Kitsch, Spam, Slop: Political Message Art and the Liberal Singularity

Exploring the meaning of kitsch, spam and slop in speaking about cultural and political judgment, Catherine Liu considers the origins of these aesthetic and food categories in light of a history of industrialization, the Cold War and artificial flavor in light of artificial intelligence.

Fear of critique and hierarchy allowed artists from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol to Ai Weiwei to post-modernists embrace the performative fakery at the heart of kitsch. What do spam and slop have to do with kitsch? This talk explores the historical, materialist relationship between these categories of aesthetic and culinary judgment.

Biography:

Catherine Liu is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine. She is the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and has published widely on critical theory, film and art criticism, psychoanalysis and Left historiography. She has appeared on a wide range of podcasts and platforms, including Doomscroll, Chris Hedges, and Chapo Trap House. Her book Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering will be published in September of 2026 with Verso. She is also the director and founder of the Palm Springs School for Social Research, an educational and research focused think tank and platform for critical and creative engagement with contemporary culture and politics.