Kitsch Quotes - Page 3

• Put paying your dues and all that puts so much into being a success. You have an understanding of what its about, being on your own for three or four years and living day to day on $3, or living in an apartment with no electricity.

  Taylor Kitsch

  Years, Understanding, Three

  6 Copy quote

• I have like 20 snap-up shirts in my closet, and I never, never would have thought before FNL would I have had that.

  Taylor Kitsch

  Shirts, Closets, Snaps

  "Taylor Made for Texas". Interview with Logan Hill, www.gq.com. March 7, 2012.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I played pretty darn competitive-level hockey. Then the good old knee injury. Obviously, it's a blessing in disguise, but growing up Canadian, that's our religion, that's our football.

  Taylor Kitsch

  Football, Growing Up, Hockey

  "Taylor Made for Texas". Interview with Logan Hill, www.gq.com. March 7, 2012.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• My real desire is to see people live in the modus of our time, to participate in the contemporary world, to release themselves from nostalgia, antiquated traditions, old rituals, meaningless kitsch and meaningless paradigms.

  Karim Rashid

  Real, People, Desire

  "Q&A: Designer Karim Rashid". Express Interview, www.washingtonpost.com. May 3, 2007.

  61 Copy quote

  Show source

• I certainly don't object to [writers] trying to imagine the lives of other societies, but you have to do it with a certain amount of humility and respect. If it were not for the ethnographic material that had been collected by missionaries and anthropologists and so forth, much of past Native American society would no longer be accessible. What I object to is making kitsch of things that are very serious.

  Michael Dorris

  Humility, Native American, Past

  9 Copy quote

• To call a work of art Kitsch is to condemn it for being bad art. But there is a great deal of bad art that we do not condemn as Kitsch. To condemn something as Kitsch is to condemn it on moral grounds.

  Karsten Harries

  Art, Moral, Deals

  Karsten Harries (2010). “Between Nihilism and Faith: A Commentary on Either/Or”, p.87, Walter de Gruyter

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

  Theodor Adorno

  Past, Helping, Utopia

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.363, Univ of California Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  David Hume

  Art, Taste, Firsts

  6 Copy quote

• Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness.

  Steve Martin

  Lonely, Book, Heart

  4 Copy quote

• The goddess of beauty is the goddess Kitsch.

  Hermann Broch

  Goddess

  10 Copy quote

• Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.

  Odd Nerdrum

  Art, Talent, Devotion

  27 Copy quote

• If the embodiment of the fundamental idea of our age were to be found in Victorian architecture, in the Church of Cristo Re in Rome or the Church in Brasilia, in Moscow University or the Capitol in Washington, then our age would undoubtedly be called the 'age of kitsch.'

  Hermann Broch

  Rome, Ideas, Age

  8 Copy quote

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

  Robert C. Solomon

  Perfection, Execution, Tradition

  7 Copy quote

• Have we not huddled in bunkers, while some premonition of tomorrow hung in the air and a comrade started singing? Oh, it felt so melancholy! And it was kitsch.

  Robert Musil

  Air, Singing, Tomorrow

  7 Copy quote

• Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and provides a short cut to the pleasure of art that is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art.

  Clement Greenberg

  Art, Cutting, Causes

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.15, Beacon Press

  32 Copy quote

  Show source

• Don't we all have an itch for kitsch?

  Matei Calinescu

  Matei Călinescu (1987). “Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism”, p.234, Duke University Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Odd Nerdrum

  Art, Horse, Fall

  15 Copy quote

• At a certain point in history monuments became associated with kitsch, (it had never previously been so) and one might well ask why this unforeseen aesthetic and ethnic debasement of their values came about, or why monuments have not adapted to the times. Perhaps, instead of evoking authentic religious, patriotic or mystical sentiments, they evoke only the customary ersatz for these sentiments and have suffered the fate of becoming sentimental.

  Gillo Dorfles

  Religious, Patriotic, Fate

  7 Copy quote

• Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

  John Bayley

  War, Reading, Vermeer

  9 Copy quote

• The techniques of kitsch, which are based on imitation, are rational and operate according to formulas; the remain rational even when their result has a highly irrational, even crazy, quality.

  Hermann Broch

  Crazy, Quality, Technique

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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We meet thus in kitsch with a reappropriation of the results of past struggles.

  Karsten Harries

  Struggle, Past, Results

  5 Copy quote

• Not all kitsch is sweet.

  Karsten Harries

  Sweet

  5 Copy quote

• The Kitsch consumer wants to be enchanted.

  Karsten Harries

  Want, Enchanted, Consumers

  Karsten Harries (2010). “Between Nihilism and Faith: A Commentary on Either/Or”, p.87, Walter de Gruyter

  6 Copy quote

  Show source