Bibs, Bobs & Ballrooms – The Risky Business of Kitsch
- Stephen Pincus
- Jul 11
- 21 min read
Updated: Jul 12
Stephen Pincus
“Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit”
- Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The tawdry saga of Trump’s White House ballroom reminds me of my high school English teacher, Joseph Sherman.[1]
Joe was a brilliant educator with a rapier wit, inimitable whether in class or on stage. Later he became a world-renowned Yiddish scholar. His red pen tore through our clichés, annotating our woolly prose with epithets like “this is philistine crap.” He had impeccable taste and no patience for hubris or vulgarity.
Joe would have dismissed the ballroom project in one word: “kitsch!”
But can we afford to be flippant about the vanity projects of the world’s most powerful leader? And should we dismissive of kitsch?
What is Kitsch?[2]
Joe would have said that kitsch is dangerous because it replaces critical
thought with stock response, authentic feeling with trite sentimentality, and creativity with cliché.
The most obvious examples of kitsch are often the most benign. Tacky backyard gnomes use traditional folklore to mimic classical sculptures once placed on grand estates. They play on cheap sentiment and nostalgia.
Nor is it difficult to see why Tretchikoff’s weeping flower is kitsch.
A discarded fragile flower is presented as an abandoned fragile maiden. The painting is over-polished, melodramatic and seeks to elicit a stock response. Faux tears don’t make flowers human, any more than gold trappings make presidents royal.
Used as wallpaper, Lost Orchid is doubly kitsch.
The word “kitsch” arose in Munich slang about 150 years ago to describe cheap art.[3] Later it became a key aesthetic, sociological and ethical concept.
Sociologists argued that reactionaries use “faked sensations” to “dumb down” avant-garde “high art,” mechanically adopting its exterior elements without its substance. The result is the mass production of “ersatz culture.”[4]
Others viewed kitsch as "evil" - a corruption of value - because it mimics creative art, using pre-digested formulae to produce a sentimentalized, false view of reality. The creator of kitsch is not merely incompetent, but "ethically depraved," engaged in a "narcissistic fantasy.”[5]
As a teen, I was entranced by Gillo Dorfles’ “catalogue of bad taste.” The book includes over 270 illustrations, many hilarious.[6] Dorfles applied kitsch to nearly every facet of modern society, from architecture, film, tourism, and pornography to religion, politics and death. He showed how artistic masterpieces become kitsch when reproduced on bath towels. He warned against kitsch’s “contagious and corrosive nature” which threatens to weaken a society’s creative energy.
Look what happens when autocrats masquerade as ancient warriors.
The Ballroom
Trump proposed a grandiose ballroom for the White House in 2010. The Obama Administration politely declined - not only was it unnecessary but would destroy the White House’s historical architectural fabric. Trump frequently floated the idea during his first Presidential term to signal his imperial view of the presidency, but did not seek approvals or start development.
Nor has he sought approvals during his second term, but he demolished the existing east wing of the White House in October 2025, has fought a court injunction against construction, and spuriously argued that the ballroom is required for “national security.” The vast majority of Americans oppose the idea; many view it as yet another attempt to distract the public from Trump’s many failures and some have likened the aesthetic to a “brothel” or “Vegas casino.”[7]
As leading architecture critic Paul Goldberger explains:
“Until now, every addition to the White House… was designed to defer to the original structure and to make it larger without appearing to be making it larger… The proposed new ballroom… for all intents and purposes designed by Mr. Trump, does exactly the opposite. It is a huge, dumb box…
It is more like a decorative emergency exit atop a vast staircase leading down to the White House grounds, the so-called President’s Park, which would also be compromised by the enormous addition.
It is not just symmetry that is being thrown away here; it is more than two centuries of respectful deference to building, function and history.”[8]
Other Bits and Bobs[9]
Trump kitsch envelops the White House. He paved over the iconic Rose Garden. Gold now covers about a third of the walls. Golden antiques cover the mantel. Credenzas bear golden feet. It’s all a metaphor for the imperial image he is trying to project.[10] If it isn’t clear that Trump is obsessed with his image then look at his gold-framed mirrors.
