Celebrated novelist Milan Kundera is someone who redefines a term and contextualises it to serve the purpose of his story. He can do so because he is an ardent student (and practitioner) not just of literature but also has a keen eye for art. His essay on Francis Bacon is one of the most incisive pieces written on the great Irish artist.

So when Kundera speaks of kitsch in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being he redefines it in his incomparable way. But what he does quite cleverly is that he transports kitsch from the artistic domain into the political arena. For the uninitiated, kitsch are artworks which are popular but lack aesthetic worth primarily because of their melodramatic or over-sentimental nature, both in terms of technique and content.

Works of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s can be seen to get the hang of the notion. Fantastic works, at that!

The writer in his novel equates the term with totalitarian kitsch calling it ‘an integral part of the human condition’. However, he never loses sight of the aesthetic side to the whole debate and keeps his arguments within the realm of art. ‘When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object,’ says a character. And herein lies the gist of the philosophy: the dictation of the heart.

These artworks are popular but lack aesthetic worth due to their melodramatic or over-sentimental nature

A couple of weeks back I was in Bangkok. Needless to say, it’s a wonderful city, and as the famous ’80s song goes: One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble, not much between despair and ecstasy. Though I did not manage to visit any art galleries there (time’s constraint) there were quite a few art schools in the vicinity that I stayed in. But an interesting thing happened when I visited one of the malls (and it was a family compulsion to go to the plazas, don’t judge me please).

Bangkok has many malls, almost one in every big neighbourhood. It was while moving in the aisles of one such big building, in search of a XXL T-shirt, I chanced upon a shop on which Kitsch (not sure if the spelling was the same) was written on a neon board. I thought it was an art store. It wasn’t. It was a CD/DVD shop. When I inquired about the name of the shop, the salesgirl reluctantly replied she didn’t know what it meant. And no, it wasn’t anyone’s name either.

Ironically, the mall is famous for inexpensive clothes and a lot of tourists go there to buy themselves things to wear without making a dent in their pockets. I’m still not certain why the CD shop has that name, but I’m sure that if Vladimir Tretchikoff or Milan Kundera sees that sign, he’d by super happy, in a kitschy way.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 3rd, 2014