Robert Musil:
What is kitsch? . . . kitsch affirms itself as something that peels life off of language. Layer by layer, it strips language bare. The more abstract kitsch becomes, the more it becomes kitsch.

Hermann Broch:
Kitsch is certainly not “bad art”; it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art, or which, if you prefer, appears alongside it. . . . Every system is dialectically capable of developing its own anti-system and is indeed compelled to do so. The danger is all the greater when at first glance the system and the anti-system appear to be identical and it is hard to see that the former is open and the latter closed. The Anti-Christ looks like Christ, acts and speaks like Christ, but is all the same Lucifer. What then is the sign that enables one to see this difference? An open system, like the Christian one, is an ethical system: it provides man with the necessary directions for him to act as a man. The hints given by a closed system, on the other hand, (even if they are covered with a veneer of ethics) are no more than simple rules of play; i.e. it transforms that part of human life which is in its control into a game that can no longer be valued as ethical, but only as aesthetic. This conceptual cycle is anything but simple . . . but it can become clearer if you remember that a player is ethically [doesn’t he mean aesthetically?] well-behaved if he is thoroughly versed in the rules of the game and acts in accordance with them. He is not concerned with anything else going on round him with the result that, when he has to play his part, he will calmly let a man drown at his side. This man is the prisoner of a purely conventional system of symbols, and even if these symbols are copied from some sort of reality, the system is still a system of imitation. We have already mentioned the grotesque religions of beauty and reason. At this stage we can also add political religions. Here again it is a question of imitation, of religions of imitation, which therefore carry within them the seeds of evil. Kitsch is also a system of imitation. It can resemble the system of art in every detail, above all when it is handled by masters such as Wagner, the French dramatists (Sardou, for example) or—to take an example from painting—someone like Dali, but the element of imitation is still bound to show through. The kitsch system requires its followers to “work beautifully,” while the art system issues the ethical order: “Work well.” Kitsch is the element of evil in the value system of art.

Thomas Mann:
The terraced garden was liberally adorned with earthenware gnomes, mushrooms, and all kinds of lifelike animals, on a pedestal stood a mirrored glass sphere, which distorted faces most comically; there were also an aeolian harp, several grottoes, and a fountain whose streams made an ingenious figure in the air, while silver goldfish swam in its basin . . . Over the outside door was an ingenious mechanism, activated by air pressure as the door closed, which played with a pleasing tinkle the opening bars of Strauss's 'Freut euch des Lebens'.

Celeste Olalquiaga:
Although for [Walter Benjamin] the novel promotes an individualistic experience that is radically different from the communal one of oral and epic literary traditions, it enables for this very reason a creative understanding of the world (rather than an acceptance of handed-down beliefs) which can open the way for its transformation.
     What is most relevant about Benjamin’s kitsch essay, therefore, is that it describes the consequence of the shift from a mode of experience based on a sacred distance to a mode based on perceptual proximity. For Benjamin, modernity replaces the cyclic flow of traditional time with a mirage of movement constituted by sheer repetition: the new as the “ever-always-the-same.” [Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” New Germarr Critique 34 (Winter 1985): 42-43.] This condition is exposed by dust, which can slowly accumulate on things given their ultimate immobility, since the proliferation in space does not grant things movement (that is, transformation) in time.
     Ironically, or perhaps by some intuitive acknowledgment, stillness was feared by the pragmatic idealism of the nineteenth century, where everything had to have a reason, an explanation, or a function. Victorian interiors, apparently merely ornamental, had a practical purpose: to cover the emptiness left behind by the absence of tradition. Material proliferation was legitimized by the pretended usefulness of things that contained other things—albums, armoires, boxes, glass cases—often protecting them from this era’s arch-enemy, dust. Interiors themselves, like the arcades of a few decades earlier, were created to protect objects from the outside, keeping them safe for contemplation.
     The vast production of the late 1800s was geared to protecting, showing, holding—an obsession that accounts for this period’s fastidious arrangements, where nothing is out of place and all the different elements participate in an obligatory meaningfulness.

A Topical Guide to the Complete Peter Leroy (so far) is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

All rights reserved. No part of this guide may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. 

Portions of A Topical Guide to the Complete Peter Leroy (so far) were first published by Voyager, Inc., as part of The Complete Peter Leroy (so far).

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.