The world kitch derives from the Russian—keetcheetsya means “to be haughty and puffed up.” The late Columbia classics Professor, Gilbert Highet, further defined kitsch as “anything that took a lot of trouble to make and is quite hideous.”

    He had his own favorites, including the architecture of Miami Beach hotels and Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. Many other items could be added to the list—C. B. Demille’s Bible epics, the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Weber, the oversized Chinoiserie vases found in expense-account hotels, faux ivory netsukes, copper statues of nude women with clocks where their stomachs ought to be.

    There are also examples of poetical kitsch—almost anything by Ezra Pound, for example. One of Highet’s favorites is this number celebrating New York:

    Pound for Pound, this is fatuity like mother used to make. Born in Idaho, the bard, a hick from way back, addresses Manhattan as a flat-chested maid, and invites it to achieve immortality by listening to his paeans. As Highet observes, “This is like climbing Mount Everest in order to carve a head of Mickey Mouse in the east face.”

    Still, the most egregious instances of kitsch are not expressed in words, but in three-dimensional pseudo art: immense uni-colored canvases; elaborate constructions that sit out in front of office buildings, saying nothing—which is exactly what the corporate heads want them to say; accusatory graffiti, defacing dwelling places and public transportation, violent rap songs that, frightened politicians warn us, “we ignore at our peril.”

      In this new Millennium, perhaps the biggest kitsch peddler (or rather the peddler of the biggest kitsch) is the vastly overindulged Christo Javacheff. Along with his wife Jeanne-Claude, he is about to wrap hundreds of Central Park’s trees in saffron-colored fabric. Mayor Mike Bloomberg, one of his most important fans, notes that this installation will soon occupy 23 miles of selected walkways in the Park.

    Christo and Jeanne-Claude have had more practice wrapping than the sales help at Target during the Christmas season. Among other objects, they’ve enveloped the Reischtag in Germany, the Pont Neuf in Paris, some islands in Biscayne Bay and a Swiss forest. On each occasion they got themselves a lot of ink and air time, and contributed nothing but an oversized vulgarity to the scene they were so anxious to obscure or obliterate.

     City guardians occasionally point out the truth: Christo and Madame have actually had a deleterious effect on the environment and added zero to anyone’s aesthetic appreciation of nature, or to the architecture designed by builders more talented than the Javacheffs. But few functionaries are willing to criticize the wrappings themselves. This is the fallout of something that happened almost 91 years ago, when Stravinsky premiered “Rite of Spring” in May of 1913. Instead of applause the shocked audience greeted the last notes with catcalls. Soon there were shouts, boos and then a full-fledged riot that was only quelled when the gendarmes arrived.

      Of course, we know now that “Rite” was a masterpiece and that the audience was largely composed of fools impervious to a breakthrough in modern music. Which is why today a fingernail scraping on a blackboard, presented in the correct concert hall, is judged seriously, weighed and measured as if it were worthy of comparison with a Bach fugue. Nobody wants to risk being called a parvenu or a square after the fact—least of all the Mayor of the greatest city in the world. You remember that town; the one with no breasts?

     Thus Mayor Mike welcomes the Christos and their bogus project. No doubt Bloomberg would not dream of owning a painting on velvet, or a metal statue of Otto Bismarck with metal pouches under his metal eyes. But defacing the lungs of Manhattan? That’s another matter. And the Mayor will not be alone. The construction will cause money to come in, thanks to sightseers and tourists, and few officials will dare to notice—aloud, at least—the Emperor’s New Kitsch.