The flourishing and the masterpieces of the artist dynasties prove, there were much fewer victims than today.
What’s the reason?
Perhaps for the simple reason that the aim and point of art was different. Today sculpture is merely one of the productional activities, which are under the control of the market, or rather of the profane forces manipulating the market. During the religious age, cult and culture used to form one unit, that is to say culture, including art had a cultic nature. It was something like a religious service. Art made an attempt to pronounce the unutterable name of God. Due to this spiritual saturation, kitsch didn’t exist in any of the periods of any of the religious ages; neither in the Middle Ages, nor in the prehistoric age, nor in the high and folk art. Clumsy works were made though, but no spiritually empty ones. Kitsch is an invention of the Age of the Market Economy along with penicillin, the telephone and the nuclear bomb. It means the work of art was made by the respect of the Market, that is, its spiritual content equals its god’s, the Market’s. That is zero.
Bulks of the works of art in the Age of Market Economy tend to become kitsch. Kitsch is something that doesn’t exist. Concerning its form, it looks like music, a sculpture, a film, but in spiritual sense it