ABSTRACT

Although kitsch in the Middle East consumed en masse, the term itself is unknown. In few cases and under specific social and cultural crises, kitsch usually used, like in the west, to downgrade aesthetical standard of an artwork. But commonly, kitsch can’t be discussed primarily from aesthetical perspectives. Questions about the relations between styles and taste or, direct our intention to issues related to ugliness and beauty, can’t give the right answers for the meaning of kitsch – especially in the Middle East. It is more critical to analysis kitsch as socio-cultural phenomena without neglecting economical and aesthetical perspectives. This paper will discuss kitsch and explore its dominance in the in several cultures. It will focus on the influences of international norms on the Arabic visual messages, which appear in visual art, graphic design, fashion design, product design, architecture etc. The central hypothecate is that the anthropological cultural and traditional dimensions have a great impact on the semantics of aesthetical properties and aesthetical experiences. The shared languages: intellectual, and artistic traditions will be debated within the framework of Culture. In this sense, any visual cultural product like sculpture, or environmental graphic design could be seen as one of a number of processes that make up a culture’s uniqueness, and design can be understood more fully when viewed in relationship to these processes. The paper will expose different visual languages that reflect kitsch as objective and inter-subjective phenomena. Kitsch within this frame could be comprehended as visual end result for cultural and individual emotional process.

1 Introduction

After three decades of the colonial era, remarkably in the 1970s, started to appear in most of Arabic big cities indiscriminate styles in Architect, advertising, information design, etc. The post modernism found its place rapidly, and emerged in hybrid contradicted forms. Most of the imported styles based on global visual languages with different universal principles of aesthetics and semiotics. There is no clear reason for the absence of designs that reflect the spirit of the place and have been designed in relation to a particular public, time, and place. The mixture of Islamic ornaments with Bauhaus style, or organic build beside straight lines sharp edged skyscraper, evident that urban designers valued post modernism and its multi-fashioned concepts: Are Hybrid style becomes to be the core concept of design? Multinational innovative extravagant buildings i.e. any product, appeared beside each other straggles to its own existence. In fact, most of global styles: Modernism, Post Modernism, Romanticism, etc. developed a new kitschy landscape that can be hardly analyzed. (Fig. 1) From one hand it reflects the freedom of experimenting, remixing, and enjoying using it. On the other hand it caused visual chaos in our daily live, and opened once again the old-new debate about identity: modernity versus tradition or local versus global. Many of the westernized or -by force orientalized– visual attempts created new aesthetical values and affected somehow our visual sensuality. Same while it stops generations of young Arabs from learning the semantics of different western styles as stand-alone language -related to certain zeitgeist- with its own unique properties i.e. visual sentence structure. The paper will present kitsch with its different processing stages till the aesthetical experiences. It aims to understand the design-specific cognitive experiences that give products or artworks a prominent position within the frame of global human culture.

Fig. 1: Between Beauty, Ugliness, and Kitsch. The semiotic beauty after Hans L Zetterberg.

2 About the term Kitsch

2.1 Cultural Communicative Instrument

Since the second half of the nineteenth century and till today kitsch –in the west-is interpreted as equivalent imitated products such as making furniture looks antique. The German verb verkitschen means, “to sell cheaply”.[1] Others explained kitsch as instrument to achieve political, and commercial aims in any form of design, including architecture, advertising campaigns, celebratory art etc. However one of the most interesting explanations could be from Clement Greenberg, who connects between kitsch and imitation. Greenberg said that whereas “the avant-garde understood generally as art in terms of its capacity to discover and invent, imitates the art of imitation, kitsch imitates the effect of imitation”.[2] While kitsch emphasizes the reactions that the work must provoke, and elects as the goal or its own operation the emotional reaction of the user, the avant-garde emphasizes the procedures that lead to the work, and it nominates these as the subject of its dialogue. It is interesting to understand kitsch as internationally provocative and powerful communicative instrument. Its ideas can be transferred from one religion to another or from one country to other one with the intention to communicate, like the political posters and propaganda images that appeared in the past 60 years glorifying the Arabic leaders, or their achievements. When we compare Fig. 2 A with 2 B, we will find that the designer imitate the entire image, and just replaced Stalin with Saddam Hussein’s head and add some Arabic features in the background like palms and Iraqi flag. Saddam’s poster demonstrates how foreign ideas and styles could be adopted and even farther developed and integrated to deliver almost the same political content with local visual treatment.

