Kitsch and Art

Kitsch and Art PDF

Author: Thomas Kulka

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-07-14

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 0271074183

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What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art seeks to give this phenomenon its due by exploring the basis of artistic evaluation and aesthetic value judgments. Tomas Kulka examines kitsch in the visual arts, literature, music, and architecture. To distinguish kitsch from art, Kulka proposes that kitsch depicts instantly identifiable, emotionally charged objects or themes, but that it does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes. He then addresses the deceptive nature of kitsch by examining the makeup of its artistic and aesthetic worthlessness. Ultimately Kulka argues that the mass appeal of kitsch cannot be regarded as aesthetic appeal, but that its analysis can illuminate the nature of art appreciation.

On Kitsch

On Kitsch PDF

Author: Odd Nerdrum

Publisher: Kagge

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13:

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Kitsch has long been viewed as fine art's poor relation, aping its form while failing utterly to achieve its depth of meaning. In "On Kitsch" Odd Nerdrum and others discuss the meaning and value of kitsch in today's world, and its relationship to art. For the first time in this volume, English-speaking fans have the chance to read the writings of Odd Nerdrum, Norway's most famous contemporary artist, or kitch painter, as he would refer to himself. This printing of a variety of writings by Nerdrum and others includes speeches, essays, and humorous pieces such as "The Kitch Questionnaire," and "Kitch Aphorisms." This book is an opportunity to discover the thought process of one of the world's most unique and compelling artists.

Putin Kitsch in America

Putin Kitsch in America PDF

Author: Alison Rowley

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2019-09-19

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 0228000394

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Vladimir Putin's image functions as a political talisman far outside of the borders of his own country. Studying material objects, fan fiction, and digital media, Putin Kitsch in America traces the satirical uses of Putin's public persona and how he stands as a foil for other world leaders. Uncovering a wide variety of material culture - satirical, scatological, even risqué - made possible by new print-on-demand technologies, Alison Rowley argues that the internet is crucial to the creation of contemporary Putin memorabilia. She explains that these items are evidence of young people's continued interest and participation in politics, even as some experts decry what they see as the opposite. The book addresses the ways in which explicit sexual references about government officials are used as everyday political commentary in the United States. The number of such references skyrocketed during the 2016 US presidential election campaign, and turning a critical eye to Putin kitsch suggests that the phenomenon will continue when Americans next return to the polls. An examination of how the Russian president's image circulates via memes, parodies, apps, and games, Putin Kitsch in America illustrates how technological change has shaped both the kinds of kitsch being produced and the nature of political engagement today.

Some Call it Kitsch: Masterpieces of Bourgeois Realism

Some Call it Kitsch: Masterpieces of Bourgeois Realism PDF

Author: Aleksa Čelebonović

Publisher: ABRAMS

Published: 1974

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13:

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Some Call it Kitsch revives the delightful and evocative art our parents and grandparents cherished. These Victorian and Edwardian masterworks were the pride of great museums around the world, and a lightly disguised source of erotic stimulation to their viewers. But after the victory of Impressionism over Academic painting and the rise of "modern" art, these eloquent narrative depicting historical events, mythological scenes, religious tableaux, adn erotic landscapes gradually sank into total disfavor and were relegated to dusty storage bins and dismissed as Kitsch - the epitome of oversentimentality, pretentiousness, and bad taste. Today these paintings are once again taken seriously for their imaginative content and technical brilliance as well as for their nostalgic and often sensual charm. Prices are skyrocketing and exhibitions draw large and enthusiastic crows. Some Call It Kitsch is the first full-scale exploration of Bourgeois Realist painting in terms of present-day critical standards. Among the artists represented are Alma-Tadema (Greek and Roman scenes of splendor and debauchery), Tissot (upper-middle-class high life), Lord Leighton (icily Classical but thoroughly erotic nudes), and Boldini (portraits of Edwardian aesthetes and titled beauties). The author, Aleksa C̆elebonović, is Yogoslavia's leading book publisher and a distinguished art historian. Writing with great perception and wit, he brings to life a group of fascinating painters, some well known today, others forgotten for more than a century. French, German, Italian, English, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and American artists are represented, the majority for the first time in full color. A valuable feature of the volume is a section devoted to brief biographies of the artists. -- from dust jacket.

