The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.
Theodor AdornoThere is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.
Theodor AdornoKitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.
Theodor Adorno