Fig. 2 A: Poster of Stalin, http://gor3ts.livejournal.com/48066.html; 2 B: Poster of Saddam Husain. Approx. 1995, Designer: Unkown.

Other examples for kitsch, could be found in hedonic objects such as the Mawlid’s bride or horse Dolls by Muslims, and devotional images by the Copt. (Fig. 3 A, B, 4, and 5) Even that Mawlid Al-Nabi means the birth of the prophet Mohamed, Muslims and Christians in Egypt celebrate in similar way to honor their Saints. Maybe the bride and horse sugar doll has Coptic roots. Coptic Saints have been also honored in similar celebrations. (Compare Fig. 3A with 3B)

Fig. 3 A: Original today’s sugar horse that used to be sold during the celebration of prophet Mohamed; 2 B: Late Antique Egyptian limestone relief with St. Sissinios, ht. 38.8 cm, wdth. 58 cm, sixth century C.E. New York, Brooklyn Museum. Fig. 4: Mawlid Al-Nabi (1) original bride and horse sugar dolls (1), Prophet Mohamed’s Birthday. Fig. 5: Mawlid Al-Nabi (2), modernized bride sugar dolls.

However, these products formed particular modern cultural codes, and still offering pleasant aesthetical experience. They created cultural habits that could fulfill social demands and serve tradition and myth. Most of kitsch or hedonic objects are produced out of cultural need, which is not just an artifact or even a beautifully made. We are still asking for especial beautiful designs, which could be kitsch or any object because it contains cultural values or adopted a combination between hedonic and mystical accent. Lastly, it is not easy to explicate why we have the habit of attraction to most kinds of beautiful objects. Especially when it comes to handcrafted kitsch –it is harder to give a clear answer from perspectives with special interest paid only to aesthetical properties or to relevant features of modern or postmodern design. Much more interesting is to know how cognitive processing of design creates emotion, and positive or self-rewarding aesthetic experiences.

2.2 Kitsch, Handicraft and Artifact

While kitsch still donates to many topics related to contemporary Arabic visual languages, as works executed to fulfill popular demand, kitsch doesn’t represent purely commercial purposes or just a beautiful artifact! Visual phenomenon like kitsch depending on: 1) Collective habits; 2) An idea like Hedonism- intrinsic good- where producers and users can maximize their ethical pleasure and; 3) The spirit of the dominant Zeitgeist, where we can evaluate our inventions and creations.

Collective habits can easily manipulate our judgment towards any object. In case of visual creation, we could highly appreciate or regard certain design and appraise it, without having a concrete reason. The bride sugar doll with its intrinsic values will be seen as end-in-itself or hedonic. The argument of Kant that explained the beauty of an object separately from the craft or from its material can’t be implemented to kitsch. In his essay Critique of Judgment – the “concept” of Art is divergent to its physical manifestation reflects Kant’s belief where art should be regarded with “aesthetic indifference”.[3] This point of view is generally held to be the correct one within dominant international academic circles of today. But somehow in the Middle East, this way of divergent can’t be applied.

Fig. 6 A, B: Posters designed by P. Harby. Left: Performance Art (II). Client: Khak Gallery of Tehran, 50 x 70 cm., 2005. Foster, 2006, p. 61; Right: Unknown Designer, poster for the famous Egyptian movie “My Father About the tree”, 1970s.

