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| Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria, begun in 1869. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. |
It is called Neuschwanstein, though Ludwig never used that name. He never saw it finished either. Ludwig died in 1886 with the scaffolding still up, and the castle was given its name only after his death.
Critics have often called it the greatest piece of kitsch ever built. Millions of visitors simply call it a fairy tale. Since 2025, it has also been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
That tension is the whole story of the word. Kitsch is not bad art made by bad artists. Often it is skilful art made to please, with every rough edge sanded away.
The word crossed the Atlantic, and so did the thing itself. In 1903, an American illustrator named Cassius Marcellus Coolidge began painting a series for Brown & Bigelow, an advertising company that printed calendars. This is the most famous of them.
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| Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, “A Friend in Need,” 1903. Public domain. |
Look under the table. One bulldog is slipping an ace to his partner with his back paw. Around them, the big hounds puff on pipes and squint at their cards.
It was printed on calendars and posters for decades, and critics never took it seriously. Yet in 2015 the first of the series, Poker Game from 1894, sold at auction for about $658,000.
In 1939, the American critic Clement Greenberg gave the word its most famous intellectual workout. His essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in the magazine Partisan Review, cast kitsch as the enemy of serious modern art… pre-digested feeling, sold to people who wanted culture without effort.
Then the art world changed its mind, at least partly. In 2013, Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange), a giant steel sculpture shaped like a party balloon, sold at Christie’s in New York for $58.4 million… at the time, a record for a living artist.
My first apartment in the city had a large framed print of a Venetian sunset. I loved it, and I took it down whenever my colleagues came over. It took me years to see that the embarrassment told me more about my taste than the picture did.
If you want to see how far the poker dogs have travelled, their story is a small history of American taste: Dogs Playing Poker →
The word began as studio slang for cheap pictures in Munich. Today it hangs in castles, on calendars, and in auction rooms.
Kitsch, it turns out, was never about the price. It is about what we are willing to admit we love.
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