Kitsch
While sitting around in the ER a few weeks ago, waiting for my swollen tootsies to be triaged (a harmless if alarming medication side effect, as it turned out), I did a little triage of my own - reading some of Kitsch (edited by Gillo Dorfles - translated from the Italian by person or persons unknown). Skip it? Keep it? Extract its knowledgy goodness and pass it on?
In the process I came across several interesting points. The editor argues that, up until very recently, there could be no such thing as "bad taste" when it came to art:
"In ages other than our own, particularly in antiquity, art had a completely different function compared to modern times; it was connected with religious, ethical or political subject matter, which made it in a way 'absolute', unchanging, eternal (always of course within a given cultural milieu)."
Defining kitsch, Dorfles remarks, "it is a problem of individuals who believe that art should only produce pleasant, sugary feelings... in no case should it be a serious matter, a tiring exercise, an involved and critical activity..." Kitsch-lovers he adds, "will judge Raphael as if he were a painter of picture postcards". Kitsch is inferior imitation of art which substitutes sentiment for emotion.
Well, the idea of kitsch as comfortable cutesiness wasn't new to me, and it's easy to sniff at others' taste (the whole book is, inevitably, full of snobbery). What struck me was Dorfles' assertion about "the kitsch aspect in works of today or yesterday which not only clash with our own alleged good taste, but which represent a basically false interpretation of the aesthetic trends of their age". If you will, kitsch is that which aims for art, and misses.
The book covers multiple areas in which kitschy art is liable to be found, including sex, death, and religion. (I turned a page while reading on the bus and was aghast to find myself facing several awful examples of pornokitsch.) "The image of death needs vigor and severity," writes Dorfles, "innocence and putrefaction, blacks and whites; it certainly needs no half tints, sky blues, pinks, angels' wings, frilly chapels or sterilized technology devoid of any real ethical meaning."
In his chapter on Christian kitsch, Karl Pawek remarks, "There has been an enormous loss of substance in Christianity... It is the result of a centuries-old watering-down of the current theological spirit and consciousness. It would not have been possible at the time of the consciousness of mystery which prevailed during the first centuries of the Christian era..." This watering-down resulted in "the substitution of something sweet and nice for something extremely powerful, of secondary for primary, of the psychic and moral Christian event for the objective, ontological event." Now if I'm understanding what this guy is saying, for the earliest Christians, the reality of the divine and its intervention on Earth was profound and immediate, and that's been lost - inevitably? - over so many centuries. (I remember a Catholic friend telling me the Omen movies spooked him because they made it all seem real.) Perhaps the New Age movement is the kitsch version of Neo-Paganism - though gods know we produce plenty of kitsch ourselves.
In the process I came across several interesting points. The editor argues that, up until very recently, there could be no such thing as "bad taste" when it came to art:
"In ages other than our own, particularly in antiquity, art had a completely different function compared to modern times; it was connected with religious, ethical or political subject matter, which made it in a way 'absolute', unchanging, eternal (always of course within a given cultural milieu)."
Defining kitsch, Dorfles remarks, "it is a problem of individuals who believe that art should only produce pleasant, sugary feelings... in no case should it be a serious matter, a tiring exercise, an involved and critical activity..." Kitsch-lovers he adds, "will judge Raphael as if he were a painter of picture postcards". Kitsch is inferior imitation of art which substitutes sentiment for emotion.
Well, the idea of kitsch as comfortable cutesiness wasn't new to me, and it's easy to sniff at others' taste (the whole book is, inevitably, full of snobbery). What struck me was Dorfles' assertion about "the kitsch aspect in works of today or yesterday which not only clash with our own alleged good taste, but which represent a basically false interpretation of the aesthetic trends of their age". If you will, kitsch is that which aims for art, and misses.
The book covers multiple areas in which kitschy art is liable to be found, including sex, death, and religion. (I turned a page while reading on the bus and was aghast to find myself facing several awful examples of pornokitsch.) "The image of death needs vigor and severity," writes Dorfles, "innocence and putrefaction, blacks and whites; it certainly needs no half tints, sky blues, pinks, angels' wings, frilly chapels or sterilized technology devoid of any real ethical meaning."
In his chapter on Christian kitsch, Karl Pawek remarks, "There has been an enormous loss of substance in Christianity... It is the result of a centuries-old watering-down of the current theological spirit and consciousness. It would not have been possible at the time of the consciousness of mystery which prevailed during the first centuries of the Christian era..." This watering-down resulted in "the substitution of something sweet and nice for something extremely powerful, of secondary for primary, of the psychic and moral Christian event for the objective, ontological event." Now if I'm understanding what this guy is saying, for the earliest Christians, the reality of the divine and its intervention on Earth was profound and immediate, and that's been lost - inevitably? - over so many centuries. (I remember a Catholic friend telling me the Omen movies spooked him because they made it all seem real.) Perhaps the New Age movement is the kitsch version of Neo-Paganism - though gods know we produce plenty of kitsch ourselves.