The Evil in Art's Value System: Herrmann Broch's Essays about Kitsch

Though kitsch seems to have lost its horror in the wake of post-modernism, the discourse that high modernism launched against it in the first third of the 20th century was a kind of proselytism. Hermann Broch pursues what he identifies as kitschy with a particular furor, calling kitsch the "evil in art's value system." He does this in essays that themselves enact what they demonize, taking recourse to the "melodramatic," Manichaean forms of expression that kitsch itself employs. Claudia Liebrand's lecture, The Evil in Art's Value System: Herrmann Broch's Essays about Kitsch, reconstructs Broch's effort to apprehend kitsch as the legacy of German Romanticism.