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The enduring power of kitsch

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch, but time and again it is drawn back to its lure, says Roger Scruton.

Ornament is crime, declared the architect Adolf Loos, and all those baroque facades that line the streets of Vienna, encrusted with meaningless knobs and curlicues, are so many denials of the world in which we live. The Barbie doll, Walt Disney's Bambi, Santa Claus in the supermarket, Bing Crosby singing White Christmas, pictures of poodles with ribbons in their hair. In figurative painting, in tonal music, in the cliche-ridden poems of heroic love and mythic glory, we find the same disease - the artist is not exploring the human heart but creating a puffed-up substitute, and then putting it on sale.

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