Kitsch Encyclopedia is a book project by Sara Cwynar
of original and appropriated images. The work bringing together
writings by Milan Kundera, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, as well
as Cwynar‘s own to formulate a relationship of kitsch to images.
Kundera considers kitsch to be a categorizing phenomenon: a means through which complex human experience is distilled to simple, sentimental motifs. All three writers discuss a similar circumstance of the contemporary image world: the way that our culture of images, especially in the age of the internet, provides an Idealized, kitsch-based image world that exists on top of the real world and in many ways has subsumed it.