![Trump’s Oval Office from New York Times 3-D Composite[11]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c026bf_508b616377984c499c1c0f13e3a5be23~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_975,h_548,al_c,q_90,enc_avif,quality_auto/c026bf_508b616377984c499c1c0f13e3a5be23~mv2.png)
In his recent state visit to the White House, King Charles demonstrated why the ballroom project is the essence of kitsch. Calling it “readjustments”, he recalled Britain’s “own attempt at real estate redevelopment” (i.e., the burning down) of the White House in 1814. Trump lapped it all up.[12] An educated king uses gentle irony and understatement to expose the sentimentalized hollow fakery of a vulgar buffoon. And in a double irony, the would-be king so desperately wants to imitate the real one that he doesn’t catch on.
Trump is intent on spattering the US capital with kitsch: a hideous Trump arch on the Potomac, a national garden of “American heroes”, and the replacement of the subtle grey surface of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool with gaudy Mar-a-Lago blue.
As one of Australia’s leading public intellectuals recently noted: “We don’t really expect taste from our politicians. Of course not. But in Trumpitecture, its absence is extreme, erring relentlessly towards bling, tackiness and kitsch.”[13]
But in the midst of his onslaught on the economy, democracy, healthcare, education, research, and humanitarian aid, among other things, how much does Trump’s kitsch really matter?
As Zadie Smith asked in a recent lecture to the American Academy of Arts and Letters: “Why talk about arts and letters when people are being gunned down in the streets?”[14]
Aesthetics: image, sound and text
Kitsch replaces beauty with display, taste with attention-seeking, value with visibility, and quality with noise.
One working definition requires kitsch to depict objects or themes
instantly and effortlessly identifiable,
highly charged with stock emotions, and
without substantially enriching our associations with them.[15]
This clearly applies to backyard gnomes, Tretchikoff’s weeping flower, and the White House makeover. But kitsch infects a wide range of media.
Adorno fled 1930s Germany, then compared its kitsch to American commercial radio.[16] Loud crescendos and catchy choruses of kitsch music "hook" uncritical listeners, who are easily manipulated into chanting commercial or political slogans. Kitsch’s “sedative” replaces revolutionary frustration with a pre-packaged sentimental release of emotion, keeping the public politically passive and compliant.
Mass-produced music erodes the capacity for independent thought, making people conform and leaving them vulnerable to demagogic messages.[17] Adorno contrasted pop music - standardized, static, soothing, and sentimental - with Arnold Schoenberg’s “revolutionary discovery of atonal music” recently discussed by Steve Aschheim in this magazine.
Aschheim calls Schoenberg’s “Survivor from Warsaw” an “astonishing memorial piece” which “ended with Jewish prisoners in an extermination camp intoning the traditional Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael, prior to presumably being killed.”[18]
Contrast this with Leonard Bernstein’s “god-awfully hammy” invocation of the Kaddish prayer in his Symphony No. 3.[19]
Kitsch language is also easy to recognise.
In lamenting the debasement of current wartime rhetoric, The Economist recently compared President Roosevelt’s D-Day statement that Americans fight “not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest” with Trump’s “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH!”[20]
![Two secretaries of War: from Churchill to Hegseth[21]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c026bf_5f92669c7c3740c0bd86ca59cab254eb~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_980,h_411,al_c,q_90,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/c026bf_5f92669c7c3740c0bd86ca59cab254eb~mv2.png)
Similarly, Trump’s so-called ‘Secretary of War’: “Iranians are toast and they know it. This is not a ‘fair fight’: We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” In his faux “prayer” sessions, the learned Secretary confuses Pulp Fiction with the bible.[22]
Trump rhetoric is packed with the pretentious diction, meaningless words, dying metaphors and verbal false limbs that Orwell calls the “swindles and perversions” of hackneyed English – “tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged.”[23]
Kitsch-mongers often don’t understand what they are imitating. Thus, they often get their cultural allusions wrong.
