How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in…

Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.

— Karsten Harries

Not all kitsch is sweet.

— Karsten Harries

The work of an artist who attempts lovingly to embrace reality, will ring false, will degenerate into kitsch.

— Karsten Harries

To call a work of art Kitsch is to condemn it for being bad art. But there is a great deal of bad art…

— Karsten Harries

The Kitsch consumer wants to be enchanted.

— Karsten Harries

The need for Kitsch arises when genuine emotion has become rare.

— Karsten Harries

We meet thus in kitsch with a reappropriation of the results of past struggles.

— Karsten Harries

The peasant finds no "natural" urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant…

— Clement Greenberg

If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of...kitsch.

— Balthus

Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies,…

— Slavoj Žižek

Her kitsch was the image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father. It was…

— Milan Kundera

Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long…

— Martin Filler

If you can't take the kitsch, get out of the kitchen.

— Charles Jencks

Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being…

— Denis Dutton

Kitsch of course only comes into existence when we recognize how and why it works.

— John Bayley