A Study of Kitsch Approach in the Field of Visual Communication

The Term Kitsch refers to repetitive, mimetic and accessible works that accompanies with features such as repetition of the familiar, diversity and imitation, the use of false emotions rather than reason, and having no idea. Nowadays the definitions of Kitsch are used in various artistic, literary, political and cultural fields, and there are various approaches and multiplicity of ideas against it thus. The emergence of the term Kitsch, as an adjective refers to the weak art work with no aesthetics standards, has been developed over the years and penetrated into the most serious debates of art during the last century. Where creativity and new ideas have no place to attract attentions, Kitsch shows its influence and power so that the quantity is placed in the first row. This phenomenon, with little change in the surface, represents things that have been seen before and mainly reflects the art work that use the common vulgar or too well-known signs to attract the audience instantaneously. In other words, Kitsch tries to attract the audience in a straight and friendly way, and so it replaces comfort and sentimentalism instead of expressions of the humanistic rich concept or human deep meanings. In fact, when art expresses no message and focuses only on its general aspect is named Kitsch. Kitsch's influence is so inclusive that as if it doesn't exist, and it takes its influence and prevalence from this aspect. Kitsch has been emerged against the phenomenon of the avant-garde and is equivalent with characteristics such as machinism, urbanization, consumer society and mass plurality. So far, critics, authors and  theorists such as "Milan Kundera", "Clement Greenberg," "Pierre Bourdieu," "Hermann Broch," "John Fisher and etc. have defined and expanded this term. "Visual communication" includes a broad field; and different types of its products in the forms of poster, book cover, billboard, logo, layout and etc. interact with the audience. In fact, Kitsch is present mostly in the public contexts of society. Kitsch's influence and expansion in visual communication and its effect on the audience and his visual literacy are the main factors that really confirm studying and perusing its discourse in the field of visual communication. The present research considers this phenomenon as the most important and influential process by criticizing of the spread and prevalence of Kitsch and its examples in the area of visual communication that is related to the public audience, so it requires studying and exploring. Because the epidemic influence of this phenomenon in the society is directly related to a decline of the public audiences' visual taste and their lack of familiarity with the quality of pure aesthetics. This study benefits from a descriptive  method and uses the library documents to investigate and illustrate Kitsch and its reflections in various fields of visual communication. The results show this phenomenon leads to the production of visual communication art works with features such as imitation, repetition, sense transference via repetition of familiar forms, reductive referring to the past and tradition, accumulation and explicit implication