Kitsch is hard to define but easy to recognise. It is ubiquitous and all but inescapable in the modern world. For example, there is kitsch on sale everywhere tourists gather in large numbers: from Venice to Toledo, from Cambridge to Cracow. An aesthete who visits these glories of the past might with reason declare: “In the midst of art, we are in kitsch.” It is the aesthetic of the age.
Clearly, kitsch does not displease or offend everyone, or even very many people. Almost as a sine qua non, kitsch is mass-produced: no one would go to the trouble of manufacturing a musical cigarette box in the guise of a Venetian gondola with a revolving ballerina on its prow unless he thought he were going to sell a lot of them. The spread of kitsch artefacts requires first, a mass market of people with money to dispose on inessentials, and second, techniques of mass production. In the pre-industrial era, inferior products were bad art or bad workmanship, but not kitsch.
It is characteristic of kitsch that it should hint at refinement but be in execrable taste; that it should make reference to something real but be entirely ersatz. The producers of kitsch may be cynical and exploitative, but consumers are sincere and in deadly earnest. They know that art exists and is a good thing that lends lustre to its patrons and collectors, but cannot distinguish the real from the fake, however grotesque the latter.
Kitsch enters many aspects of modern life, not just the visual, and not least among them religion. The shops surrounding most popular religious sites and shrines are now as bedecked with kitsch artefacts as any seaside resort. And it isn’t only religious artefacts that are kitsch nowadays: religion itself is kitsch. Services often end in supposedly reconciliatory hugs among the congregation, a form of behaviour that is kitsch to its saccharine core.
American television evangelists and their religion are kitsch on a grand scale. Their services – or shows – are to real religion what pencil-sharpeners in the shape of a doge’s head are to a portrait by Bellini. For television evangelism to flourish, there needs to be mass gullibility and shallowness, combined perhaps with an inchoate awareness that there is something missing in life.
We should not laugh at the Americans, however, with their inability to perceive at once that their TV evangelists are crooks, nor imagine that something similar cannot happen here: for it can and does happen. What, after all, was the mass outpouring of so-called grief at the death of Princess Diana if not an orgy of emotional kitsch, which was ersatz, shallow and tasteless? Indeed, she herself was an entirely kitsch figure: her qualities were to virtue what moulding in plastic is to sculpture in marble. The shallowness of the public’s attachment to her is demonstrated by the evident fact that, had she suffered an attack of acne or psoriasis, the public would have lost interest in her completely; and yet, despite the shallowness of their attachment, people behaved as if they had lost a truly loved figure who meant a great deal to them. Only people who were, in fact, deeply attached to nothing, who had little inner life, could have reacted in so kitschy a fashion.
Kitsch emotions must be expressed in public and have a hectoring quality: for it is only by persuading others to partake that the person who expresses them can be reassured that they are real and not mere simulacra. That is why the Queen had to be bullied into public expression of sorrow for the death of her former daughter-in-law. The unseemly intimidation of our aged monarch implied one of two things. Either she felt genuine grief at the death of Diana, in which case we did not grant her the elementary right to grieve in her own fashion, in private; or she did not feel such grief, in which case we considered she had a duty to lie to us by pretending that she did. Either alternative tends to the establishment of a dictatorship of kitsch.
Not surprisingly – and quite deservedly – we have a kitsch government, whose tastes and emotions are as cheap and exhibitionistic as the fluffy nylon bears, tigers and pandas that adorn the slippers of some of my less mature female patients. It is difficult to decide whether it would be more appalling if the kitsch gestures and sentiments of the government were cynical pandering to the tastes of the electorate or truly represented the state of its soul. Insincerity is always a vice, but sincerity is not necessarily a virtue.
We used to laugh – and rightly so – at the vulgar antics of President Lyndon B Johnson, who displayed his surgical scar in public. We might have lost our place in the world, and our politicians might be for ever pygmies, but at least no one here behaved in public in this undignified fashion. However, Mo Mowlam’s removal of her wig in public, a mere generation later, was infinitely worse than LBJ’s tasteless display: it was a direct appeal to the kitsch sentiments of the 1990s.