Kitsch, More Than Art

Kitsch, More Than Art PDF

Author: Odd Nerdrum

Publisher: Schibsted Forlag

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9788251636384

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Kitsch is Odd Nerdrum's luxuriously produced apologia for the enduring relevance of the old master style. Containing writings and interviews by and with Nerdrum alongside hefty plate sections of both Nerdrum's own paintings and those by painters he sees as exemplars of a certain kind of figurative art, it is a bold attack on the foundations of modernism. In Nerdrum's view, what we call "kitsch" art is a consequence of modernism's "make it new" ethic. For Nerdrum, this insistence on novelty has permeated the thinking of institutions, critics, artists and the public, and has effectively suppressed what Nerdrum most values in a work of art: sentimentality, passion, pathos and the self-evident skill and emotion of sheer craft. By this latter value in particular, the kitsch painter is able to work according to knowable standards that painting prior to modernism has established--standards that are "more than art," for, as Nerdrum puts it, "the kitsch painter commits himself to the eternal: love, death and the sunrise." Kitsch is a manifesto that recruits figurative painters both old and new, such as William Dyce, Paul Fenniak, Sampo Kaikkonen, Isaac Levitan, Osiris Rain, Ilya Repin, Giovanni Segantini, Valentin Serov, George Tooker, George Frederick Watts and Anders Zorn, and situates their work alongside more than 70 of Nerdrum's recent paintings. Alongside essays, poems and plays by the artist, Kitsch contains an extended dialogue on the topic between Nerdrum and Maria Kreyn.

My Silver Planet

My Silver Planet PDF

Author: Daniel Tiffany

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1421411458

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Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

Kitsch!

Kitsch! PDF

Author: Ruth Holliday

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2012-10-02

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780719066153

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From bottle gardens, the bachelor pad and Batman to designer gnomes and monogamy spray, this book uses a diverse range of objects to explore the changing significance of kitsch. With its unique approach to its subject, Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste promises to advance debates in cultural studies and sociology around taste, while providing an invaluable introduction for students and interested readers. Kitsch! examines how the idea of kitsch is mobilized – progressively, as bad taste, as camp and as cool – to inform notions of identity and sensibility. Where most studies proceed from the kitsch object, this book takes the moment of aesthetic judgment as its starting point and attempts to identify the ideological work performed by the category itself. The book poses the strongest challenge to those who argue that taste is democratized in contemporary culture, offering ample evidence that judgments of taste have shifted ground rather than relaxed.

Kitsch

Kitsch PDF

Author: Monica Kjellman-Chapin

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1527551350

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Kitsch: the mere word evokes mental images of cutesy collectibles, treacly trinkets, sweetly sentimental scenes, thematically trite tabletop tchotchkes, or perhaps anemic appropriations of canonical works of art. Frequently dismissed as facile, lowbrow, or one-off, throwaway aesthetics, kitsch elicits responses that range from the sardonic smirk laced with derision to the grin glimmering with the indulgence in a “guilty” pleasure. Kitsch, however, is surprisingly mobile and complex, as evidenced by its recent renewal as “kitschy cool.” This ambiguity not only allows it to gesture towards a disparate array of artifacts and ideations, but also to be pushed and pulled in various applicatory directions. The contributors to this collection address the problem of how and what kitsch might signify, and approach the kitsch question as a complex, nuanced interrogative. They consider kitsch in relation to its historical association with pseudo-art, its theoretical underpinnings and connections to class, the deliberate mobilization of kitsch in the work of specific artists, kitsch as a form of practice, as well as kitsch’s traffic with race, patriotism, and postmodernism. The essays in this collection necessarily cut a wide interpretative path, mapping the terrain of the phenomenon of kitsch – historically, conceptually, practically – in multivocal ways, befitting the polysemous creature that is kitsch itself. Drawing upon art history, popular culture studies, philosophy, and visual culture, the authors’ responses to the “big” question of kitsch move well beyond habitual artificial boundaries, far beyond the simple binaries of good/bad, high/low, elite/popular, or art/kitsch, into far more complex, challenging, and ultimately rewarding territory.

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