Like any culture in the world, the Arabic culture has specific norms and especial values to craft i.e. to handicraft. In the Arabic poetry, “poetic creation was known and discussed as craft.”[4] The syntactical concept in poetry that considers rhyme with a lot of details paid attention to sound can be executed to shape artistic approach. Visual creation-like poetry-appeared through inspiration and talent to the fore while handicraft emboldening tremendous effort essential to it. Even handicraft was in ancient times more important than today, still Arabic young generations showing respect to it. We all know that the existence of talent and inspiration could be resulted out of previous artistic tradition and non-artistic social factors, according to Middle Eastern aesthetics; great artistic achievement should be seen in the finesse of an object. Today, Iranian designers like Harby own a capacity for visual creation relies on training, a process that necessarily involves understanding for the traditional uniqueness. His cultural habit becomes the amount of experiences that particularly appeared to be interesting out of their hedonic properties, such his posters from 2006, where it provide self-rewarding rational operations. (Fig. 6 A)

Fig. 7 Ayman Ramadan, Koshary min Zamman (untitled). Digital print, 46.2 cm x 36.2 cm, framed. Image courtesy the artist.

Fig. 8 Huda Lotfy, (untitled). 2012?

In fact, most of Arabic people dealing frequently with numberless objects without giving immense attention to its aesthetical properties. Only in especial moments, and within cultural contexts they can develop an emotional tie toward objects that they really do like or need. No matter if the message of the object will be shaped in the form of kitsch, or other way of visual expression, when cultural boundaries i.e. undefined codes appeared viewers would not be able to enter into aesthetical experience. This happened, for example, by the contemporary Arabic Artworks or designs, where normal viewers doesn’t understand the photo of two European portraits for the former German president Helmut Kohl and late French president François Mitterrand eating the Egyptian national meal “Koshary”. (Fig. 7) Even by mixing of occasionally used products, such as dolls looks like Barbie, the Batman with Islamic pattern, most of the viewers remarked it as funny or evaluative artifact but not as Artwork.

Perhaps any strange mixture of different properties: the one of beauty of the dominant Zeitgeist with the one of cultural norms can’t easily reach Arabic taste. In fact many Arabic users and viewers had made an error by mistaking good design or artwork with just an evaluative artifact. That is often found in street advertising, TV commercials, Fashion, Architecture etc. The newly appeared black and white street ad adverting for Valentine’s party in Cairo, where the famous Egyptian singer Shireen looks like a copy of Sofia Loren with her hairstyle (Fig. 9); Or where the Egyptian brothers Oca and Ortiga appeared with their music to fulfill the place of western pop music in the Middle East, both of the examples reflecting our passion to hybridize elements without noticing that they are artifacts i.e. a kind of an imitation from imitated phenomenon. We can only remember the black and white Egyptian films, where the same styles have been copied to serve the outer look of our actresses, and actress.

Fig. 9 Egyptian Famous Singer Sherin as a copy of Sofia Loren, Street Advertisement, Cairo , 2014. @ A. Saqaf Alhayt.

2.3 Cultivated and uncultivated

Although the majority in the Middle East doesn’t know kitsch as a term- as explained in previous chapters-they consume it en masse, communicate with it, and enjoy using it in different way than in the west. Kitsch is obvious in everything, starting from verbal conversation (over embellishing adjectives), car and vehicle decoration, street products, through art or design exhibitions, till lyrics, poetry, and teaching art, design, and architecture. Paradoxically, the term kitsch had hardly been used in the academies in the Middle East. Instructors keep asking their students to avoid nonfunctional and non-aesthetical ideas and most of the time they meant bad taste. But which bad taste do they mean? And do Arabic artists, designers, academics, and viewers –relatively the entire culture –know how to substitute kitsch with other styles in their daily bases of communication?

