Abstract

How has the advent and widespread use of digital media affected our understanding of kitsch its relationship to art? Along this chapter, the author introduces the term “digital kitsch” not to describe specific, conventionally “kitschy” manifestations of digital aesthetics, but to identify the default mode for all creative endeavors with digital media: tools that have made visual literacy accessible to all, turning the strategies and languages of the avant-garde banal and commonplace; tools that elicit technophilia, rather than critical, informed use, and whose built-in limitations and ideologies condition their creative outputs. Digital kitsch takes in everything from amateur internet creations to professional content, from low-res “poor images” to mainstream media productions, from pixel graphics to hi-res CGI, and more. By no means exhaustively, this chapter looks at how art might exist in this arena, in relation to digital kitsch, but without identifying with it.