Modernist writer
Hermann Broch argues that the essence of kitsch is imitation: kitsch mimics its immediate predecessor with no regard to ethics—it aims to copy the beautiful, not the good.
[7] According to Walter Benjamin, kitsch, unlike art, is a utilitarian object lacking all critical distance between object and observer. According to critic Winfried Menninghaus, Benjamin's stance was that kitsch "offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation".
[6] In a short essay from 1927, Benjamin observed that an artist who engages in kitschy reproductions of things and ideas from a bygone age deserved to be called a "furnished man"
[8] (in the way that someone rents a "
furnished apartment" where everything is already supplied).
Kitsch is less about the thing observed than about the observer.
[9] According to
Roger Scruton, "Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious."
[10]
Tomáš Kulka, in
Kitsch and Art, starts from two basic facts that kitsch "has an undeniable mass-appeal" and "considered (by the art-educated elite) bad", and then proposes three essential conditions:
- Kitsch depicts a beautiful or highly emotionally charged subject;
- The depicted subject is instantly and effortlessly identifiable;
- Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations related to the depicted subject.[11][12]