Assistant art professor Nadine Hawke addressed the role of kitsch art in popular culture in her honors lecture "Kitsch in Synch: Analyzing Popular Arts."
"The term kitsch is often associated with the term bad taste," Hawke said. "It is also used very broadly to include anything that is considered bad taste."
Hawke gave examples of classic kitsch art like snow globes, pink flamingoes and salt shakers resembling John and Robert Kennedy.
"Usually how you know you're dealing with kitsch is someone says 'I can't believe you have it, wear it, say it' and that type of stuff," Hawke said. "Go to Dollar Tree [or] Dollar General, and there it is."
Hawke explained that many view kitsch as a kind of pseudo-art.
It has many elements of art including color and designs, but it comes short of being true art, she said.
She described elements many would attribute to kitsch.
"When you look at kitsch... it's usually not well-developed intellectually or design-wise, so it's like a sketch. Second is that it's cheap or relatively cheap. Another is that it's considered aesthetic junk or rubbish," Hawke said.
She said that kitsch has not always been around in popular culture. It is a relatively modern occurrence.
"Most will say that [kitsch] came about with the industrial revolution, where you had the ability to create lots of stuff on mass levels cheaply for a large audience," she said.
Another element of kitsch Hawke addressed is how it is sometimes used as an attempt to elevate a person's status.
"Kitsch is used to seek status... you're trying to make yourself look like you come from one class that you don't belong to," she said.
Hawke said this use of kitsch is somewhat odd, because kitsch items tend to be made out of imitation materials.
"They won't use the real materials because that's too expensive or too cost-prohibitive," he said.
Other qualities of kitsch Hawke discussed are cuteness, lack of sophistication and lack of propriety.
She also talked about what some believe to be the effects of kitsch on society. She said that some feel that kitsch can be detrimental to a society because the viewer is not required to think about what they are seeing.
Hawke said that this school of thought believes that "anyone who looks at kitsch has to be a passive viewer; it is very simple... they don't have to have their own thoughts looking at it."
She explained that some feel passive thinking about kitsch would lead to passive thinking about other issues in society, and this in turn would lead to a lack of freedom.
Hawke also covered the effects of kitsch on fine art. She said that there are also those who feel that kitsch will have a negative impact on art.
"Kitsch, because it's designed to reach as large an audience as possible, is going to be a lower level of taste," Hawke said. "The complaint was that for fine art to compete, it would have to do the same thing; it would also have to lower its taste and therefore it would be debased."
But Hawke offered another possible relationship between kitsch and fine art.
"What you see is that avant-garde is going to evolve from kitsch. Kitsch is going to evolve from the avant-garde. They evolve from each other," she said.
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