Genèse et enjeux du kitsch

Kitsch is a concept historically linked to industrial modernity. It corresponds to a need on the part of the bourgeoisie, the new dominant class, to copy the aristocracy without having the means to do so. But the phenomenon is not limited to that : the appearance of kitsch is a symptom which reveals a cultural crisis. Balzac is interested in this phenomenon while Rimbaud makes a literary object of it ; in the twentieth century it is appropriated as a figure of counterculture.