[Deep Dive!] NFTs and Kitsch
Written by Alessandra @Vasari Art Team
[Deep Dive!] is an editorial series that covers the perspective towards NFT by art experts from Vasari DAO.
We will review how NFT is evolving to be one of the crucial fields in art.
If you asked the average person what they know about NFTs, there are a couple of ways they might answer. They might say they’ve never heard of them, or that they have but don’t really understand what they are. They might say it has something to do with downloading and trading JPEGs online. And they would also most likely say that whatever NFTs are, they can be very expensive. Indeed, a lot of how mainstream media presents NFTs to the public has to do with the exorbitant price tags they come with online and at fine art auction houses. Most conversations around NFTs are framed from the perspective of collectors and traders, not necessarily viewers and artists.
The artistic and cultural value of NFTs is still being hotly debated, with many artists and critics dismissing them as part of a passing fad. It seems ideas of “fake” art and the unabashed commercialism of NFTs feature strongly in these debates. However, these criticisms are by no means new in the world of art. To help us understand fraught ideas of originality and the intersection of artistic production and mass-production, we can look to kitsch.
“If works of art were judged democratically — that is, according to how many people like them — kitsch would easily defeat all its competitors.”
— Thomas Kulka.
Travel souvenirs, gift shop items, replicas of famous works of art, Hummel dolls, Norman Rockwell, dogs playing poker, hotel paintings and paintings on velvet. These are all examples of kitsch.
“Kitsch” is a pejorative term that generally refers to cheap artistic “stuff”. Even if the stuff it is made of isn’t necessarily cheap, the way it is presented can cheapen it, making it kitsch. Literary critic Matei Calinescu describes the typical use of genuine art as mere ostentatious decoration as stemming from the world of kitsch: “Thus a real Rembrandt hanging in a millionaire’s home elevator would undoubtedly make for kitsch.” The Rembrandt itself is not kitsch, but the owner’s decision to hang it in an elevator is.
Kitsch is thought of as a relatively modern phenomenon linked to urbanization, modes of mass production and consumption, and the rise of the middle class through the Industrial Revolution. However, ideas of ostentation and demonstrating wealth and status through ownership of art existed well before industrial capitalism; think of the Baroque and Rococo periods, full of excessive amounts of gold leaf and ornamentation. Calinescu observes: “Cheap or expensive, kitsch is sociologically and psychologically the expression of a lifestyle…”. Like other forms of art, kitsch conveys the values, status, and tastes of those who view, enjoy, and choose to own it.
The exact origins of the term “kitsch” are ambiguous. Scholars speculate that it may derive from the German word verkitschen, meaning “to make cheap”, or the Russian verb keetcheetsya, “to be haughty and puffed up”. The term emerged in mid-nineteenth century Munich, used by art dealers to describe cheaply made decorative paintings that were easy to sell. This designation revealed as much about the purchasers of the paintings as it did the art dealers or even the artists. In the article “In Defense of Kitsch”, Ed Simon discerns:
“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.”
Gravitation towards kitsch wasn’t just an index of class and social position; it also acted as an index of taste, a taste dictated and imposed by elite academic circles or subcultural artistic groups, and therefore inaccessible to those outside of them.
The pervasiveness of kitsch throughout mass culture in the 20th century has been rejected and embraced by various artists and cultural producers. Clement Greenberg is often credited with popularizing the word kitsch in 1939 with his Partisan Review essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”. In it he denounced kitsch as a “simulacra of genuine culture,” saying that it is “mechanical and operates by formulas…the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times”. For Greenberg, the rise of kitsch, with its formulaic quality and lack of originality, was a sign of the death of “authentic” art, which could only be saved by the advent of the avant-garde, epitomized (at the time) by Abstract Expressionism.
Nevertheless, artists sought to use kitsch techniques and aesthetics precisely for those antithetical and disruptive purposes. Kitsch elements were used rebelliously by Dadaists and the Surrealists. In the vein of kitsch, Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein reproduced imagery from suburban life and popular culture using methods of mass production.
As abstraction and contemporary art grew more and more distant from people’s everyday lives and frame of reference, kitsch became more and more close to it. In the same way standards and methods of appraising and understanding “high art” were developed, so were sensibilities around kitsch. Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” elucidated the particularities of camp and the ways it could also be appreciated and enjoyed because of its overtness, its gaudiness, and excessiveness: It’s beautiful because it’s awful. Camp is the self-aware cousin of kitsch, and the rise of the camp sensibility helped consumers actively develop sophisticated ways of making meaning out of kitsch. Designating something as kitsch now doesn’t mean it is without cultural or artistic merit.
Today replicating mass-produced, cheap, everyday objects is a tactic used by artists and is not questioned in the world of high art. Think of Jeff Koons and his Balloon Dog sculptures. This series featured a banal object, usually created by adults for children, recreated on a massive scale in stainless steel. In 2013, Balloon Dog (Orange) was bought by Christie’s for $58.4 million, setting a record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction by a living artist.
That record has since been broken: Beeple (aka graphic designer Mike Winkelmann) sold his Everydays- The First 5000 Days NFT at Christie's for $69 million, placing him alongside Koons as “among the three most valuable living artists”.
“Once kitsch is technically possible and economically profitable, the proliferation of cheap and not-so-cheap imitations of everything- from primitive or folk art to the latest avant-garde- is limited only by the market.”
— Matei Calinescu
Whether or not NFTs are “kitsch” in themselves is not the focus of this article; that depends on the characteristics, use and presentation of individual works. But considering the art-historical evolution of kitsch becomes useful when thinking about how NFTs are impacting the traditional art market, and how originality is (or isn’t) valued in a world of seemingly infinite replicas.
Like kitsch, NFTs are often undercut as being “fake” art, imitations of an often far greater original. Through a line of unique code on the blockchain, only one person can own the “original” of an NFT. The same thinking can apply to a digital photograph, bought by a collector and existing as a digital file on their device. Even though the image itself can be downloaded by anyone for free, a distinction is made between this; copying and pasting is not the same as “owning” or having the rights to reproduce something. The authenticity of images is also policed by the communities themselves. In online crypto-communities and on social media, having a genuine NFT image as your avatar or profile picture is a status symbol of ownership. Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, the London-based founder of the curatorial consultancy Electric Artefacts, who has bought and sold several N.F.T. avatars, said: “Crypto Twitter has this understanding: you just don’t steal someone’s avatar.”
This is where the interesting potential of NFTs lies: within the standards set by the creators and crypto communities. For now, the prices, aesthetics, and flow of capital generated by NFTs are still controlled by the NFT artists and viewing communities. This however, through institutional involvement, can all change in a moment.
To be easy to market and consume, kitsch relies on formula. It does not encourage reflection or challenge conventions, but offers a stylized and prepackaged comfort, referencing ideas and images that are already familiar. However, artists have been able to lean into the cheapness of kitsch to subvert those norms (ironically often to astounding monetary gain). As media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message”. Like kitsch, NFTs as a form of media can reflect our own values surrounding back to us. The potential of NFTs as an innovative and radical form of art is still largely unexplored. It may be too early to tell whether NFT’s as a medium can change ideologies around taste, art, and production, or (following the typical route of kitsch) just repackage accepted ideologies as new. Ultimately, the future of NFTs will be determined not just by institutions and historians, but by artists, viewers, and consumers.
Vasari DAO aims to support contemporary artists and bridge the contemporary art scene and the NFT world.