Unlike in Western culture, where objectivity is given considerable emphasis, the opposite is true in Arab culture.[5] It doesn’t mean that we can’t think logically or behave objectively, but differently and whatever we encounter, there are always reasons. Maybe three important factors – among others- should be considered in the Arabic Culture: 1) Influences from western and orthodox philosophy-especially from the Greek, Persian, and the 18^th and 19^th centuries; 2) Connections to the cultural and economical global systems; 3) The global pressure on local activities led in a way to create huge cultural and economical gap between classes. It was clear that the 1950s and 1960s Arabic aesthetics has been changed, but it is not finished with practicing i.e. implementing western modernism. (Compare Fig. 6 A, with B) Even the entire idea of beauty after the Infitah (= the opening in Sadat’s time, by the end of the 1970s) has been totally changed once again toward post modernism, but still the culture can’t follow or digest the heavy meal of modernism. It appears the uncultivated cultural environment that tried to distinguish itself from the cultivated one through the usage of imported products. At this time western European products could easily be found in the Egyptian markets.

Fig. 10: Fariynaz Zaker, Mixed media, 2010. http://farniyazzaker.com/photos.htm

Fig. 11: TV advertising for one of the famouse series “The Knower” with a portrait of the famous Egyptian Actor A. Imam, 2013.

Both environments stimulated each other in two different tastes with sub-tastes. Between the 1980s and 2000s in Egypt – appeared the post modernism era in the Middle East. Unlike the modernism in its struggle to legitimize itself like classism- the post-modernist Arabic graphic designers, visual artists and architects tried to adopt and produce as many different styles as possible to put beside each other in a new urbanism. The perception of beauty as such is no longer obvious; its initial classification requires adequate context variables. While the minority defined kitsch as something intended to provoke an emotional effect rather than permit objective observation, the majority holds kitsch to be that artistic practice that to ennoble it, and to ennoble the purchaser, imitates and quotes the art of the museums. Unlike anti-kitsch, lovers of kitsch do give respect to the great art of the museums. Unfortunately what sometimes museums exhibit has been labeled by cultivated sensibility as kitsch, and even as ordinary, lovers of kitsch hold that works similar to those of great art. Many of us, who had visited or will visit the Water Discus Hotels in Dubai – an underwater and above water section, will admire the depths of the ocean while making the most of the warm climate. (Fig. 12) In Atlantis Hotel Dubai-located on artificial island- where magnificent imitations of Indian touch mixed with unknown styles, enabled the visitors to enjoy and take photos besides the colorful Chihuly Sculpture, or in lost Chambers. (Fig. 13)

Fig. 12 New Water Discus Hotel – under construction, underwater room. Dubai.

Fig. 13 Chihuly Sculpture in Atlantis Hotel in Dubai.

The Gulf ‘high class’ adores the Italian baroque, European 19^th century romantics, and German Bidermayer porcelain. All these styles could be appearing together in one environment beside Islamic ornaments and Andalusian architecture. (Fig. 20) We have just to remember how big Arabic cities have been modernized in the past fifty years, and how a city like Dubai looked in the 1970s compared with today (Fig. 14). Unlike in the old cities like Cairo, we can still find French “passages couverts”, or English, Italian furniture, and Greek styles beside Bauhaus style. The economical system, and the big dream of having a great brand name, forced the gulf societies to integrate such uncultivated ideas. The most important factor was the creation of a new-rich class. Members of Arabic upper classes saw that the tastes of the west should stand against the one of the ‘lower’ classes, which is disagreeable or ridiculous, or old fashioned. Moreover the majority of the Arabs believe that beauty – verbal or visual – has finished its job when it provides pleasure. Most of Arabic natives don’t truly beliefs in western cultivated functionality and it’s after usage effects. These facts have been reflected in cultural habit and art appreciation i.e. taste. In Egypt and in many other Arabic countries, emotion triggered in a way our daily life. Like in visual art, we have to ask in design: Do we have to tailor our philosophy of design to the beliefs and desires that we actually have concerning design?[6]

Fig. 14 Dubai 2009, the world trade Centre in the middle of the photo looks very small comparing to other skyscrapers.

