learned. However, best not to live exclusively in the realm of kitschiness, or else you’ll be so light, emptied of anything ugly or serious, as to be completely meaningless.