I'll be in the lower 48 for a couple of weeks, so the posts will be few and far between. I leave you with a few ideas from Hermann Broch who, although he is better known for novels like The Death of Virgil and The Sleepwalkers, wrote some very provocative essays about art.

The essence of Kitsch consists of exchanging the ethical category with the aesthetic category. The artist pursues not a 'good' work of art, but a 'beautiful' work of art, what matters here is a beautiful effect. And this means that the kitsch novel, even while often using quite naturalistic language, i.e., the vocabulary of reality, describes the world not as it really is but as it is hoped and feared to be…

…The means employed for effect are always "proven," and they can hardly be increased any more than the number of possible dramatic situations could be increased; that which is past and proven appears over and over again in kitsch; in other words (a stroll through any art exhibit will confirm this), kitsch is always subject to the dogmatic influence of the past—it iwll never take its vocabulary of reality from the world directly but will apply pre-used vocabularies, which in its hands rigidify into cliché…

The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality. For through kitsch, as an imitation system, is obliged to coincide in all its aspects with art, the artwork's methodology as such cannot be imitated—all that can be imitated are its simplest forms. It is quite significant—and nowhere is this so obvious as in poetry, but also somewhat in music—that kitsch must always revert to the most primitive methods, precisely because it completely lacks any imagination of its own…

And just so we can see how far Broch is willing to take this:

The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.

These and other gems appear in the compilation
Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age.

For a subtly different view, here is a tidbit from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory:

One of the defining characteristics of kitsch may be that it simulates non-existing emotions. Kitsch neutralizes them along with the aesthetic phenomenon as a whole. Kitsch is art that cannot, or does not want to, be taken seriously, while at the same time, through its appearance, postulating aesthetic seriousness…

In order to make the above definition of kitsch meaningful one would probably have to look at the expression of the work of art itself as an index of truth and falsehood. To establish authenticity or lack of authenticity is endlessly complicated however—one of the complications being the fact that the truth content of means of expression changes over time…

Something to think about next time you are flipping through the pages of Popular Photography.