2.4 Kitsch, Ugliness and Beauty

“Ugliness is also a social phenomenon”[7] that’s how Umberto Eco summarized the contradicted terms beauty/ugly. It is difficult to signify objects that we don’t like as ugly. From aesthetical perspectives there are no rational explanations of why artworks i.e. beauty appears to us to be worth making, preserving and using. “If we examine the synonyms of beautiful and ugly, we see that while what is considered beautiful is: cute, pleasing, attractive, agreeable, lovely, delightful, fascinating, harmonious, marvellous, delicate, ….. ; what is ugly is: repellent, horrible, horrendous, disgusting, repulsive, odious, indecent, foul, frightening, …. (not to mention how horror can also manifest itself in areas traditionally assigned to the beautiful, such as the fabulous, the fantastic, the magical and the sublime).”[8]

In the Arabic countries the socio-cultural dimensions played somehow a part in creating the idea of ugliness, in the sense that elegance has always been associated with the use of costly materials, and the need of creating new styles. Second factor is related to the spirit of epoch; what have been seen yesterday as beautiful could be seen today as ugly? But it is significant to recognize that no style could replace older one entirely. A good example can be found in the Persian Miniature Shahnama, where Rustam slays the White Div of Mazandara from Abu’l-Qasim Manur Firdawsi (c.934-c.1020). (Fig. 15) This two dimensional style is still in use. From socio-cultural perspective, ugliness in this regard is the art that give us knowledge.[9] Visual perceptions remain desired; even it doesn’t have the value we think it owned, because of the quality of the information it delivers. There are certain dialogues can be done between objects and its makers. Designer like Khaled Sharan has the capability of keep sending new messages to its community through his colorful furniture; i.e. He send messages with values that often has been interpreted in the Arabic World with beautiful! (Fig. 21) Finally there is no unified visual perception for every taste, and kitsch addresses more the emotional side of the user. Especially when its historical and social meanings of an object are clear, the rest, the magical elixir of creativity, will appear differently by each individual.[10]

Fig. 15 Rustam slays the White Div of Mazandara, Shahnama, Abu’l-Qasim Manur Firdawsi (c.934-c.1020). Persian Miniature. Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, Italy.

3 Kitsch and Styles

3.1 Kitsch with romantic Effect

Unlike many other kitsch producers, Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum (1944) believe that art serves the public – such as politics – and kitsch serves personal expression. He is not in favor that romantic ingenuity can be an interrupter for rational thinking, or led to continue ideas of nationalism, and totalitarianism! (Fig. 16)

However, many Middle Eastern Visual Artists and Designers have been influenced by his ideas and tried to modify it in different styles, but especially in Andy Warhol’s pop style. While Omani Artist Hassan Meer reflect this idea in his work “Enlightenment”, 2011, and consider his work of art loses itself in the eternal and reflected pure sensuality; (Fig. 17), Maghrebi photographer Laila Essaydi’s artwork doesn’t directly reflect kitsch features, her photomontage response to the 19^th century romanticism (Fig. 18). Its aesthetics convey melodrama, and opened the debate about the link between being sentimental, original, and act in romantic way, and following lead us to discuss romantic in relation to aesthetics orders and the sensitivity level of art viewers and design users.

Actually we can expose kitsch in the Middle East from emotional dimensions of the viewer/user rather than the aesthetical properties. W. Benjamin described the kitsch as “something that is warming”, and from personal perspective, I do believe that kitsch reflects the unpolished talent itself without forgotten to serve life and to addresses the human being; it is as well the interesting picture![11] In the work of the Egyptian artist Khaled Hafez (born 1963), or in the Iranian design and art such as from Farhad Moshiri or Mahmood Sabazi, Designer Khaled Sabazi, we will find that the visual language of pop has succeeded to attract generations from the 1990s and till today.

