The Kitsch Movement

Kitsch painting is an international movement of classical painters founded upon a 24 September 1998 speech and philosophy by Odd Nerdrum, later clarified in his book On Kitsch with Jan-Ove Tuv and others. The movement incorporates the techniques of the Old Masters with narrative, romanticism, and emotionally charged imagery. The movement defines Kitsch as synonymous with the arts of ancient Rome or the techne of ancient Greece. Kitsch painters embrace kitsch as a positive term not in opposition to "art", but as its own independent superstructure. Kitsch painters assert that Kitsch is not an art movement, but a philosophical movement separate from art. The Kitsch movement has been considered an indirect criticism of the contemporary art world, but according to Nerdrum and many Kitsch painters, this is not their expressed intention.

The word, kitsch, was originally popularized in the 1930s by the art theorists Theodor Adorno, Hermann Broch, and Clement Greenberg, who each sought to define avant-garde and kitsch as opposites. To the art world of the time, the immense popularity of kitsch was perceived as a threat to culture. The arguments of all three theorists relied on an implicit definition of kitsch as a type of false consciousness, a Marxist term meaning a mindset present within the structures of capitalism that is misguided as to its own desires and wants. Marxists believe there to be a disjunction between the real state of affairs and the way that they phenomenally appear."

The Kitsch philosophy, as a positive view, is based on the term art, or fine art as solely the "concept" as opposed to its physical manifestation, a view popularized in the 18th century by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his book, Critique of Judgement. According to Kant, art should be regarded with "aesthetic indifference". Others have come to similar conclusions about the origin of art, notably, Larry Shiner in The Invention of Art.

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