The printing press revolutionized the world, disseminating knowledge and the written word en masse. It was invented in Germany, and marked a cataclysmic moment in history of civilization.

It sparked the Age of Enlightenment, the empirical foundation of all we take for certain today. It set the standard.

as these letters, strung together, on this book, a formula to be read, translated and equated into meaning in our linear minds.

Every action has a reaction. Germany reacted to the Age of Enlightenment in many ways. In a harmony of esteemed voices (as famous and prolific as Bach himself)

Germans denounced the Enlightened Age for valuing rationalism, empiricism, and universalism over individual feelings, emotions, and the dirty reality of human experience.

Movements like sentimentalism and the more masculine sounding, Sturm and Drang ( Storm and Stress) were Germanys response to Enlightenment.

These thoughts were propelled again by the printing press, which distributed Goethes Sorrows of Werther to the public.

It was described as giving expression to the nameless unrest and longing discontent which was then agitating every bosom.

These seeds of thought planted the flower of romanticism that blossomed in Germany in the 18th century.

They looked towards the majesty of nature and the simpler times of past civilizations.

They spread their glorification of natures beauty abroad, with artists such as German-American artist Albert Bierstadt, who captured the rugged beauty of the American West along with other Hudson River Valley artists.

At this same time industrialization was underfoot, pumping out mass-manufactured products, shipping them via railroad and stuffing the society with newly minted money.

Now everyone could have their ornamental, their sentimental, and manufacturing did as it always will, and replied to the minds of the masses.

The masses wanted romantic beauty, and so the machines made it.

The printing press, ever guilty of innovation, dispersed advertising and images that mocked the Romantics work.

The Munich art scene was hopping with affronting attepts at romantic work-- mere sketches made marketable. With the economic boom the urchins had arrived. Street-artists were ever ready to sell a shtick to the anonymous passing by.

The artistes, ever vocal and discerning, likely felt as if their beloved art was being vandalized, sullied, besmirched and visually violated.

With noses turned high in the air, they described the street artists actions as smears, (calling to mind a baby shitting on a rembrandt) using the word kitschen from old dialectical german.

As verbs tend to do, this one shed its action to classify a category, and thus transformed into a noun: kitsch. The increase in manufacturing and media never stopped, and alongside it, the spread of the new noun was pre-internet viral.

Transmitted mostly through artists & critics, it was a beloved tool for writers and gossips of the time, soon becoming something that implied the derogatory for more than just painting, but for styles en masse.

Artists expelled their frustrations with expressionism, cubism and surrealism, raw sensations dancing into the 20th century.

The printing press published artist opinions, again showed the public to the private, and the students of art ( ever privy) acted accordingly.

Art movements that followed show a clear reaction to this new word kitsch. Romanticism was dead to most artists, who sought new ways of expression, a way less replicable, less marketable. They went deeper for meaning that lingered for a TIME in the mind, that stimulated, that seeded.

They called avant garde the opposite of kitsch. Its nomenclature was french (advance gaurd) transparent, much like the besmirching kitsch was for germans at the time. it pushed boundaries, and began as a tool to aggressively push society and thought forward. With artworks like Duchamps fountain, it fell upon deaf ears and blind eyes of the masses.

Perhaps the artists liked it that way, as they preferred to voice their opinions against the mass-manufactured and mainstream. (As a designer and even more so an optimist, I find this to be a tragic misstep of hubris.)

With photography now joining hands with the printing press, Avant Garde spawned many artistic movements. It went so deeply minimal that it zeroed in upon itself,

and turned back and upside down, face to face with kitsch again via Pop Art in the 60s. Again reacting to the mass manufactured, but this time using it, like the factories of consumerism used art during the origin of kitsch.

Technology and invention has since exceeded common sense and reason, producing the unsustainable and going from kilobytes to terabytes in less than a decade.

With so much to consume, so much information, the public is like the german romantics, overwhelmed and looking to the past, trying to slow down and realizing that time is the most valuable in art and life alike.

Manufacturing still rules with an iron fist over the masses, increasing as they do, in the billions of peoples with the billions of purses to empty on pandering sentiments and symbols to further feed our insatiable appetites.