A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of the George Washington University in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts within American Studies and Folklore. / In the United States there is a fairly large group of people who collection Avon bottles and other Avon memorabilia as a hobby. For some of these people this hobby is much more than a means of recreation; their collections are deeply entangled with their identities and affect their perceptions of the world. The act of collecting and the resultant, ever growing collection, or physical manifestation of the collecting process, allows Avon collectors to express themselves aesthetically.

This thesis tries to distinguish kitsch and art with the help of philosophical hermeneutics by reading it in the light of Derrida&rsquo / s interpretation of Hamlet in Specters of Marx. It defines kitsch as experience in order to go beyond both of the two main approaches, namely, the one that sees kitsch as an object and the one that reduces it to the behaviour of the subject. It tries to show that kitsch is not just an aesthetic problem, but also, a political one.