Quotes About Kitsch

Kitsch is decorous object with fake attraction that is in fact without value. In light of the poem of Job, I suggest that when our ministry does not challenge and offend and open news paths, we are likely to be engaged in religious kitsch.

What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.

Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them

The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

There is a kitsch of death. For example, death transformed into sweet sleep: The 'good night, sweet prince' of the last scene of Hamlet.

The 1950s to me is darkness, hidden history, perversion behind most doors waiting to creep out. The 1950s to most people is kitsch and Mickey Mouse watches and all this intolerable stuff.

Sometimes there's a tackiness about Route 66 that out-tacks any tackiness I've ever seen anywhere else. And the Meramec Caverns are the pinnacle of that tack.

The orb came about because I wanted to do this kitsch sweater for Prince Charles when he went hunting and fishing with his kilt on.

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.

Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch.

Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition

Is not art then a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes? What a backwards contention it is to claim that life is more important than art! Life is good as long as it holds up to art: That in life which cannot be employed for art's sake is kitsch!

Is not art then a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life?

Kitsch and tourism are inseparable partners. Perhaps it is because, by definition, both are inauthentic.

Kitsch lives with one foot in the realm of aesthetics and another foot in the realm of ethics.

Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious, when in fact he feels nothing at all.

Hence for a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a 'challenge' to the complacencies of our public culture. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for the conforming and the comfortable, which are simply other names for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché.

Todo lo que es anacrónico es obsceno. Como divinidad (moderna), la Historia es represiva, la Historia nos prohíbe ser inactuales. Del pasado, no soportamos más que la ruina, el monumento, el kitsch o el retro, que es divertido; reducimos ese pasado a su sola rúbrica.

There is nothing more vulgar than sophisticated kitsch.

I did my homework and didn't go out much, and had a very highly developed kitsch fantasy life where I dreamed of being a dancing girl.

Kitsch is a sentimentalization of reality in response to cultural failure. The greater the failure, the more malignant the sentimentalization.

It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.

In Germany, I have been called the Queen of Kitsch, but I don't mind that - as long as people buy the books.