Among these is the view that those who are, or have been, seriously ill are heroes and heroines merely by virtue of their present or past suffering. This is a deeply populist sentiment, an implicit appeal to mediocrity, in so far as it confers heroic status upon us all, regardless of our conduct, because the vast majority of us are going to suffer a serious illness at some time in our lives, even if we have not already done so. This also explains the fast-expanding literary genre, the memoir of illness, for illness is an achievement we can all aspire to. But if everyone is a hero, no one is: so Mowlam’s gesture was both an act of populist flattery and at the same time destructive of the true virtue of heroism.
In taking off her wig and exposing her illness to the public, Mowlam was appealing also to the kitsch sentiment that the ill can do no wrong: because, if they do wrong, their illness excuses them, and hence they have done no wrong. Besides, who among us would be so unfeeling as to criticise a woman forced to wear a wig because of cancer treatment, when it is well known that loss of hair is what women fear most about such cancer treatment, more than death itself? Make yourself vulnerable, make yourself a victim (as Princess Diana did), and everyone will love you: for are we not all vulnerable, all victims?
In addressing the TUC conference recently, Tony Blair started with a little poem, of the quality that one might expect in the kitschier kind of greetings card. No one can blame the Prime Minister for not being a poet; but it speaks volumes either of his contempt for the intellectual level and taste of his audience or of his own soul, whose shallows on this evidence can scarcely be plumbed, that he saw fit to give public utterance to his doggerel at all (rather than, say, make a literary allusion).
Every year, this time of year, I come to the TUC,
And every year the press report,
There’ll be a row between you and me.
They say I’ll come and beat a drum,
Unleash the annual cry,
Change your ways, clean up your act,
Modernise or die.
Well, modernised you have, I say,
New Labour, new unions, too,
Both for the future, not the past,
For the many, not the few.
The Prime Minister is to be congratulated, at least, on the artistic unity of his performance, the perfect fusion of its form and content, kitsch to the very last stanza. There is no real disagreement between the government and the TUC – and any suggestion that there is must be the work of a malevolent press. The praise of the TUC (whether justified or not) is slimy and unctuous; the opposition of the many to the few is flattery of the populace, a bow in the direction of the kitsch sentiment that the heart of the common man is always in the right place. There are more football hooligans or house burglars in this country than neurosurgeons: does that make the former more estimable and socially valuable than the latter?
As for the past, it is merely an impediment to be overcome and if possible forgotten, in favour of the glorious future that we (in our unprecedented wisdom) are going to build. That is why we can turn our back on an entire cultural tradition and on inherited institutions with impunity, because they have nothing to teach us. Out with the old, in with the new: including the pictures on the walls of Downing Street. Kitsch to its core, this attitude is the source of Cool Britannia, in which restaurants with tubular steel furniture patronised by television starlets are regarded as the acme of civilisation and £750 million can be spent in the erection of a vast dome to celebrate a date that for most people has nothing but an arithmetical significance.
Contrast the conduct of the British soldiers who liberated Buchenwald at the end of the war with that of Cherie Blair when she visited the Albanian refugee camps. Whose emotions, do you suppose, were the deeper, yet which were expressed more demonstratively? Cherie Blair had no constitutional or governmental duties to fulfil: her televisual tears and grief were little but a sales pitch for her husband. How could a woman who felt such compassion in public, in front of television cameras relaying her emotions to millions of homes, be married to anything other than a good man, that is to say one who is caring and sensitive? Even had her husband not played a larger part than most in bringing the catastrophe about, even had he not been in the least responsible for it, her performance would have been a lamentable indulgence in emotional kitsch. It remains only for her now to go and express her lachrymose sympathy for the Serbs ethnically cleansed from Kosovo – except that they would tear her limb from limb if she showed her face among them.
Caring and sensitive: these are the cant words of emotional kitsch. They grate like the sound of a fingernail running down a blackboard. Anyone who has had any dealings with a British public bureaucracy knows what caring in this context means: unfeeling procrastination, neglect and derogation of elementary duty. Yet still the kitsch rhetoric rolls and seems to satisfy many who cannot distinguish appearance and reality, the real from the fake.
It is difficult to say which came first: kitsch nation or kitsch government. But they now seem well suited to one another: shallow, insincere, tasteless, self-obsessed, changeable, unprincipled, egotistical, arrogant, uncultured and quite without charm.
The writer is an inner-city GP
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