Kitsch Quotes - Page 4

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

  Karsten Harries

  Struggle, Past, Results

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• The peasant finds no "natural" urgency within himself that will drive him toward Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for he can enjoy kitsch without effort

  Clement Greenberg

  Effort, Natural, Ends

  Clement Greenberg (1971). “Art and Culture: Critical Essays”, p.18, Beacon Press

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• The orb came about because I wanted to do this kitsch sweater for Prince Charles when he went hunting and fishing with his kilt on.

  Vivienne Westwood

  Artist, Hunting, Fishing

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• We are all kitsch on our deathbeds.

  Odd Nerdrum

  Deathbed

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• I listed to Tchaikovsky. He is both kitsch and profound. I love that lack of "Good taste."

  Cy Twombly

  Tchaikovsky, Profound, Taste

  "Kitsch art: love it or loathe it?" by Jonathan Jones, www.theguardian.com. January 28, 2013.

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• The precondition for kitsch, is the availability of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It draws its lifeblood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience

  Clement Greenberg

  Discovery, Availability, Speak

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• Artists now decline to go to bed with beauty, fearing they'll wake up with kitsch.

  Mike Curran

  Artist, Bed, Wake Up

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• Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that's not modern, which is most of it.

  Mike Curran

  World, Modern, Modern World

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• In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.

  Milan Kundera

  Answers, Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Given

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

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• The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch.

  Jon Landau

  Rocks, Depth, Rolling

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• A kitsch novel describes the world not as it really is, but as it is hoped and feared to be.

  Hermann Broch

  World, Novel

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

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• High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.)

  Robert C. Solomon

  Art, Emotional, Class

  Robert C. Solomon (1970). “Entertaining Ideas: Popular Philosophical Essays, 1970-1990”

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• How easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it. This too is kitsch

  Karsten Harries

  Despair, Easy, Lyrical

  Karsten Harries (1968). “Meaning of Modern Art”, p.82, Northwestern University Press

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• The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Imitation, Stills

  Theodor W. Adorno, Richard D. Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno ; Selected, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Leppert ; New Translations by Susan H. Gillespie”, p.364, Univ of California Press

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• Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.

  Don DeLillo

  Art, Taste, Pops

  Don DeLillo (2012). “Running Dog”, p.148, Vintage

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• Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.

  Martin Filler

  New York, Writing, Islands

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• I'm not too fond of really cool design. I've got quite kitsch taste really, in things like tableware. I'm quite a sucker for 1930s pressed glass.

  Kevin McCloud

  Glasses, Design, Taste

  "Man about the house". Interview with Decca Aitkenhead, www.theguardian.com. October 10, 2008.

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• Manga is virtual. Manga is sentiment. Manga is resistance. Manga is bizarre. Manga is pathos. Manga is destruction. Manga is arrogance. Manga is love. Manga is kitsch. Manga is sense of wonder. Manga is … there is no conclusion yet.

  Osamu Tezuka

  Arrogance, Resistance, Wonder

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• It is possible to call Tolstoy Kitsch.

  Robert Scholes

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• High kitsch, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be openly dismissed as cheap.

  Robert C. Solomon

  May, Said

  Robert C. Solomon (1970). “Entertaining Ideas: Popular Philosophical Essays, 1970-1990”

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• With the passage of years, not all of Dicken's readers remained infatuated with his pathos. One generation's sublimity became another generation's kitsch.

  Peter Gay

  Years, Generations, Pathos

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• The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Dream, Sweet, Art

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• Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch

  Slavoj Žižek

  Verge

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• Kitsch of course only comes into existence when we recognize how and why it works.

  John Bayley

  Existence, Courses

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• In the end indignation over kitsch is anger at tis shameless revelling in the joy of imitation.

  Theodor Adorno

  Joy, Shameless, Imitation

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