In Praise of the Monstrous: What Rejected Kitsch Reveals About the Boundaries of Taste

The strangest thing about an ugly object is how easily its ugliness can disappear when the right person decides to love it. A porcelain dog on a suburban mantelpiece might look hopelessly tacky. Put the same dog in a gallery, describe it as an exploration of domestic sentiment, and people may stop laughing. Give it a designer’s name, photograph it against a concrete wall, and someone might pay hundreds of times its original price. The dog has not changed. Its glaze has not improved, and its proportions have not become less absurd. What has changed is the story surrounding it, and the authority of the person telling that story.

This is where the subject of vernacular ugliness becomes more interesting than a simple defense of quirky interiors. We often assume that people disagree about beauty because everyone has different preferences. But taste also determines whose preferences deserve respect. One person’s treasured ornament becomes another person’s evidence of vulgarity. One person’s improvised house becomes another person’s architectural problem. A wealthy collector can display something grotesque as an act of irony, while a person who owns it sincerely may attract ridicule. The question is not only why we find beauty in ugly things. It is why some people must justify their taste while others have the power to redefine it.

Vernacular ugliness occupies the space where objects, buildings and decorations fail to meet established standards of beauty. It includes the overdecorated house, the mass-produced figurine, the awkward garden ornament, the homemade extension and the furniture that refuses to coordinate with anything else in the room. These things may be badly made or visually incoherent. They may also express affection, aspiration, grief, pride or a desire to make ordinary life feel extraordinary. Their importance lies partly in this contradiction. They can look wrong without being meaningless, and they can become aesthetically compelling without ever becoming conventionally beautiful.

The social life of bad taste

In his 1979 book Distinction, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste does more than describe what people enjoy. It helps reproduce social distinctions. People learn to recognize certain objects, artistic styles, and forms of restraint as signs of refinement. They also learn which pleasures to avoid if they want to appear sophisticated. These lessons become so familiar that social preferences can feel like natural truths. We stop asking why a particular vase looks elegant, and another looks vulgar. We simply know which one belongs in a respectable home.

Consider the difference between a faded oil painting of a rural landscape and a brightly coloured print of a sunset. The oil painting might hang in an antique dealer’s shop, accompanied by a note about its age and provenance. The print might hang above a sofa in a family home. One invites us to consider artistic history, material technique and scarcity. The other may seem sentimental, generic and commercially produced. Those differences matter, but they do not explain everything. Both images might offer their owners comfort, familiarity and a sense of place. We simply have more established cultural language for admiring one than the other.

Bourdieu’s argument becomes especially useful when we consider how people acquire the confidence to judge. Someone who has grown up around art collections, architectural history and design magazines may know how to recognize a desirable object. They may also know when to express admiration, when to remain silent and when to laugh. Someone without that background may have equally strong aesthetic feelings but lack the vocabulary that makes those feelings socially credible. Taste therefore involves not only what we see, but also what we have learned to say about what we see.

This creates a peculiar situation. The person who dismisses a porcelain figurine as tacky may believe they are making a purely aesthetic judgment. Yet their response may also reject the domestic world associated with it: sentimental gifts, crowded cabinets, floral curtains, family photographs and a preference for abundance over restraint. The figurine becomes a convenient target because it carries those associations in a small, easily recognizable form. We judge its appearance, but we may also be judging the people whose lives it represents.

That does not mean every criticism of an ugly object conceals class prejudice. Some objects really are poorly designed, and some combinations of color, scale and material create unpleasant visual effects. The point is that aesthetic judgment rarely operates in isolation. We bring social assumptions to the object before we have fully examined it. Learning to see differently means recognizing those assumptions without pretending that all judgments are equally convincing.

The embarrassment of sincerity

Kitsch becomes particularly revealing when it expresses an emotion that respectable taste finds embarrassing. Think of a ceramic angel with pink cheeks, a painting of a wolf staring at the moon, or a porcelain couple holding hands beneath a plastic rose. These objects make their intentions obvious. They want to be moving, romantic, or beautiful. They do not leave much room for ambiguity. Their sentiment arrives without the protective distance of irony.

The art critic Clement Greenberg attacked kitsch in his influential 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch. He associated kitsch with mass production, imitation, and the consumption of familiar effects. In his account, kitsch offered ready-made emotional responses rather than demanding the more difficult engagement that modernist art required. His argument reflected a wider modernist suspicion of commercial culture and its capacity to reproduce artistic effects for mass consumption.

