So Bad It’s Good
Remember these Rock’n Flowers you put near your hi-fi system and they wriggled to the music?
Mine wore sunglasses.
-
The POLITICS OF GOOD AND BAD TASTE
On Kitsch
Kitsch is a German term that has been used to categorize art and cultural objects that are considered an inferior copy of an existing style. The term is also used more loosely in referring to any art that is pretentious or in bad taste, and also commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass. Kitsch was a pejorative term, an insult, during the Modern period - it was culture pandered to the masses, the lowest common denominator that didn’t require people to think or question their assumptions about culture.
So Bad It’s Good
In the era of postmodernism, with the rejection of Modernist traditions and notions of taste, we can enjoy something because it is done in bad taste - the ‘so bad it’s good’ notion of culture. Think American Idol’s William Hung and our beloved aunty Wing [http://www.wingmusic.co.nz]. This new reading of kitsch is egalitarian and anti-elitist, rescuing those aspects of popular culture consigned to the Modernist rubbish bin and looks at them afresh. The borders between kitsch and good taste became blurred in postmodernism.
You Need Very Good Taste To Have Bad Taste
The film maker John Waters states “In order to acquire bad taste, one must first have very good taste.” Appreciation of irony and kitsch is problematic and arguably, in some ways as elitist as high Modernism. Peter Ward, author of ‘Kitsch in Sync: A Consumer's Guide to Bad Taste’ (1994), calls it "a gloriously inverted form of snobbery." He explains that “a connoisseur of kitsch unconsciously applauds his own cleverness at being able to appreciate qualities inherent in objects that are undetectable to simpler folk. A feeling of superiority creeps over us, derived from the knowledge that some people genuinely draw comfort from these tasteless objects.”
So if you haven’t got good taste, you wouldn’t appreciate kitsch at all even though you may surround yourself with it - lava lamps, pop art of Andy Warhol, solar toys from Japan, plastic toy figurines, pretty little things from Kalm's and Cards n Such, kiddy looking adult t-shirts, retro stuff, Havaianas flip-flops, Swatch watches, Richard Clayderman, Kenny G, Aqua, F4 and the kitschy and campy stuff from New Urban Male [http://www.newurbanmale.com] - as they have to desperately claim, it is ‘for men with good taste’.