“Thomas Kinkade’s art is Pornographic.”

The potentially hyperbolic statement above comes straight from the lips of my Aesthetics Professor, who also happens to be the head of the Art Department. Of course, the idea is that uninspired, unimaginative, and consumer-driven imagery is not art and is actually degrading to look at when it is deceptively purveyed as having aesthetic value.

There is another adjective for this sort of non-aesthetic rubbish: kitsch.

Calinescu writes in regard to kitsch that it “dismisses the claims or pretensions of quality of anything that tries to be ‘artistic’ without genuinely being so.” He describes it as “aesthetic deception and self-deception,” and damns it for always implying “aesthetic inadequacy.”

“We have only to think of the horrendous old ‘curiosities’ that are on sale in the increasingly numerous nostalgia shops–rotten boots, broken cart wheels, porcelain night-pots, unwieldy rusty bathtubs of two or three generations ago, and inumerable other shabby junky ‘antiques,’ which many people enjoy as poetic relics from the better world of our grandfathers.”

Kundera tells us “the brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.”

To me the idea of kitsch as base seems to have plurality of meaning, for true universal brotherhood must exist at the basest of levels, at the lowest common denominator; and your Pottery Barn prints may lead straight to an uninspired aesthetic hell.

Just be careful next time you choose your wall paper, and consider purging your house of souvenirs…