Greenberg identified a real difference between a work that explores an emotion and one that relies on familiar symbols to trigger it. But his distinction also raises a problem. Why should familiarity make an emotion less genuine? A mass-produced angel may use conventional imagery, but its owner might associate it with a child, a religious belief, or a person who has died. The object does not need to be original to carry an original history. Its emotional meaning can exceed the intentions of the person who manufactured it.

We often treat irony as a sign of intelligence because it creates distance between ourselves and what we display. We can own an absurd ornament while pretending that we do not take it seriously. We can enjoy a sentimental painting because it is so excessive that it becomes funny. This allows us to approach emotions that might otherwise feel uncomfortable. We can express affection without appearing naïve, and we can enjoy beauty without having to defend its quality.

But what happens when someone does not use irony? Imagine two people displaying the same elaborate ceramic Madonna. One places it on a minimalist shelf as a provocative object, explaining its relationship to popular culture. The other keeps it beside family photographs because it belonged to their mother. The first person’s choice may attract intellectual admiration. The second person’s choice may invite assumptions about their education, religion, or taste. The difference is not necessarily in the object or even in the emotion. It lies in the social permission to express that emotion.

This is the uncomfortable side of kitsch. It exposes how easily we confuse emotional restraint with sophistication. The person who hides their sentiment behind irony can appear more discerning than the person who expresses it directly. Yet the direct expression may be the more vulnerable one. It risks being misunderstood, laughed at, or dismissed as childish. The kitsch object can therefore become a small record of emotional courage, even when its appearance remains ridiculous.

When ugliness becomes interesting

The writer and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai offers another way to approach these objects. In Our Aesthetic Categories(2012), she examines the cute, the zany, and the interesting as aesthetic categories that shape contemporary experience. These categories do not necessarily produce the clear admiration associated with beauty. Instead, they generate mixed responses. Something can be cute but irritating, interesting but unsatisfying, or entertaining without being especially admirable.

This helps explain the strange attraction of an object that we cannot quite like. A grotesque figurine might have an oddly expressive face. A badly proportioned chair might seem almost alive. An overdecorated room might overwhelm us while making us curious about the person who assembled it. Our response does not settle into admiration or disgust. We move between the two, and the movement keeps the object in our attention.

Perhaps this is why the word monstrous works so well for certain examples of vernacular ugliness. A monster violates the expected order of things. It combines features that should not belong together, exceeds normal proportions, or refuses to fit a familiar category. The same qualities can make an object compelling. A garden gnome with a grotesquely cheerful face, a house with mismatched architectural details, or a lamp shaped like an oversized flower can feel excessive in a way that conventional beauty rarely permits. The object becomes memorable because it refuses to settle down.

We should distinguish this response from the idea that every unconventional object is secretly beautiful. That claim would simply absorb ugliness into a larger definition of beauty. Some things remain unpleasant, badly made or absurd. Their interest may lie precisely in the fact that we cannot resolve them into an attractive whole. We can recognize the ingenuity of a homemade ornament while finding its proportions dreadful. We can admire the persistence of a building’s owner without pretending that every addition improves its appearance.

This distinction matters because aesthetic appreciation does not always require approval. We can look closely at something, understand its construction and consider its cultural significance without wanting to own it. In fact, the need to turn every interesting object into something beautiful can prevent us from seeing what makes it different. Ugliness deserves attention not because it must eventually become beauty, but because it reveals the limits of the categories we use to organize our visual world.

The privilege of owning the wrong thing

There is a curious privilege in being able to enjoy something without needing anyone else to approve of it. A collector can fill a room with bizarre furniture and call it an exploration of postmodernism. An interior designer can place a kitsch ornament in an otherwise restrained room and turn it into a conversation piece. Their choices appear deliberate, and deliberateness makes them easier to admire. We assume that the person knows the rules and has chosen to break them.

Now consider someone whose home contains the same objects because they inherited them, bought them cheaply, or simply like them. Their choices may not receive the same generous interpretation. People might describe the room as cluttered or tasteless rather than eccentric. The difference reveals a form of cultural privilege: some people can turn their preferences into statements, while others find their preferences treated as evidence of poor judgment.

The same process affects vernacular architecture. An architect might describe an unconventional building as an experimental response to local conditions. A homeowner who adds rooms, changes windows and decorates the facade without professional guidance may be accused of ruining the original structure. Sometimes the criticism is justified. Yet the difference in language matters. One person’s intervention becomes an architectural proposition; another’s becomes an aesthetic failure.

