Vulgarity as Cultural Mirror
The word vulgarity carries centuries of unease. Derived from the Latin vulgus, meaning “the crowd” or “the common,” it has long been used as a marker of class and taste. What was deemed “vulgar” was not only excessive or gaudy but also socially dangerous, associated with the masses rather than the elite. Yet in art, vulgarity has often been precisely where vitality thrived. It is the space where ornament runs rampant, where colors shout instead of whisper, where taste becomes a battlefield.
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Kitsch and the Politics of Excess
Kitsch, with its plastic roses and glitter saints, has frequently been dismissed as the epitome of vulgarity. Yet as cultural critics from Hermann Broch to Clement Greenberg noted, kitsch was less a failure of art than a reflection of modern society’s hunger for immediacy and sentiment. Its excess was not innocent, but symptomatic.
In interiors, kitsch aesthetics—whether ceramic figurines or clashing neon posters—have resurfaced as ironic gestures, turning “bad taste” into playful commentary. The very excess that once condemned kitsch has become its strength, a way of refusing the sterility of minimalist good taste.
Camp as Protest
If kitsch is vulgarity as sentimentality, camp is vulgarity as strategy. Susan Sontag’s famous “Notes on Camp” recognised camp’s delight in exaggeration, artifice, and theatricality. Camp aestheticises vulgarity deliberately, transforming glitter, fuchsia feathers, or neon wigs into weapons of visibility.
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Within queer and feminist subcultures, camp became more than style—it was protest. It inverted the hierarchy of taste, claiming excess as empowerment. To be vulgar was to refuse erasure, to be louder, brighter, and more outrageous than the structures that sought to contain.
Vulgar Symbols in Contemporary Prints
In contemporary symbolic wall art, the vulgar often appears through deliberate exaggeration. Acid palettes, oversized florals, distorted faces, or surreal hybrids echo kitsch and camp traditions. These images thrive on too-muchness. They destabilise interiors with their boldness, creating energy where restraint might have deadened.
Far from being failures of taste, such works expose the arbitrariness of taste itself. They remind us that the categories of “beautiful” and “ugly,” “refined” and “vulgar,” are historically contingent and politically charged.
Rebellion Through Bad Taste
Why does vulgarity endure as an aesthetic? Because it offers critique in disguise. What is excessive reveals the limits of what is permitted. What is gaudy points to the violence of restraint. Vulgarity resists assimilation, claiming the right to be seen and heard without apology.
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In this sense, the aesthetics of vulgarity are not only decorative but emancipatory. They transform kitsch excess into commentary, camp humor into protest, and “bad taste” into a mode of survival.
Toward a Poetics of the Vulgar
To embrace vulgarity in art and interiors is to embrace contradiction. It is to allow glitter, neon, and grotesque distortion to speak not as accidents but as deliberate choices. Vulgarity, when reclaimed, becomes not shameful but luminous, a form of critique dressed in sequins.
From kitsch souvenirs to camp protest, the aesthetics of vulgarity remind us that rebellion can arrive in gaudy colors, that critique can wear rhinestones, and that beauty, in its most radical form, often chooses to be loud.