A recent White House video entitled “Justice the American Way” interspersed footage of Iranian targets being hit with scenes from the film Gladiator. This “tells you that they actually see war as a Hollywood movie” but misunderstand it: Gladiator’s hero was “a reluctant fighter… not a violent lunk, but a peaceable man forced to fight for his wife, child and the ‘dream that was Rome’.”[24]
While kitsch is typically associated with the political right,[25] it has also been vigorously attacked by conservatives like Roger Scruton.
For Scruton, kitsch appeals but is dangerous because it is:[26]
sentimental– it deceives you into mistaking a narcissistic reaction for authentic feeling: ‘look at me feeling this; how nice I am and how lovable’.[27]
addictive – it’s automatic, like eating sugar, rather than intentional, which requires understanding and curiosity.
infantilizing – by offering a childish fantasy – an escape from real life – it makes you passive and undermines your potential for growth.
In short, kitsch is fake.
Milan Kundera captures the pretense more graphically, calling kitsch the “absolute denial of shit.” He describes the deception as a “second tear”: first is the false tear for the object; kitsch is the second narcissistic tear you shed for the self shedding the first tear.[28]
So, an obvious symbol of kitsch is the “selfie.” Its prevalence in the self-reinforcing Trumpian community of fakery may now be kitsch’s ultimate expression.
You might challenge my complaints about kitsch with three retorts.
First Retort: there is no kitsch
The first is that it’s not possible nowadays to objectively distinguish it from authentic art, so there really is no such thing as kitsch at all.[29]
This is simply laziness. The fact that intelligent people may disagree on whether something is true or good doesn’t mean there is no such thing as truth or ethics. Similarly with aesthetic judgement. Kitsch seeks to undermine the distinction between good and bad taste and erode the notion of artistic standards altogether.[30]
Once we establish criteria, drawing distinctions is a matter of doing the work to apply them. Rather than two discrete buckets, authenticity and kitsch should be viewed as zones along a continuum, with difficult cases located at their border.
Compare these two home libraries.[31] They have similar chandeliers and mirrors. Both have ornate crown mouldings, relief plasterwork and intricate woodwork. Each has multiple sofas with a classical bust sculpture overlooking them from atop an adjoining table.
And yet the first feels fake while the second is obviously the real thing.
The first is hyper-modern.[32] Almost everything is ostentatiously white - candles and flowers (both fake), sculpture, sofas, walls and every single book. The intricate plaster and wood mouldings (incongruously combined with
bamboo) don’t fit with the pretentious insistence on uniformity by cladding all the books in white and arranging them strictly by size. The clutter of candles seems redundant, never mind the flowers. And the prominent sculptural bust provokes the question – what is this imposter doing in this room?
In the second library, everything has a purpose and fits together. The furniture, lighting, art and ornamentation are imposing, but none is an imposter. The clutter works, and nothing obscures the reason the room exists: its books. As The Times of London put it, this library at Chatsworth House is "often described as Britain's loveliest private library, [and] ranks among the great historic library interiors of Europe."[33]
Or compare two paintings of the Galilee, each involving the use of a computer.
Denis Diamond’s digitally executed Road Through the Upper Galilee - After Rain, the cover art for Issue 3 of this magazine,[34] captures the region’s distinctive topography without sentimentality. The artist’s restrained treatment of sunlight is particularly striking - muted yet shimmering on the myriad shades of green - reflects the Galilee hillsides with uncanny accuracy. The painting’s central motif subtly suggests the mysteries and dreams of roads not taken.
The second painting is an AI-generated Galilee landscape presented as a picturesque pastoral world offering serenity, nostalgia and delight. Red poppies and pink blossoms foreground a road winding through symmetrically aligned trees and symmetrically receding hills leading to a centered focal point: a hackneyed biblical image of Edenic sunlight. Even the road’s grassy median tapers and divides the road symmetrically.
Ironically, this forced attempt at realism feels less real than the simplified geometry of Road Through the Upper Galilee. In stark contrast to Diamond’s road which disappears into uncertainty, the AI painting promises arrival, eliciting an unambiguous stock response: "This is an idyllic, blessed place.”