These visual artworks reflect that the majority in the Middle East believe that artistic creation is somehow means romantic ingenuity, where the influence of models from other works would block the creator’s own imagination. Like Romanticism, originality for M. Sabazi, or Khaled Sharan is absolutely essential (Fig. 19, 20)

Fig. 16: Odd Nerdrum, Women with Doorknob, oil on canvas, 115×135 cm, 1990.

Fig. 17: Hassan Meer, Enlightenment 1, 70x100cm, Digital print on art paper, Edition of 5, 2011.

Fig. 18: Maghrebi photographer lalla Essaydi, Series Les Femmes du Maroc, photomontage, 2010.

Heading to the progressive development of romantic taste, the term ‘Romantic’, ‘Romanesque’ means as much as the German term ‘Romantisch’ which was in the seventeenth century a synonym to (in a negative sense) the Italian term ‘romanzesco’ (like the old romances). In the eighteenth century it’s meaning was rather ‘romanesque’ or ‘picturesque’. In this respect Rousseau added an important subjective definition to this picturesque spectacle: the expression of an ambiguous and indeterminate ‘je ne sais quol’.[12]

Eco emphasis in his book On Beauty (2007) that the first German Romantics broadened the scope of the indefinable and of the vague covered by the term ‘romantisch’, which came to cover all that was distant, magical and unknown, including the lugubrious, the irrational … what was specifically Romantic was the aspiration (‘Sehnsucht’ = the desire in German) to all this.”[13] And that is exactly the German romantic painter C. D. Friedrich has believed on “the artist’s feeling is his law”. The concept of the genius, or artist who was able to produce his own original work through this process of “creation from nothingness”, is the key to Romanticism, and to be unique was the worst sin.

Fig. 19: Iranian Designer and Artist F. Moshiri, “Anywhere The Dervish Roams, Where He Lays His Home is There”, 2010.

Even the term romantic historically cannot be defined as aspiration; we still use it as an attached label to any design that expresses such an aspiration! Perhaps all – kitsch – is romantic in so far as it expresses nothing other than aspiration, perhaps like the paintings of F. Moshiri and Mahmood Sabazi (Fig. 19, and 21). And here we have to ask question about the core of beauty that ends to be a form and the beautiful that become in the post modernism the formless and the disordered. Therefore, kitsch within contemporary visual creations requires a larger need for interpretation than any previous eras. It is even become in any reading process of design the better the understanding of its quality, the higher the probability that it produces aesthetic desire.

3.2 Kitsch, Camp and Post-Modernism

Another terms related to kitsch are camp and pompier art. According to S. Sontag and E. Eco, Camp is not a style; much more it is the objects that possess some exaggeration or marginal aspect (one says “It’s too good or too important to be camp”)[14] Camp should include a certain degree of vulgarity, like drawings and some work of Khaled Hafez. (Fig. 24) S. Sontag has published a long list of examples that defines camp or the subject of camp that includes “heterogeneous and ranges from Tiffany lamps to Aubrey, Beardsley, ….”.[15] Because there’s nothing campy in nature, all camp objects must own a quantity of extremism that goes against nature. “Camp is a love of eccentric of things-being-what-they-are-not and the best example of this is art nouveau.”[16] By all means, Middle Eastern taste adores young art. During the period of western colonialism-and after spreading the ideas of the Bauhaus school, the eastern high culture was still using all kinds of forms of kitsch with romantic style.

Fig. 20: Arabic post-modernism design. Different styles are mixed together in one room.

Fig. 21: Khalid Sharan’s chair: Bint Arabia=Arabic Girl; Right, Fig. 22: Mahmood Sabazi, Islamic Marline, 2011.

The Arabic post-modernism design overlapped ideas, thoughts, mixed styles, and techniques together. Artists and Designers created their styles remixed historical ideas with modern, but also reinterpreted narratives in their own way. (Fig. 22, and 23) In this regard the post-modernism opened the door for all kinds of creativity to be realized and exhibited. And these concepts were not in favor of aesthetical function. What happened in the visual language was a clear reflection of a new philosophical thinking and not a mere magical styles.