This is particularly relevant in South Africa, where domestic architecture reflects differences in wealth, access to land, inherited building traditions and the practical realities of extending a home over time. A house does not always emerge from a single architectural plan. It may develop through successive repairs, additions and changes in family circumstances. The resulting building can look awkward because it records decisions made under changing conditions rather than a unified design vision.

We should not romanticize every improvised structure, or suggest that poverty automatically produces authenticity. People deserve safe buildings, sound construction and access to good design. But we should be careful about treating visual irregularity as proof of cultural inferiority. A building can reveal ingenuity and attachment while also showing the limits imposed by money, regulations, or available materials. Its appearance tells only part of the story.

The deeper issue is who gets to decide which stories count as architecture and which remain dismissed as bad taste. If professional recognition can transform an unconventional building into a celebrated example of creativity, then the building’s value cannot rest entirely on its physical form. The authority to interpret it also matters.

When rejection becomes a selling point

The market has an extraordinary ability to absorb the things it once rejected. An object can move from the charity shop to the collector’s cabinet, from the suburban home to the design gallery, and from mass-produced decoration to a coveted vintage find. Once its former ugliness becomes desirable, sellers can use that history to increase its value. The object becomes attractive partly because it once appeared unattractive.

This is not a new phenomenon. The rediscovery of neglected styles, the rehabilitation of supposedly vulgar materials and the revival of outdated furniture all demonstrate how unstable aesthetic reputations can be. But the process contains a contradiction. The object becomes valuable because it challenges accepted taste, then loses some of that rebellious force once the new taste becomes established. What began as a refusal of convention turns into another convention.

The same thing happens when designers deliberately introduce kitsch into sophisticated interiors. A brightly coloured plastic ornament becomes striking against a neutral wall. An elaborate chandelier looks provocative in a bare concrete room. The contrast allows the object to benefit from the restraint surrounding it. Its excess becomes legible because everything else has been carefully controlled.

There is nothing inherently dishonest about this. Recontextualization can reveal qualities that people previously overlooked. Yet it also raises a question about whose approval makes an object worthy of attention. Must a mass-produced figurine wait for a designer to recognize its potential? Must a vernacular building receive the attention of an architectural historian before we take its cultural meaning seriously?

Perhaps the most radical response is not to declare every rejected object beautiful. It is to resist the assumption that an object needs prestigious approval before we can look at it carefully. We can recognize its flaws, understand its history, and value its emotional importance without converting it into a luxury product or an ironic statement. We can allow an object to remain ordinary.

Learning to look without rescuing everything

Vernacular ugliness challenges us to develop a more flexible kind of attention. Instead of asking immediately whether something belongs in a beautiful room, we can ask what it does there. Does it preserve a memory? Express an aspiration? Reveal a local building practice? Expose the conventions of its period? Or simply amuse us because it looks absurd? These questions do not guarantee a positive answer. They give us a richer basis for judgment.

The distinction between appreciation and approval is crucial. We can find an object culturally revealing without admiring its appearance. We can recognize the emotional power of kitsch without pretending that sentiment makes every design successful. We can value vernacular architecture without ignoring poor construction or the destruction of historic features. A more generous aesthetic does not require us to abandon standards. It requires us to understand what those standards can and cannot tell us.

The rejected object becomes especially powerful when it exposes a contradiction in our own behavior. We may claim to value individuality while ridiculing people whose homes look different from ours. We may praise authenticity while preferring imperfections that have been carefully selected and professionally styled. We may celebrate freedom from convention, provided that the unconventional choice comes with the right explanation.

Perhaps that is the real aesthetic power of the monstrous. It reveals that taste is never simply about what pleases the eye. It also concerns the authority to choose, the freedom to express emotion, and the ability to make an object mean something beyond its appearance. The ugly ornament does not need to defeat the beautiful one. It only needs to show us that beauty is not the sole measure of a meaningful visual life.

The porcelain dog can remain ridiculous. The overdecorated house can remain awkward. The sentimental painting can remain sentimental. Their value does not depend on our ability to rescue them from those descriptions. Sometimes, the most revealing thing about an object is that it continues to exist outside the approval of people who would never choose it for themselves.

And perhaps we should leave it there. Not every object needs to become beautiful, fashionable, or collectible before it earns our attention. Some deserve to remain strange, excessive and faintly embarrassing. Their refusal to conform reminds us that the world contains more ways of living, remembering and expressing affection than any single standard of good taste can accommodate.