The First World War saw the rapid rise of patriotic kitsch, and the great crimes and revolutions of our century have taken place behind a veil of kitsch: look at the art and propaganda of Nazi Germany and revolutionary Russia, and you will see the unmistakable sign of it
As explored in Greenberg
This work of the imagination is not possible for everyone; and in an age of mass communication, people learn to dispense with it. And that is how kitsch arise
How does this tally with https://daily.jstor.org/in-defense-of-kitsch/ and its argument that Kitsch relates to Catholicism?
we fix one another with the eye of judgment.
See Richard Wrangham, Goodness Complex
Kitsch is not just pretending; it is asking you to join in the game
Relate to the overwhelming pressure online to post black squares or memes when tragedy occurs or when someone famous dies (even when it's not tragic but the natural end of a very long and successful life)
Death demands grief and dignity and suffering.
yet we respond to it with sad face emoji's
In such a world, death does not really happen. The "loved one" is therefore reprocessed, endowed with a sham immortality; he only pretends to die, and we only pretend to mourn him.
Relate this to digital afterlife, and the plethora of fake celebrity mourning on social media
One's main thought, nevertheless, on reading Greenberg's essay is: "How lucky he was to live then and not now."
And imagine what he would have thought now in 2023!!
Now kitsch is on sale in every African airport—antelopes, elephants, witch doctors, and hobgoblin deities, skillfully carved in ivory or tropical hardwood, imitating the enchanted figures that inspired Picasso but, in this or that barely perceptible detail, betraying their nature as fakes
see functional model essay on kitsch again -