Kitsch Quotes - Page 3

• I don't do the L.A. scene. I stay focused and very myopic. I don't feel I need to prove myself or be in people's faces, especially in this town.

  Taylor Kitsch

  People, Needs, Myopic

  "No Way But Up". Interview with Ari Karpel, www.menshealth.com. March 2, 2012.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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 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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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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

  Odd Nerdrum

  Art, Talent, Devotion

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• 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

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• The goddess of beauty is the goddess Kitsch.

  Hermann Broch

  Goddess

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• Not all kitsch is sweet.

  Karsten Harries

  Sweet

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true kitsch, which always strives to please.

  Denis Dutton

  Self, May, Taste

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