Kitsch Museum in Bucharest (Okt, 2017)

Visiting Romania twice in a row was quiet inspiring! Previously, I’ve reported about my visit to the Communist Consumer Museum in Timisoara. Four weeks later, I headed over to Bucharest for a conference. I had some free time and I visited - guess what - another kitsch museum! Yes, the second kitsch museum in a row! I don’t know why, but Romania seems to be the perfect place for kitsch and trash art.

The Romanian Kitsch Museum ꜛ is located in one of the many side streets ꜛ of Bucharest’s old town, not so far away from the famous Lipscani Street. It extends over two floors on the top floor of an old house, fully packed with kitsch from many epochs of Romania’s younger history. It covers the communist and post-communist epoch as well as ecclesiastical and capitalist kitsch, right up to our present time of rigorous self-expression and self-optimization. But the museum doesn’t want to make fun of the kitsch at all. The exhibition explores the reasons of kitsch in each specific epoch. Definitely worth a visit.