Kitsch as an odd fellow traveller, beggar lice on the coat tails of the modern, a stain which modernism fears as a viral agent somehow devaluing the modernist values in kitsch’s banal but not ironic values, values which seem to magically appear with the advent of the modern. Truth or fiction? It really doesn’t matter to kitsch as it forms its own totemist confusions of its origins and purported values of just there-ness, doppelgangers of beauty and strength without being very strong and often of a surprisingly banal and etiolated beauty. Is something else going on here, in kitsch’s duplicity, something impossible to ignore and yet difficult to see and conceptualize? Except of course as an exercise in a certain stupidity and culpability of the masses, not to even speak of its governing mood of melancholia:
For champions of modernity, fear of the occult is an essential fear. Its presence even at the heart of the scientific revolution, however, speaks insistently of a view of history harsher still than the evolutionary myth: we have escaped nothing in our history, and what we presume to have escaped still dwells within us.
Magical Thinking: History possibility and the Idea of the Occult, Stuart McWilliams