In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera speaks of kitsch as "the absolute denial of shit, both literally and figuratively, kitsch excludes everything from vision that human existence has inherently unacceptable. "
Kitsch thus serves to obscure what we would prefer not to see, to produce an acceptable form unconditionally, absolutely consensual.
This means adding absolute perfection, Milan Kundera described as historically and up to the basis of certain myths:
"Behind all the European beliefs, whether religious or political there is the first chapter of Genesis, from which it follows that the world was created as it was he was, that being is good and that it is a good thing to procreate. Call this fundamental belief the categorical agreement with being. It follows that the categorical agreement with being a aesthetic ideal for a world where shit is denied and everyone acts as if it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.
In art, it is probably born of the encounter between between the desire to own art at home and the ability to reproduce Low prices. Well now, it is nevertheless neither a genre nor a tendency asserted art ... marked up by some artists pop art. Everything seems to have changed since that art no longer dictates its laws to the consumer society on the contrary, it inspired her, color and hype of advertising. The visual codes of kitsch learn their letters of nobility when a can of soup or a banana yellow fluorescent earn their ticket to the museum.
Today, many artists are inspired by this development will see the bright purple poodle Jeff Koons, or, better yet, pictures of the duo Pierre & Gilles. Costumes, Glitter, starry background, plastic flowers, everything is there.
For Milan Kundera, the communist regime (where the novel takes place and that the author has known) belongs to this ideal as much as he can, he uses this aesthetic utopia to believe in its perfection, its viabililté. Without doubt this is so politically Kundera sees kitsch as "the station correspondence between being and oblivion."