Kitsch is a conflicted term—hard to strictly define, but as with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s joke about pornography, one knows it when one sees it. Borrowed from a nineteenth-century German word for cheaply-made, disposable versions of fine art pieces, “kitsch” denotes an accidental style or mode that often connotes tackiness and provincial tastelessness. When the term is used, it calls to mind the heavily gilded porcelain of a Hummel figurine, the garishness of a velvet painting of the Virgin Mary or Elvis, the luminescence of a Thomas Kinkade landscape. Kitsch is cousin to camp, but lacks the self-awareness of the latter. Kitsch is colorful, flamboyant, crowded, gilded, and golden. Concerning taste, kitsch expresses the exact opposite of the simplicity of the Shaker furniture; it’s the antithesis of what Bowe and Richmond describe as the “tendency towards the increasingly fashionable notion of minimalism.”
For the purchasers of kitsch in nineteenth-century Munich, reproductions of elaborate and intricate decoration were a means of class ascension. But they also signaled a type of bourgeoisie cluelessness concerning taste, discretion, and style. Something can look expensive; indeed, something can be very expensive, and still be kitsch—maybe all the more so because of it. Less a strictly delineated style or movement, kitsch is a sort of naïve attitude or approach to art, one that, to paraphrase the German modernist critic Hermann Broch, seeks to promote the beautiful without any concern for the good.
Largely limited to German art criticism until the twentieth-century, it was critic Clement Greenberg who popularized the word kitsch in his 1939 Partisan Review piece “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” He argued that kitsch is a “simulacra of genuine culture,” that it is “mechanical and operates by formulas… the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.” T. J. Clark explains in Critical Inquiry that Greenberg saw kitsch as a “sign of a bourgeoisie contriving to list its identity… an art and a culture of instant assimilation… of avoidance of difficulty, pretense to indifference, equality before the image of capital.” In this view, kitsch is an attempt at purchasing a type of aesthetic experience, the commodification of art with indifference to quality or discernment, which subsequently devalues the idea of art overall.
The last point is crucial, for Greenberg sees kitsch, which he says emerges from the Industrial Revolution, as the direct product of a capitalist commodification that cares nothing for aesthetics beyond profit. Strictly speaking, then, although the Hôtel de Varengeville’s ostentatious furniture, excessive gilding, and ridiculous displays of wealth are all evocative of kitsch, they aren’t, by Greenberg’s estimation, kitsch proper.
The Hôtel de Varengeville is the product of eighteenth-century French aristocratic culture and not of industrial capitalism, hence it is not kitsch. Were somebody to finish their suburban basement so that it looked like the drawing room from the Hôtel de Varengeville, that would be kitsch. Still, it’s hard not to see Greenberg’s (strongly Marxist) reading of kitsch’s aesthetics as limited in some way, for all of the attributes we associate with it—the gold, the busyness, the ornateness—can be traced back to movements, from the rococo to the Baroque, that pre-date modern capitalism.