Kitsch in Television: Broadcasted Kitsch Experience

Influence through utilising kitsch experiences is a domain that connects politics and management in rational planning of what is being presented to the receivers. The case study analysed in this chapter explores how kitsch serves as a tool for indistinctively continuing the prevailing ideology while simultaneously disguising itself as entertainment. The research aims to understand better the nature of contemporary, populistic, post-truth politics. As the unit of the analysis, we took the annual open-air concert transmitted by National Polish Television (TVP). During the right-wing national government period (2015–2023), the programme for the event was by definition conservative and non-transgressive, including traditional Polish mountaineer music and Romani songs along with artists perpetuating 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s nostalgia. The chapter includes a multimodal case study of a nearly 5-hour 2019 show using, as the primary analytical tool, the kitsch experience theory (Szostak & Sułkowski, Kitsch in Management: Characteristic Forms, Carriers and Propagators. Education Excellence and Innovation Management: A 2025 Vision to Sustain Economic Development during Global Challenges. Proceedings of the 35th International Business Information Management Association Conference (IBIMA), 2020; Szostak, Sztuka zarządzania. Zarządzanie sztuką. Społeczna Akademia Nauk, 2023) and a social-semiotic approach to multimodal analysis (Norris, Multimodal Discourse Analysis: A Conceptual Framework. In P. LeVine & R. Scollon (Eds.), Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis (pp. 101–115). Georgetown University Press, 2004; Kress, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge, 2010). The main research goal was to explain why this kind of event can be considered a kitsch experience and how it serves as a tool for a conservative ideology while being broadcasted to the masses.