Fig. 23: Khaled Hafez, Series photography, ‘Why Not”, 2009.

It seems that the need to develop distinctive styles has forced Arabic designers to produce a large number of innovative styles that led to create confusion by the normal perceiver. The borders between design and non-design have been vanished and somewhat obscure. Since Shaker Hassan Al-Saied’s and S. Abdelkarim’s use of everyday objects in the middle east, Arabic artworks have often become difficult to recognize as artworks per se. In contemporary design, nearly every conceivable kind of material has been used as product. Today and after four decade, the borders between designed and non-designed objects have been blurred. We find contemporary visual artists like Ayman Ramadan (Fig. 7), or Khaled Hafez producing kitsch through the usage of cartoonish figures or popular icons i.e. kitsch objects, and rejecting the autonomous of art. The post modernism permitted all styles to be exhibited, even in museums!

Fig. 24: Khaled Hafez, Drawing, mixed media on paper, 2012.

4 Conclusion: Between Modernism and Kitsch

The main conclusion in this research paper is the continuous existence of two different visual languages: Modernism and Post-Modernism i.e. and partly Kitsch.

The position of modernism towards autonomous thinking and visual solutions opened once again the debate about the future of individualism. A. Mendini experimentations with everyday objects against the modern functionalism opened the door for many Arabic and Middle Eastern designers and Visual Artists.[17] As a result of his vision was that mixing between what called good design with other like kitsch. The new Arabic design and visual language created new flair i.e. trivial culture and succeeded to replace it with the modern high culture. Even they couldn’t succeed yet to achieve their dream of non–banal design, with further creating of new ideas, they could build bridges from design to art.

Where modern design followed the idea of objects should be permanent, a wave in the post modernism i.e. Anti-Design, emphasis that objects should be temporary, as quick to throw away and be replaced by something new and more functional. Arabic Modernism is still underdeveloped, and demands to be regarded as the one genuine method of creating with understanding. Till today it is hard for most of the Arabs to understand the visual treatment and the symbolic meanings of abstract posters like the design of El Lissitzky’s from 1919-even it will reflect local symbolic colors. El Lissitzky combined geometric shapes to create a strong political statement, where the sharp red triangle of the Bolshevik army is invading and dividing the white circle in this graphic statement on the Russian Civil War.[18]

Modernism as a doctrine progression, as scientific can tolerate – and indeed celebrate – change. Since scientific progress is the result of research and development, so too, design progress can be adjusted within modernist dogma. Change can be accounted for by pointing to technological and sociological advances, and other advances in the natural and human sciences, which can easily cross borders and cultures. At the heart of any modern progressive thinking of visual language i.e. design is the central notion of function.

Functionalism was a modern dogma that takes the value of design to be well customized to suit the purpose for which it is intended. In this regard it will be understandable if we can define any design, even kitsch, as composition of elements that includes communicative and emblematic aspects. It will be impossible to separate the question of what design is, from the question of its value. In order to classify something as design is to make it understandable that someone appreciating it. In fact we value the activities of making and appreciating design.

On other hand, kitsch objects having functions and one of them is delivering happiness and pleasure. Of course, there is plenty of unpleasant design, and we need a dogma that explains our positive evaluation of many creative and contemplative activities, and tolerate the existence of some, or even quite a lot of non-functioned design.[19]

Ultimately in my paper between culture of handicraft and industry (2004), I explained how the aesthetician J. Mukarovsky splits functions into: A) Aesthetics Function; and B) Austere Function. The first regards design as worthy of aesthetic consideration. The second doesn’t. Aesthetic function can’t provide a secure account of why it is that specific function has to show up in the viewer’s experience.[20]

Finally and in case we accepted the fact that kitsch exists en mass in the Middle East, then its style marked tendency to vacate the old concepts of beauty as the only principle of good design and to replace it with a more general concept of hedonic i.e. pleasure and more cognitive concepts of interest and stimulation. In conclusion for the previous chapters, we can summaries its content as following:

Doubtless, kitsch producers and users do not think that what they are doing or buying could be seen differently from what they thought of i.e. as bad taste.
Kitsch properties-in any kind of design and architecture- has been mistaken with the idea of beauty and being beautiful.
Traditional aesthetic approach in the Middle East succeeded to enhance our art perception. But it doesn’t provide us with a theory about the aesthetic of hedonic objects, or kitsch.
At present, most Higher Education institutions lack the expertise and resources to deliver new specific research methods training in Design.
There is considerable demand for creating new design ideology in the Middle East that based on local research and focuses on contemporary and future socio-cultural needs.
We have to understand the process of making artifact in a broader sense. Being an artifact does not indicate being a physical object that has been transformed, or just an evaluative object.
The beauty of precious product doesn’t come alone out of the values it embodies!
A purely classificatory theory of artifacts would be mistaken, and so it is also mistaken in the case of kitsch
Design is not separable from understanding the minds of those who traffic with it; and understanding their minds means understanding how and why they value design.
Aesthetical appreciation of today requires explicit information processing, which can reflect the need for commentary thinking.
Design exists with a dual function: aesthetical and austere.
It is useless to defining the taste of highly sensitive person as a standard of taste. This standard can easily turn by the dream-like beauty of the macabre taste of post-modern kitsch. (Lorand, 2003, p. 99)
The philosophy of modernism needs much more time to be further developed in the Arabic countries. The era of modernism varied from region to region and from country to country.
We can easily -like Marx – articulate the developmental process of design waves that modernity: “all that is solid melts into air”, which may sound today like an accusation of modernity as being chaotic, meaningless, or even destructive, but what was originally meant was that this dynamism registers the variability and transformability of social conditions.

Finally, Middle Eastern designers and visual artists who are trying to catch up the spirit of the dominant Zeitgeist – just to be contemporary- they have to stop imitating western styles, and try to rediscover heritage in order to understand art and design as two faces of the same coin.

5 References

Eco, U. On Ugliness. Harvill Seeker, UK, 2007, 394; Menninghaus, W. On the “Vital Significance” of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of “Bad Taste”. In Benjamin, A. & Rice, Ch. (Eds.), Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity. Melbourne,: Re-press, Australia, 2009, 39-57.
Eco, U. On Ugliness. Harvill Seeker, UK, 2007, 394.
Lorand, R. Aesthetics Order: A philosophy of Order, Beauty and Art. London, Routledge, UK, 2003.
Alami, M.H. Art and Architecture in the Islamic Tradition-Aesthetics, Politics and desire in early Islam. London, I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., UK, 2011, 80.
Nydell, M. Understanding Arabs: A contemporary Guide to Arab Society. (5th Ed.), N. Brealey Publishing. Boston, USA, 17-18.
Zangwill, N. Aesthetic Creation. Oxford University Press, New York, USA, 2007, 33-34.
Eco, 2007, 394.
Ibid,
Zangwill, N. Aesthetic Creation. Oxford University Press, New York, USA, 2007, 32-33.
Menninghaus, W. On the “Vital Significance” of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of “Bad Taste”. In Benjamin, A. & Rice, Ch. (Eds.), Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity. Melbourne,: Re-press, Australia,
Eco, U. On Ugliness. Harvill Seeker, UK, 2007, 303-304; Menninghaus, W. On the “Vital Significance” of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of “Bad Taste”. In Benjamin, A. & Rice, Ch. (Eds.), Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity. Melbourne,: Re-press, Australia, 2009, 40-42.
Eco, 2007, 408.
Ibid, 411-415.
Bürdek, B., Dale, M., Richter, S. & Hausmann N. (trans.). Design: History, Theory and Practice of Product Design. Birkhäuser-Publisher for Architecture, Basel, Switzerland, 2005.
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