Kitsch has been theorised as bad taste, as mass-produced sentimentality, as the aesthetic of the bourgeoisie, as the enemy of the avant-garde. Living Value Theory proposes a more precise account: kitsch is a diagnostic category that names a specific failure mode in the value machine of art.
The failure is this: kitsch produces the form of aesthetic experience — the emotional response, the sense of beauty or profundity — without the substance. It short-circuits the process of aesthetic mediation, delivering the output (sentiment, comfort, uplift) without the transformative work that genuine art requires.
This is why kitsch is not simply bad art. It is art that has undergone a specific kind of value collapse, in which the transactive process is replaced by a simulacrum of itself.