There is a fundamental difference between digitally-executed painting like Road Through the Upper Galilee and AI-generated art which may be prone to kitsch because it synthesizes familiar pictorial conventions based on the vast datasets, including commercial and popular imagery, that it is trained on.
Second Retort: some kitsch can help
A second retort is that some kitsch can be necessary and useful. You may be troubled by kitsch’s fake, sentimental, addictive, and escapist elements, but feel that some critics reach too far in objecting to any art that evokes simple beauty and pleasant emotions.[35]
Take sympathy cards, tacky t-shirts or self-help philosophy books. Most are likely kitsch. But the cards and t-shirts may help someone short of time, skill or confidence to express deeply held emotions or views. The books may inspire a new career or approach to life.[36]
Even Beethoven made use of kitsch. And in a brilliant cinematic combination of visual and aural kitsch, Kubrick perversely twisted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in the film A Clockwork Orange, from a symbol of universal brotherhood into an anthem of violent, authoritarian enjoyment.[37]
Stylized kitsch in a theatrical, artificial or flamboyant context may become aesthetically pleasurable. This is what cultural activist Susan Sontag dubbed “camp”.[38]
So, authentic art can effectively employ kitsch instrumentally, intentionally, or ironically. Like sugar, kitsch in limited doses may sometimes be redeemed by its usefulness.
Third Retort: kitsch is good
But kitsch’s usefulness should not be confused with the third retort, that kitsch is good in itself, perhaps better than authentic art. Underlying this is the populist assumption that elitism is evil and that elevating or refining culture is bad for society.
In film, for example, critics describe kitsch as “honest vulgarity” that redeems popular culture by transforming kitsch into legitimate, vital art.[39]
A recent collection of articles on beauty, fashion, mourning, bio-art, visual arts, architecture and politics seeks to “inaugurate a new phase in kitsch studies” and explore the transformation of kitsch from “an aesthetic slur of the 19th and the 20th century” into “a positive term… at the heart of today's society.”[40]
Kitsch has even been defended on religious grounds. Evangelical charges of “moral depravity and sensual indulgence” in “kitsch” Catholic painting, sculpture and liturgy have been defended “not as lack of taste, but as the declaration of ownership over sacred things by the mass of humanity.”[41]
One historian argues that theatre and opera were enjoyed by all social classes together until the mid-nineteenth century when the elites separated “highbrow” from “lowbrow” culture and gave the former a special status.[42]
Another suggests, in contrast, that elitist notions of modern art are rooted in eighteenth-century rationalism that put style ahead of content. This theorist argues that effortless emotional gratification enables the masses to recognize and enjoy an iconic image, a brand logo or a popular advertisement jingle. [43]
Certainly, bingeing on an unreflective Netflix series can be therapeutic at the end of a stressful day.[44] But poor style often either reflects or masks rotten content. Trump’s narcissistic bombast reflects his callous, retrogressive agenda. Orwell’s totalitarian newspeak “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”[45]
In fact, kitsch has been described as “a specifically aesthetic form of lying.”[46]
Ethics and Politics
Lies and fakery are not conducive to building authentic social relationships. Nor do formulaic cliché and infantilization foster mental development. In contrast to authentic art that engages the reader or viewer’s imagination in creative work, kitsch does all the work for us, serving up the junk food of familiar and comfortable texts and images to meet our pre-determined expectations.[47]
Like a digital algorithm programmed to satisfy us, kitsch narrows our consciousness and reduces our capacity for critical thinking. As pre-fabricated emotional experience, kitsch cheats its audiences into artistic reactions without intellectual heavy lifting.[48] It coarsens our social interactions, eroding empathy and cheapening our ways of relating.
Since he embodies it, Trump is an obvious target for kistch. For example, in her graphic historical survey of toilet humor, Professor Alison Rowley focuses extensively on Trump, suggesting toilet kitsch might empower those without other access to the political process.[49]
Arguably, “Dump Trump” kitsch helped to dump Trump in 2020, but its sustainability as a strategy seems doubtful after a barrage of MAGA kitsch propelled Trump to victory in 2024. Similarly, the empowerment of MAGA-kitsch enthusiasts may be illusory: how effectively has Trump addressed his supporters’ grievances?
