Kulak:

What changed was the rise of the professional academic avante garde and their almost immediate capture by the ethnic, sexual-socio, and class enemies of the productive classes.

Every western ethnicity has had non-aristocratic class that has always produced objects almost the exact same as the ones now derided as kitsch, indeed these traditions have been core to the folklore, mythology, ethnic identity and sense of place of western peoples… It hard to name a part of old europe that did NOT have tales and regional arts depicting some diminutive forest people, anthropomorphic animals, or sexual joke. And it’s even harder to think of ones that did not produce intense amounts of idealized folklore, and almost parodically over the top depictions of their folklore.

Just as Americans now make art of bigfoot or other cryptids, Europeans for thousands of years produced sculptures and art of their monsters.

It was only with the rise of the Avant Garde and specifically subsidies for those artists that this magical category of “Kitsch” comes about in which all the folk arts and lower-class aesthetic sensibilities as dismissed not by an aristocracy that feels noblesse oblige, but by ethnic and class enemies who need to discredit and exclude the productive national majority ethnicity from their own institutions, so that they, the capturing ethnicity and interests, might extract the tax dollars and institutional prestige the productive classes themselves generate. 

Now you might say “that’s cute but do you really care about Garden Gnomes and dogs playing poker that much?”