INSTITUTE FOR PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

Abstract

The text is founded on the stand that all the serious and significant theorists of kitsch as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon have perceived and pointed to its anthropological dimension. According to the author, each thorough effort in this field of research has led to a conclusion that the complexity and multiple dimensions of this phenomenon cannot be mastered in an analytical manner by means of the category of objectively oriented aesthetics or sociology of culture. In other words, neither is kitsch just a certain given fact expressing unfounded claims to the artistic status nor are the cultural circumstances of modern societies exclusively responsible for the phenomena and mass production of such given facts. Consequently, all of them – let us call them substantionalist definitions of kitsch – which have defined it by means of the formal properties of the objects we qualify as kitsch, have proved to be reductionist and insufficient, contrary to the other type of definitions, the relationist ones, which observed it starting from a specific relation that an individual forms with such objects. The central part of the paper thematizes the nature of that relation as a universal potential of human treatment of objects, which, as such, can be recognized in all the forms of human existence. For, as Ludwig Giesz emphasizes, there is no just kitsch as quasi-art, there is also kitschy behaviour, self-experience, in short – a life in a kitschy style. The conclusion of this text represents a view of the phenomenon of a kitschy person as a tourist, i.e. the challenges offered by tourism as a manner in which a person of today shapes their leisure time to their readiness to produce and enjoy kitsch.