Trump’s kitsch is an integral part of every aspect of his presidency. Take parades:
“The spectacle demands emotional submission with the goal being identification with the leader. It exchanges democratic freedom for a vision of unity under a single figure.
However, wrapped in humour or patriotic kitsch [emphasis added], Trump’s parade rehearses an authoritarian script with disturbingly familiar cues.
What appears as celebration is, in fact, a rehearsal. It signals a dangerous shift toward personal glorification and a political culture where pageantry replaces participation and adoration displaces dissent.
As history warns, that is when democracy begins to give way.”[50]
A direct line runs from Trump’s bibs, bobs and ballroom to the evisceration of institutions, freedoms and the world order. The risk is vividly illustrated by the evolution from first to second term ICE costumes:
“The new aesthetic wasn’t about doofuses in red hats announcing themselves to you from a distance. That was first-term Trump aesthetics, when the goal was to make people feel like part of the club with merch and slogans. The… second-term aesthetic is about regular everyday dudes who might all of a sudden jump out of a car and take you away.
The new non-uniforms… suggest an update of old school fascist aesthetics. It was once the case that a special uniform (brown shirts, swastika arm bands) marked the victimizers. The adoption of a “normie” aesthetic to carry out state violence, weapons, the banality of evil, pollutes everyday life in a way that previous regimes could not. I’m still not sure whether I have seen an actual ICE officer in the flesh. But the fact that I have seen their ‘uniforms’ on videos, and that these uniforms are everywhere in America, means that any given plane ride or walk down a Chicago street can feel terrifying now, terrifying and fascistic.”[51]
In Israel, a similar direct line can be drawn from Netanyahu’s cigars, pink champagne and diamond necklaces[52] to his partner Ben Gvir’s birthday cake, decorated with a noose and guns.[53]
![Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara strike a pose (Reuters: Rami Shlush)[54]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c026bf_d38074d0477743a687d665d5e4433214~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_483,h_272,al_c,q_85,enc_avif,quality_auto/c026bf_d38074d0477743a687d665d5e4433214~mv2.png)
Kitsch has deep roots in fascism. Mussolini’s extensive reconstruction of Rome was intended to make the city great again.[55] Authoritarians use kitsch to turn “extreme situations” including disability and death into a “sentimental idyll.”[56]
Is there a more extreme “denial of shit” than the Nazi’s extermination of the unsightly disabled?
Nexus Institute[57] founder Rob Riemen argues that kitsch is much more than bad art – it’s the mindset of a society that has given up on the cultivation of moral and spiritual values.” [58] In kitsch society:
Who I am is based on what I have. The compulsion to acquire is not simply greed, but a need to show off our possessions to others. In the digital world kitsch is the accumulation of “likes”.
Quantity eclipses quality. So, the best is by definition the biggest, and education is reduced to the transfer of information and skills needed to earn money.
As “demagogues, stupidity, propaganda, vulgarity, and the lowest human instincts increase their dominance,” democracy inevitably gives birth to its “bastard child … which is fascism.”
Hence for Riemen, kitsch undermines identity, quality and democracy. He presents a familiar but chilling portrait of “the king of kitsch… who his followers believe to be the new messiah who will cure society of all evils and make them happy again and the country great again.”
This is “the new fascist leader who will present himself … as the anti-politician, the strongman, the leader who will cure society from all social evil, and knowing that that's not true:
…he has no other choice than to deceive his millions of believers with slogans, the false promise of a return to a never-existing past, a rich and never-ending variety of enemies to exploit their resentment and fear…with endless propaganda to manipulate their habits and opinions. He has no other interest than self-interest, and his lack of ideas and vision will be hidden by blaming all kinds of scapegoats, and his disinterest in the rest of the world promoted as a brilliant strategy to make his own country great again…
He always will be the showman, the con man, who will exploit vulnerable people…The fascist leader will demand an unconditional loyalty, and his incapability to accept any form of criticism, plus his self-image of being a genius, always characterizes the authoritarian.”
