Trash culture

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The term "trash culture" entered into common use in the West from the 1980s to indicate artistic or entertainment expressions considered to be of a low cultural profile but able to stimulate and attract the audiences. It refers to books, movies, TV shows, etc. characterized by poor taste, vulgar themes, and subjects chosen to attract the audience through shoddy, low-quality, and culturally impoverished content. In this sense, trash culture is defined as the validation of the voyeuristic sight of the middle class which approaches the popular culture as style of consumption.

The concept of trash culture should not be confused or merged with the concept of "kitsch", even if the two may be related.^{[2][full citation needed]} Kitsch is linked to art in a permanent way, but it is also a social phenomenon which establishes itself as a way of being: in Western society it is characterized by the limitation of the artist's space of creation. Kitsch is essentially multiplication and reachability. It is based on the consumeristic civilization which creates to produce, and produces to consume. It is a repetition whose consequence is a new activity in the relationship between individuals and their environment: consumerism.

In this sense the concept of trash culture can be considered an evolution of the 19th-century concept of kitsch, a development of a consumeristic behavior that, at the beginning, was related to the lowest social classes. Now the phenomenon has embraced a wider range of classes, reaching the contemporary middle class and sometimes the high class. As kitsch was a social phenomenon that established itself as a way of being,^[3] so too trash culture can be defined, but in this one the aim of a continuous process of creation and consumption is the externalization and the accentuation of the self being, that can be expressed through the way of dressing, wearing accessories, and through the self social approach.