Culture April 1, 2016

The invention of kitsch, critic Clement Greenberg wrote in 1939, was part and parcel of European industrialization. The continent’s newly dislocated masses found themselves stuck, from Birmingham to Berlin, between an urbane high culture to which they had no connection and a folk culture whose significance was indelibly rooted in the countryside they had left behind, and kitsch, Greenberg argued, was devised to fill this gap. Produced by committee, designed by formula, and motivated by profit, kitsch “pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.”