Kitsch
<p>via <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch">wikipedia</a>:
"<b>History</b>
As a descriptive term, <i>kitsch</i> originated in the art markets of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich#Capital_of_reunited_Bavaria" title="Munich">Munich</a> in the 1860s and the 1870s, describing cheap, popular, and marketable pictures and sketches.<sup id="cite_ref-1" class="reference"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup> In <i>Das Buch vom Kitsch</i> (<i>The Book of Kitsch</i>), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reimann_%28writer%29" title="Hans Reimann (writer)">Hans Reimann</a> defines it as a professional expression "born in a painter's studio".
The study of kitsch was done almost exclusively in German until the 1970s, with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin" title="Walter Benjamin">Walter Benjamin</a> being an important scholar in the field.<sup id="cite_ref-menninghaus_2-0" class="reference"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch#cite_note-menninghaus-2">[2]</a></sup>
Hermann Broch argues that the essence of kitsch is imitation: kitsch mimics its immediate predecessor with no regard to ethics—it aims to copy the beautiful, not the good.<sup id="cite_ref-3" class="reference"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup> According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin" title="Walter Benjamin">Walter Benjamin</a>, kitsch is, unlike art, a utilitarian object lacking all critical distance between object and observer; it "offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation".<sup id="cite_ref-menninghaus_2-1" class="reference"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch#cite_note-menninghaus-2">[2]</a></sup>
Kitsch is less about the thing observed than about the observer. According to Roger Scruton, "Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious."<sup id="cite_ref-Scruton_4-0" class="reference"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch#cite_note-Scruton-4">[4]</a></sup>"</p>