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One type of cliché is the guilty pleasure: the art we love to hate. The guilty pleasure is a relatively new category of experience, a complex knot of shame about consumerism and the enjoyment of consumption. Guilty pleasures typically refer to reality television, pop music, and comfort food, but they haven’t been seriously considered in the realm of art history.

This panel approaches guilty pleasures and clichés on methodological and representational levels; we welcome papers that interrogate these terms as productive categories of cultural inquiry as they intersect with art history, criticism, or visual culture. Papers might address: To what extent do clichés overlap with trash imagery, camp aesthetics, and spectacular gimmicks? Can these phenomena subvert art history’s pretense of detachment and elitism? How does acknowledging guilty pleasures signify a return to an affective encounter with art? While the guilty pleasure has been codified as a cultural condition of late twentieth-century America, presenters may engage with the concept as it emerges in any region or period.