What does Kitsch mean in Art?

Is it old-fashioned, mean, or benighted to monitor the art market's conflicts of interests?

• The art market is FULL of conflicts of interest: cases of large and small consequence abound, ranging from insider trading to juried panels full of cronies rewarding cronies. Is it old-fashioned, mean, or benighted to monitor this malfeasance? Examples abound: in the petty arena of awards and influence, we have juried panels with artists who've won the awards they are awarding, we have art writers who are also curators and oft-times collectors, we have collectors who are arts advisors... in the larger money-making and career breaking arenas, we have art dealers promoted to museum directors, collectors and dealers "bidding up" artists at auction in order to raise prices, we have art collecting corporations sponsoring art shows on public property. Add to this the fact that bloggers who have tried to speak out on these topics have been laughingly dismissed as "morality police" or simply ignored as nutters... I have not made up  my mind about what to think of this Wild West of an art market. I 'm asking you to help me think it through as I do my research!

• Answer:

  I hope it's none of those things because it is what I intend to research as well! So it shouldn't come as a surprise that I think an understanding of how the moving parts in the art market go together is absolutely important to critically looking at art and art institutions.  As far as the conflicts of interest within the art world . . . why wouldn't there be? By my understanding, the rules that bind trustees, acquisitions departments, curators, dealers, and career artists and the amount they are accountable for producing, disseminating, and conserving cultural value and the degree to which the art market is regulated are more than clues towards understanding why those conflicts of interest exist.  Include the contradiction of being a collector of art and also being any position that determines cultural value or economic value of art (critic, dealer, curator, trustee) and the "conflicts" sometimes don't seem coincidental. Regarding whether researching the art market is a good approach for researching the art world:  I think that economic analysis is a very seductive way to explain a lot of art world phenomena, especially in Contemporary art.  One of my professors, a sociologist of culture, stresses that it can be a reductionist approach so I hope to gain an understanding of cultural production and cultural exchange (independent of the market) as well as the role of money in art.