Kitsch Quotes

• The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Views, Avant Garde

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.19, Beacon Press

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

  Mike Curran

  Art, Personality, Irony

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• Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

  Walter Benjamin

  Art, Teach, Folks

  Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty (2008). “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media”, p.209, Harvard University Press

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• Kitsch may be conveniently defined as a specifically aesthetic form of lying.

  Matei Calinescu

  Lying, May, Form

  Matei Călinescu (1987). “Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism”, p.229, Duke University Press

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• Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

  Milan Kundera

  Forgotten, Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Oblivion

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• Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Artist

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• No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

  Milan Kundera

  Matter, Human Condition, Scorn

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• Kitsch makes things that are pretty as representations, but ugly as art, modern artists made things that are ugly as representations but beautiful as art.

  Mike Curran

  Beautiful, Art, Ugly

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• Kitschis one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of "trashy," sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the "cliché" in discourse.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Museums, Odds, Junk

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• Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.

  John Cusack

  Taken, Looks, Dangerous

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• The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

  Hermann Broch

  Beautiful, Essence, Confusion

  Hermann Broch (2002). “Geist and Zeitgeist: Six Essays by Hermann Broch”, Counterpoint LLC

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• Kitsch is deceptive. It has many different levels, and some of them are high enough to be dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.

  Clement Greenberg

  Light, Different, Levels

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.11, Beacon Press

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• Kitsch tends to wallow in beauty - its shortcoming is not aesthetic, but ethical

  Hermann Broch

  Ethical, Aesthetic, Shortcomings

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• Kitsch is Mechanical and operates by formulas.

  Clement Greenberg

  Formulas

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.10, Beacon Press

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• One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch.

  John Bayley

  Art, Function, Art Is

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• Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Catholic, Church, Moral

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• Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

  Milan Kundera

  Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Existence, Humans

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim, (Part Six: The Grand March), 1984.

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• Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Art, Hymns, America

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• A real Rembrandt hung in a millionaire's home elevator would undoubtedly make for kitsch.

  Matei Calinescu

  Real, Home, Elevators

  Matei Călinescu (1987). “Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism”, p.236, Duke University Press

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• In truth, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” isn't about Sept. 11. It's about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies - or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers - and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.

  Manohla Dargis

  Baby, Loneliness, Sadness

  "A Youngster With a Key, a Word and a Quest" by Manohla Dargis, www.nytimes.com. December 22, 2011.

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• How can we prevent this telescoping of cultures and styles from ending up in kitsch eclecticism, a cool hellenism excluding all critical judgment?

  Nicolas Bourriaud

  Style, Culture, Judgment

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• The Super Bowl is Americana at its most kitsch and fun.

  Sting

  Fun, Super Bowl, Americana

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• When applied to politics and taken to its extreme, kitsch is the mask of death. Fascism was all aesthetics. There was no core principle to it. There was no truth to it.

  John Cusack

  Taken, Principles, Mask

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• 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.

  James Ellroy

  Doors, People, Waiting

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• You must neither completely nor partially copy the art of others. If so, you will be producing kitsch.

  Hermann Broch

  Art, Copies, Ifs

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