Bad, tasteless, flashy, and commercialized art. It is art that tends to fall into the paradoxical category of work that we love to hate, or perhaps more precisely that we love and hate at the same time. Where modernism art emphasized uniqueness, durability, originality, and novelty, kitsch celebrates mimicry, expendability, repetition, and banality, and finding pleasure amidst the dross (probably no current artist better exemplifies this approach than Quentin Tarantino, whose films are a deliberate and respectful pastiche of older styles). The ultimate kitsch item is a replica of a famous original of the type Eco, Umberto decries in his account of hyperreality. The Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, Theodor, used the term âkitschâ in conjunction with avant-garde to define the polar extremes of contemporary art, condemning kitsch on the one hand for merely reproducing the values of late capitalism and praising the avant-garde on the other hand for challenging or refusing those values. Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, Clement Greenberg adopted a similar binary in his writings on modern art, again condemning kitsch for its failure to yield anything new or interesting. Although kitsch is generally used in a derogatory fashion, it can also be used in an affirmative sense when it refers to items of nostalgia---propaganda items from former communist countries like China and Russia might be considered âgoodâ kitsch because to people on the Left they recollect a âlostâ world of socialist dreams and to people on the Right they confirm capitalismâs victory. Similarly, artists like Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons exploit nostalgic kitsch in their work.