These quintessential fascist characteristics apply, according to Riemen, to Orbán, Putin, Erdoğan, Wilders, Le Pen, Kaczyński, Zeman, the fascist leaders in Austria and Germany, “and last but not least, indeed Mr. Donald Trump.”
It’s fascinating that Riemen said all this during Trump’s first presidential term.
Education and Idealism
Kitsch damages minds, debases discourse, degrades societies. Kitsch societies produce ever more kitsch.
As one cultural observer puts it, the society that put Trump in the White House is “incurious, unwelcoming, backward-looking and fearful. It does not seek the new, but demands endless repetition of the same themes, merely with greater elaboration, gaudier technical effects and greater expense.” [59]
How do we stop this vicious cycle?
We can create and support good writing, painting, design, music, theatre, film and other arts. We can critique and promote criticism of both authentic and kitsch art, and highlight the differences.
But as with leadership,[60] I believe the only sustainable way to fight kitsch is through education.
Like ethical leadership education, educating against kitsch should seek to cultivate honesty, humility, curiosity, critical thought, openness, empathy and imagination.
Many people see through falsehood and manipulation. But the ongoing barrage of kitsch wears us down.
Education presents many ways to defend against kitsch.
Joseph Sherman was highly effective at this as our English teacher.[61] He inspired teenage jocks to enjoy Shakespeare and Dickens, to recognize pretence and propaganda, and to speak and write with clarity, originality and imagination.
Recalling the four English exams that Joe set for us each term, I suggest a “five C’s” framework as one example of an educational approach: comprehension, (literary) canon, (practical) criticism and composition, each focused on recognizing and avoiding cliché.
Deep comprehension involves close attention to intention and meaning. Ongoing engagement with high quality literature sensitizes us to complexity and ambiguity. Practical textual criticism[62] enables us to cut through sentimentality and dogma. And competent self-expression demands intellectual rigor and imagination.
What could be a better antidote to propaganda than (life long) learning to read widely and critically, to own what we read, and to write freshly and clearly?
And there’s another ‘C’ at the core of cliché: convenience.
In her lecture on whether art matters right now, Zadie Smith contrasts art with technology, which strives for convenience: “Art can be enormously inconvenient! Art can luxuriate. Wander. It may embellish and decorate, or refuse to be convenient, dogmatic, obliging. Its distance from the prerogatives of the powerful is precisely where its force of resistance lies.” [63]
Smith reflects on a formative novel in her canon, and concludes with a rousing affirmation of its enduring power over Trump kitsch:
“It has internal order. It’s beautiful and tragic. It is human, above all. Reading it reminded me what humans are, what they are capable of, why they do the things they do, and why it is they leave so many things undone.
...Such art is made by us and for us. It is for our sakes. Its power is not of the kind this president recognizes, but it has its own kind of force. It will outlast both him and his regime. It will outlast us all.”[64]
This is an idealistic vision which would have resonated with Joe Sherman in his war on kitsch.
Joe’s critical mind and caustic wit should not be confused with cynicism. Just as kitsch’s sanitization and sentimentality - its “denial of shit” – should not be confused with idealism.
Kitsch-mongers prey on fear, ignorance and laziness. They are cynics, not idealists. Educating against kitsch, on the other hand, is a profoundly idealistic project.
Joe captured this in his farewell editorial for our high school magazine. He wrote it in a technological and political era a long way from our own. Yet his call to action is as compelling now as it was half a century ago:
“As our world grows more technological… we ask our children to decide how to earn a living instead of how to live…
Only the ability to be human in the fullest sense… can show people how to live. Only minds capable of seeing beyond the surface can use change as a creative rather than as a destructive force. Education should enable our children to use specialised knowledge to understand the common nature of all things. It should lead them out of themselves towards a fuller understanding of life, and a richer enjoyment of it.
