KITSCH, AS AN AESTHETIC CATEGORY IN POSTMODERN ART

Abstract

This essay aims to bring the artistic scale of kitsch3 that expands from the common to the
interdisciplinary, even to hyper-realism, up for discussion by analyzing the kitsch phenomenon,
which may be positioned as the aesthetic equivalent of the productions of the continuous culture in
the postmodern environment. Yet today’s art, which is confronted with a kind of zeitgeist that has
spread to all styles from easily consumable to elitist art, is under the influence of a perception
management that dominates almost all daily reality with the guise of cultural management. The
aesthetics defined by Baumgarten in 18th century. After that it reshapes according to spirit of time,
as late-capitalist order, which exhausted modernism and connected the world, took for granted
intricate identity that contains both deep-rooted tradition and contemporary. Kitsch, which classified as banal by Greenberg in 1960s, was tried to be excluded from field of art
through Baudrillard's rating of bad, worse, kitsch in 1980s, but the style that Nerdrum glorified with
definition of new old masters shifted the discussion from matter of taste to intellectual concern’s
field, thus question of quality has become invisible. Kitsch, which has been released in increasingly
hybridizing Contemporary Art environment, has spread to many cultural and artistic fields, and
today it has almost turned into an aesthetic category.