Quotes About Kitsch

Art and irony would disintegrate the personality, kitsch makes it whole.

The destruction of images, the first signs of which reach back to the 1920s, eliminated a lot of kitsch and unworthy art, but ultimately it left behind a void.

Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations…. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.

The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se , forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system.

The goddess of beauty is the goddess Kitsch.

If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of...kitsch.

Kitsch is: a species of beauty, which, as it is florid and superficial, pleases at first; but soon palls upon the taste, and is rejected with disdain, at least rated at much lower value.

If you fall asleep on horseback, the horse will stop by the rock. Art is a car. Kitsch is a horse.

Art is a car, kitsch is a horse.

The call to level the playing field, pushed to its logical conclusion, is a call for the systematic subversion of American individualism and democracy. It is the kitsch marxism of our time.

18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.

Of course it's kitsch, and of course our love for every cult figure gets called kitsch when we want to separate the suffering it requires to create a symbol that lives in the world from the ravages of one's own life.

I'm not too fond of really cool design. I've got quite kitsch taste really, in things like tableware. I'm quite a sucker for 1930s pressed glass.

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.

Every ambiguous, false, tearful, emotional exaggeration brings about that typically kitsch attitude which could be defined as "sentimentality."

Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.

Tout est kitsch, si l'on veut. La musique dans son ensemble est kitsch; l'art est kitsch; la littérature elle-même est kitsch. Toute émotion est kitsch, pratiquement par définition; mais toute réflexion aussi, et même dans un sens toute action. La seule chose qui ne soit absolument pas kitsch, c'est le néant.

En cierto modo, todo es kitsch. En conjunto, la música es kitsch, y el arte, y hasta la literatura. Casi por definición, cualquier emoción es kitsch; pero también cualquier reflexión e incluso, en cierto sentido, cualquier acción. Lo único que no es kitsch en absoluto es la nada.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

It is too simple to say that if you avoid kitsch you avoid empire but it is a good start. It is more accurate to say that while kitsch does not necessarily imply empire it is one of its accompaniments.

The church doesn't have a monopoly on kitsch or sentimentalism, but if you want to find it, the church may well be the easiest place to start.)

That such a scrap of kitsch has endured in a way that the writing of Francis Bacon has not says much about what's really timeless and what isn't; that the 1959 "Deck of Cards" was far more popular with pop audiences than with country audiences says much about who the real kitschmongers are.

Manga is virtual. Manga is sentiment. Manga is resistance. Manga is bizarre. Manga is pathos. Manga is destruction. Manga is arrogance. Manga is love. Manga is kitsch. Manga is sense of wonder. Manga is … there is no conclusion yet.