genialischer kitsch - Tchaikovsky, kitsch of genius

Introduction:


Elton John and his partner have a child. This child's godmother is Lady Gaga. How do I know this? I read an interview with Elton John's partner in Macleans magazine. Elton John's partner, David Furnish is the man responsible for bringing us ''Gnomeo and Juliet'', which my boyfriend thinks is an awful premise for a film, and he was wondering where anyone would get the idea of using garden gnomes to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet. I said that gnomes were ''in'' right now. He disagreed. I said, ''kitschy things are cool right now. Look at the success of a website like Etsy''. So we started to argue about whether kitschy things are cool, but I was already on a wikipedia tangent to see if I really understood what kitchy meant...


Objective:


Define the word kitschy. Bonus points for etymology.


Method:


Google the following search terms: ''kitchy'' ''kitchy etymology'' ''kitchy defintion'' ''camp'' ''camper'' (I went off on another tangent).


Results:


Kitsch is a German loanword. Some of my internet sources tell me it means trash. Some essay written by some girl from the department of art history at The University of Chicago said that some people suggested it was an inversion of the French word ''chic''. Which would kind of make it Verlan, but the word kitsch has been around since the 1925 markets in Munich, which as far as I know is longer than Verlan has been around. 


Apparently I am not the only person confused about the definition of kitsch. Pretty much every website I went to said something different. I think the most useful definition was from wordnetweb.princeton.edu ''excessively garish or sentimental art; usually considered in bad taste''. I like this definition because my boyfriend agreed that ''cutesy'' things are in style, and I'm going to say that ''cutesy'' and ''sentimental'' are basically synonyms, so we can both be right.


Conclusion:


1. Kitsch is cool.
2. Gnomes are kitschy

*The ''camp'' tangent:

Wikipedia made a connection between kitsch and camp by saying something about postmodernism in the '80s. Then wikipedia says that camp  '' refers to an ironic appreciation of that which might otherwise be considered corny''. Depending on the website, I was reading that the word ''camp'' is either from 17th century French, or French slang ''camper'', meaning ''to pose in an exaggerated fashion''. I was not able to verify this. The closest I got was ''Établir, placer quelque chose avec décision et vigueur'' which would be ''establish, or place something decisively and with vigor (or with effect)''.

You know, it's not really cool for someone to admit that they don't know the definition of a word that's always being tossed around. I've become a lot more comfortable than I used to be admitting that I don't know the meaning of a word that somebody is using. Sometimes the other person defines it for me, and I learn a new word. Sometimes they can't define it and I realize that we're having a pointless discussion because neither of us knows what we're talking about.