kitch

samurai

spending money

scissors

wasting money

is the opposite of art. Where art teaches us to see into things, kitsch allows us to see outward from within things.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

is a style that often involves the adaptation from one medium to another: wood-imitation wallpaper.

These objects all have kitsch in common. The dictionary offers that the term derives from kitschen (1860), ‘to cheapen’, and a later authority says that its attributes invariably include an adaptation from one medium to another: wood-imitation wallpaper, the ‘co venience’ hotel built to resemble Windsor Castle; Tomita’s synthe- sized ‘edition’ of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. Another quality, it is said, is that kitsch always represents an effort to diminish scale and reduce functional activities to domestic terms – as in the Fuji tissue dispenser.

is always representative of an effort to diminish scale and reduce functional activities to domestic terms.

is from the word ‘kitchen,’ to cheapen.

is indicative of periods in which values decline.

This was foreseen by an eminent observer, the novelist Hermann Broch, who, back in 1933, stated that ‘. . . all periods in which values decline are kitsch periods.’ However, he was not thinking of Japan nor could he have been, because in this area Japan had no standards from which to decline.

kitch, n.Definitions

kitch