A clear analysis of kitsch in its current context.
Kitsch has changed. What was once considered a style of bad taste, relegated to the decorative realm and associated with bourgeois aesthetics, has transformed into a global "neokitsch" that permeates architecture, leisure, fashion, entertainment, and even digital communication. Its influence has grown so much that it has given rise to "luxury kitsch," adopted by major brands and financial elites. Expansive and omnipresent, it is no longer limited to objects or images but shapes a true civilization based on the logic of excess: the civilization of "too much."
Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy do not limit themselves to nostalgic criticism or moral judgment but explore kitsch as a central phenomenon in the anthropology of modernity, revealing the human need to escape in a world dominated by the aesthetics of the ephemeral and seduction. Instead of reducing it to superficial frivolity, they analyze it as an interpretive key to our era and place the issue in its real context. This book does not aim to condemn it but to offer a clear and insightful reading of modernity, with its contradictions and excesses, to show that kitsch is not something to be eradicated but understood in all its complexity.
