Biokitsch in Art: And the Survival of the Prettiest Laura Beloff In the field of the visual arts and humanities, artists working with biologi- cal and biotech arts are at the forefront of understanding with a wide perspective the potentialities and the societal implications of science and technology developments. Artistic projects emerging from biological and biotech arts are often presented with aesthetics adopted from laboratories and scientific experiments; they incorporate petri dishes, glassware, hard- ware components, and clinical machine parts. Among the numerous art- works with these kinds of typical laboratory aesthetics are also examples that stand out with their different aesthetics, which, when looked at from a traditional high-art perspective, could be seen in the light of the defini- tion of kitsch. Kitsch is commonly claimed to attest to “poor taste,” excessive cuteness, or sentimentality. However, when these artworks are investigated through a wider societal perspective, the works seem to have additional layers which affect, challenge, and play with kitsch aspects. L. Beloff (*) Helsinki, Finland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Ryynänen, P. Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch, 249 Beloff, L. (2023). Biokitsch in Art: And the Survival of the Prettiest. In: Ryynänen, M., Barragán, P. (eds) The Changing Meaning of Kitsch. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_10