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Bathos is Greek for depth. As used in English in the present sense, it referred only to bad poetry, but it is now used more broadly to cover any ridiculous artwork or performance.
Bathos is the combination of the very high with the very low. The term was introduced by Alexander Pope in his Peri Bathos of 1727. Pope's work is a parody in prose of Longinus' On the Sublime (Peri Hupsos), in that he imitates Longinus's style for the purpose of ridiculing contemporary poets. An even more immediate source of the parody was Boileau's 1712 Treatise on the Sublime. Where Boileau had offered a detailed discussion of all the ways in which the sublime effect had been achieved in poetry, Pope offers a lengthy schematic of the ways in which authors might "sink" in poetry. Pope satirizes many of his contemporaries in the work, plucking lines of poetry out of their works to highlight their absurdity, with his most consistent victim being Ambrose Philips (whom he would attack repeatedly through his career).
Although Pope's manual of bad verse offers numerous methods for writing poorly, of all these ways to "sink," the method that is most remembered now is the act of combining very serious matters with very trivial ones. (For example, he mentions a line of verse where God sweeps the clouds from the sky as being ridiculous for making the Creator a housemaid.) When something sublime is mixed with something ridiculous, the effect is comic or "bathetic" (e.g. children performing Macbeth or a Garden Club passion play). The radical juxtaposition of the serious with the frivolous destroys the serious meaning of the verse and creates humor. Since Pope's day, the term "bathos," perhaps because of confusion with " pathos," has been used for any artform, and sometimes any event, where something is so pathetic as to be humorous.
When artists consciously mix the very serious with the very trivial, the effect is the absurd and absurd humor. However, when an artist is unconscious of the juxtaposition (e.g. when a film maker means for a man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet to be frightening), the result is bathos.
A tolerant but detached enjoyment of the esthetic failure that is inherent in naive, unconscious and honest bathos is an element of the camp sensibility, as first analyzed by Susan SontagSusan Sontag (born January 28, 1933) is a well-known American essayist and novelist. Sontag was in born in New York City, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B. from the College of the University of Chicag, in an essay "Notes on camp" that first appeared in Partisan ReviewPartisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly which was published from 1934 to 2003. It was founded by William Phillips and Philip Rahv. It grew out of the John Reed Club as an alternative to New Masses the publication of the American C, 1960 .
Arguably, kitschKitsch originates from the German term etwas verkitschen (which has a similar meaning to "knock off" in English). It categorizes art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style. The term is also used more loosely in referring to any art that is bathos in concrete arts.