Above all, it should not be the servant of materialism, but the guide of idealism.”[65]
[2] Dictionary definitions of “kitsch” include “(1) something that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor quality, or (2) a tacky or lowbrow quality or condition” (The Merriam Webster Dictionary) and “works of art or objects that are popular but that are considered to have no real artistic value and to be lacking in good taste, for example because they are sentimental (Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries)
[3] According to Stefan Ortlieb and Claus-Christian Carbon, the earliest written account of ‘kitsch’ was in a satirical poem by Max Bernstein making fun of a contemporary genre painting at the 1883 show of the Munich Art Society. See “Kitsch and Perception: Towards a New Aesthetic from Below,” in Art & Perception 7 (2019), note 1
[4] Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review, Fall 1939
[5] Hermann Broch, “Einige Bemerkungen zum Problem des Kitsches (Notes on the Problem of Kitsch),“ 1955
[6] Gillo Dorfles, Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste, 1969
[7] See, for example, Jan-Werner Müller, “A ballroom bunker is a perfect symbol for Trump 2.0,” The Guardian, April 30, 2026, and Shirin Ali, “There’s Something More Sinister Beneath Trump’s Ballroom Obsession,” Slate, April 30, 2026
[8] Paul Goldberger, “Trump Will Destroy Washington if It’s the Last Thing He Does,” New York Times, March 13, 2026
[9] The English expression "bits and bobs" has been used since the late 19th century as a mildly derogatory equivalent of “bits and pieces” or “odds and ends.” The doubly alliterative “bibs and bobs" is a common mishearing or “eggcorn” (a mishearing of “acorn”). As a folk distortion, “bibs and bobs” is thus perhaps kitsch in itself. Hence the intentional use of bibs in the title of this article
[10] Sam Sifton, Inside the Oval Office, New York Times, December 24, 2025
[11] See Ashley Wu, Doug Mills, Junho Lee, Marco Hernandez, Katie Rogers and Mika Gröndahl, “‘He’s a Maximalist’: Inside Trump’s Gilded Oval Office,” New York Times 3-D composite, December 23, 2025
[12] Ben McCaffrey, “King Charles mocks Donald Trump's White House ballroom plans,” GB NEWS April 29, 2026
[13] Elizabeth Farrelly, “Trumpitecture: Kitsch by executive order,” Architecture,” Au, Australian Institute of Architects, May, 2026
[14] See Zadie Smith, “Art for Our Sakes: Why should we go on making things?” The New York Review of Books, June 11, 2026. This essay was delivered in a slightly different form as a lecture at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, in May, 2026
[15] Tomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art, 1996, pp 14-42
[16] Theodor W. Adorno, “On The Social Situation Of Music,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research), 1932, pp. 103-124 and pp. 356-7
[17] See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947, translated by John Cumming, New York: Herder and Herder, 1972
[18] Steven E. Aschheim, “There Will Be Music Despite Everything,” Kaleidoscope magazine, 4th issue, Sept 2025
[19] Steve Schwartz, “Weill Das Berliner Requiem; Schoenberg A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46; Bernstein Symphony No. 3, Kaddish,” Jewish Music Institute -Suppressed Music, October 19, 2009
[20] “The rhetoric of war has changed. Not for the better,” The Economist, April 23, 2026, p.76
[21] Churchill photograph Q 84077 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums and Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of Defence on Facebook
[22] ibid
[23] George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946, pp 3 - 6
[24] “The rhetoric of war has changed. Not for the better,” op. cit. p.77
[25] See Thom Waite, “How kitsch became the defining aesthetic of right-wing America,” Dazed July 17, 2025
[26] See Marijke Doms, “Why Beauty Matters: Kitsch, Stupidity And Tragedy,” 2017
[27] Roger Scruton, “Faking It,” Confessions of a Heretic, London: Notting Hill Editions, 2016 p.8
[28] Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim, New York: Harper & Row, 1984 p. 248
[29] See Rebecca Longtin, Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", Youtube lecture, December 27, 2023
[30] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp 56–58
[31] Both are featured in Ellis et al, At Home With Books, Carol Southern Books, 1995
[32] This is the home library of designer Thomas Brit (ibid, p.49)
[33] “Inside Chatsworth — is this Britain's loveliest private library?”, The Times, March 25, 2026
[34] Road Through the Upper Galilee - After Rain, Cover artist - Denis Diamond, Kaleidoscope Issue 3, June 2025
[35] H. L. Story, “Criticising the Kitsch Critics,” July 7, 2023
[36] See Riccardo Carli, “Living with the Everyday Kitsch Object: A New Existential Potentiality,” British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 66, number 1, January 2026, pp. 1–16
[37] Slavoj Žižek, “Beethoven and the Act,” Goads and Prods, Nov 16, 2024.
