Years ago, some of my fellow art students and I went to Lowe’s Hardware to purchase some painting supplies. We were browsing the paint aisle when I noticed a massive banner advertisement above the paint swatches. It depicted five or six Labrador puppies playing around their mother on beautiful green lawn. I stopped and examined it for some time as my friends wandered off to find their supplies. “Something is wrong with this,” I thought. The puppies’ mother… What’s wrong with her?” And that’s when I discovered that she had been photoshopped. Her eyes were far too big for her head. “Oh for crying out loud,” I thought. “That is so manipulative! They enlarged the eyes so she will look like a puppy as well.” I continued my examination of the advertisement. The puppies were bounding and playing in the bright green grass. Was the color enhanced too? In the middle of the picture there was one puppy bounding away from the camera, his tail wagging high in the air. That’s when the worst of the advertisement hit me. I was floored. The artist had photoshopped out the puppy’s anus. It was just puppy fur from the tip of his tail to the pads of his hind paws. I became furious, and yet I didn’t know why. Was my anger justified? The answer lies in a study of the concept of kitsch.
Before providing a definition, I want to provide one more example to consider. We will then return to the puppies. On the next page is a painting entitled, Along the Lighted Path, by Thomas Kinkade. This is an example of what is commonly understood to be kitsch. Let’s exercise our inner art critic. Feel free to take into account Frank Brown’s twelve principles of taste from my previous post. Take two or three minutes to just look at it. Identify what Kinkade is doing. After a few minutes, decide if you like it.
Can you explain why?
Along the Lighted Path, by Thomas Kinkade
It is currently en vogue to express dissatisfaction with the works of Thomas Kinkade. That’s our cultural climate at the moment, and so when we begin evaluating this work of art, we ought to do so by also considering other participants in the conversation. Several weeks ago I was discussing this exact painting with some friends.
“Thomas Kinkade is absolutely horrible,” my friend espoused.
“It’s not real,” another added. “It’s… it’s just bullshit.”
“Right on,” I added. “It’s so sanguine. It feels plastic.”
“I actually like it,” one friend bravely offered. We all turned to face him. This oughta’ be good, I thought to myself.
“I just don’t see what the guy has done wrong,” he explained. “Kinkade depicts the beauty of a peaceful town. There’s no violence, no poverty, there is absolutely no discord whatsoever. It’s quite beautiful, actually. What’s so wrong with that?”
Once again, I found myself confounded. I had been leaning on a common critique within my community to explain why I didn’t like Kinkade. Did I actually have anything helpful to offer?
Having taken the summer to study aesthetics, I can now articulate a little more about what Kinkade might be doing wrong here.
But first: a definition of the word “kitsch.” There are myriad definitions of the word kitsch these days. The word originally described “cheap artistic stuff.” Merriam Webster now defines it as “things (such as movies or works of art) that are of low quality and that many people find amusing and enjoyable.” Stephen Guthrie explains that kitsch is usually well crafted and generally heart-warming, filled with memories and dreams, typically sweet and sentimental.
So is kitsch, or more specifically this painting, doing anything wrong? Calvin Seerveld thinks so. In his book Rainbows for the Fallen World, Seerveld states that kitsch “… is so hurtful, if not evil.”1 That sounds mighty dramatic, but Calvin Seerveld is not alone. Guthrie elaborates, explaining that “The artwork that masks difficulty… that covers scars and struggles, is not beautiful, but kitsch. We are deeply dissatisfied, for example, with a film or novel that brushes away all tensions and crises of the plot and concludes with an abrupt ‘and they all lived happily ever after.’ Such an ending does not complete but undermines the beauty of the work.” Frank Brown explains “Kitsch is a beautiful lie; it prettifies and falsifies the world, often by embracing, implicitly, a cause or an ideology that requires cheap emotion and an unqualified (but blinkered) acceptance of reality…”2 Milan Kundera provides the most vivid explanation on the harmful effects of kitsch. He explains, “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit… [it] excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.”3
So is Along the Lighted Path guilty of “denying the shit of our world?” Well, we certainly know the creator of the anusless puppies is guilty of denying the shit of our world – indeed, quite literally! But what’s the problem with that?
The problem with kitsch like Along the Lighted Path and the puppy advertisement is that it celebrates the airbrushed perfection of a fashion magazine. Its vision of the good life is a vision that covers its eyes and ears and mouth to the reality of the Fall, willfully embracing the comfort of ignorance. It is emotionally cheap, encouraging a shallow understanding of our world, trivializing our attention and sensibility.
Seerveld explains that “Kitsch never enlarges experience; it blandly affects a show to stimulate feelings of exquisiteness or a mood of supernal tenderness, but it flops into bathos simply because it is ersatz… Kitsch canonizes immaturity.”4
Yet, sadly, the shit of this world is real and undeniable if one is to confront reality. The Kinked and the puppy advertisement are both kitsch insofar as they attempt to elicit certain predictable emotions. Brown likens pieces like these to “cheap grace,” explaining that they seeks to succeed by triggering predictable emotional reflexes.5 Kitsch takes short cuts, exploiting easy effects.
Brown likens kitsch to the “spiritual milk” that Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians Paul says,
But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready.
2 Corinthians 3:1-2
Brown’s comparison of kitsch to spiritual milk does make room for kitsch in our world, however. He maintains that it can actually help people to open their hearts. Kitsch can be helpful in a nursery, or a hospital, or for people for whom beauty is a distant memory, offering them an infantile experience of shalom. But one must remember that kitsch tends to be cheap, counterfeit, quick and easy. He explains, “There is a place for kitsch… Yet kitsch is forever immature – and often in a way that cries out to be counteracted and reformed at a more mature level. In and of itself, kitsch ordinarily conveys a distorted impression of the higher goals to which it typically alludes or aspires. And it cannot often carry one very far toward those goals.”6 Served likens this to baby talk, and admits that, as such, it remains necessary. But even though there is a place for both kitsch, baby talk, or spiritual milk, we must always aspire toward the soul enlarging experiences of “solid food,” or “spiritual maturity.”
Kinkade’s perfection is not the perfection of Christ. Kinkade’s town cannot exist in the perfection of the kingdom of God. Thomas inspected the resurrected Jesus, and found that the scars of the Fall remained. Glory did not merely cover them up. In like manner, great art can depict absolute shalom without masking difficulty and fallenness. It does not have to resort to “and they all lived happily ever after.” That rhetorical veneer simply does not satisfy. The movie 50/50 is perhaps one of the most vivid examples of how kitsch fails undermines all of the good work it attempts to complete.
The movie is about a twenty-seven year old man named Adam Lerner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). He has always tried to take good care of his health, so it comes as a cruel surprise when he learns that he has malignant tumors along his spine. His doctor gives him a 50/50 chance of survival, but Adam tries to remain upbeat, though his mother and his best friend Kyle react badly to the news. Adam starts seeing an absolutely gorgeous, twenty-six year old, single therapist (Anna Kendrick), and (big surprise) their relationship threatens to cross the boundary between doctor and patient. The plot builds fantastically into existential questions of divine justice, mortality, grief, and love in the face of terminal illness. Then Adam has his surgery and the doctors proclaim (within hours of completing the surgery) that they had removed all of the cancerous tissue and that he would make a full recovery.
There was no talk of “we will find out later if we got it all.” There was no talk of the chances of the cancer coming back. The movie simply ends with Katie and Adam standing alone in his living room. Katie smiles devilishly and asks, “Now what?” Then the credits role. 50/50, like Kinkade and like those puppies, undermines its objective by leaving the mature viewer thinking “but that isn’t true! That isn’t honest!” We would rather have an ending that is coherent, satisfying, and well formed. 50/50 threw that all away in favor of butterflies in our tummies. Instead of expanding our understanding of justice, mortality, grief, and love, 50/50 proclaims a vision of the good life that requires lodging our fingers in our ears and squeezing our eyes shut. The examples in this post all champion emotional immaturity, encouraging people to continue believing that they will find their Anna Kendrick right before they never die.
But our world is not a world that God chose to fix with the snap of his fingers. God chose to bear with the suffering of his people through Christ. The perfect Christ became the very sin and corruption of our fallen world so that we might become the righteousness and the incorruptibility of God. The story is exquisitely beautiful, just as kitsch aspires to be. But the story of God’s redemption of his people is a beauty that is not clean, cheap, or easy. It’s beauty does not ignore cancer. It’s beauty embraces the whole story, and consequently, leaves those who experience it deeper, broader, fuller human beings.
“Easter never forgets Good Friday.”7
- Seerveld, 63.
- Brown , 129.
- Kundera , 168-169.
- Seerveld, 63 (emphasis mine).
- Brown , 146.
- Brown , 147.
- Brown , 224
Jonathan H Dockery 