[38] See Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 1964
[39] See Pauline Kael, “Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; Or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?” 1964
[40] Paco Barragán, Jean Serroy, Erik Anderson, Alison Rowley, and Michaela Pastekova, The Changing Meaning of Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
[41] Ed Simon, “In Defense of Kitsch,” July 29, 2020
[42] See Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Harvard University Press, 1988. The terms "highbrow" and "lowbrow" reflect phrenology’s racist theory that Europeans’ superiority could be seen in their "high" brows - see George Lipsitz, “High Culture and Hierarchy,” American Quarterly, September 1991
[43] Ortlieb and Carbon, above, pp 14 - 21
[44] Cf. Thomas Roueché, “Happily bingeing on kitsch,” Cornucopia, April 11, 2021
[45] Orwell, above, p13
[46] Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 1987
[47] See David Perell’s interview with Yaan Martel, May 2026
[48] See Umberto Eco , “The Structure of Bad Taste" in Apocalittici e Integrati, 1964
[49] See Alison Rowley, “Old Tricks for a New Dog: Toilet Humor, Politicized Kitsch, and the Trump Presidency” in, The Changing Meaning of Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance, op. cit. The illustration is Figure 1 in he article entitled: “Photograph showing button referencing both the ‘golden toilet’ and ‘shithole countries’ episodes. Taken November 019 (Courtesy of the author).” Professor Rowley has also written graphically about Putin kitsch. See “What Does a Putin Garden Gnome Tell Us About Contemporary Politics?” September 25, 2020
[50] Irene Gammel, “Trump’s military parade: A ‘big big celebration’ or an authoritarian ritual?” The Conversation, May 29, 2025
[51] Dushko Petrovich Córdova, “The Second-Term Aesthetic,” n + 1, Issue 52, Winter 2026, p.120
[52] Yossi Melman, “The Bibi Files' Director: 'The Extent to Which Netanyahu Can Lie and Obfuscate Amazes Me’,” Haaretz, November 20, 2024
[53] Charlie Summers, “Top cops attend Ben Gvir’s birthday,” Times of Israel, 3 May 2026
[54] Riley Stuart, “Inside the Netanyahu family's collapsing popularity, from burnt soup to corruption court cases,” ABC News, November 21, 2023
[55] See Goldberger, op. cit.
[56] See Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, English edition, 1984
[57] See Nexus Instituut
[58] See Rob Riemen, To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism, WW Norton, 2018 and his presentation “To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism,” Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, February 5, 2018. The ensuing Riemen references are to this presentation.
[59] Mike Lofgren, “How did we get from the ’60s to Trump’s kitsch White House?,” Salon, August 9, 2025
[60] See my “Where Have All The Leaders Gone?” Kaleidoscope magazine, Issue 2, March 2025
[61] For an extensive recent study of the evolution of English studies in the English speaking countries to its status as the pinnacle of a civilized education in the mid-twentieth century, see Stefan Collini, Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain, 2025
[62] Ibid, Chapter 21, "Insurgents” traces the rise of I. A. Richards’ foundational method of "prac crit" as a cornerstone of mid-twentieth century English studies and the role of T.S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis in its development
[63] Zadie Smith, op. cit., commenting on Edward P. Jones ‘ novel The Known World, 2003
[64] ibid
[65] King Edward VII High School Magazine Editorial by Joseph Sherman, Johannesburg, 1975
