Kitsch Quotes - Page 5

• The need for Kitsch arises when genuine emotion has become rare.

  Karsten Harries

  Needs, Emotion, Arise

  Karsten Harries (1968). “Meaning of Modern Art”, p.79, Northwestern University Press

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• If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of...kitsch.

  Balthus

  Speak, Ifs

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• The destruction of images, the first signs of which reach back to the 1920s, eliminated a lot of kitsch and unworthy art, but ultimately it left behind a void.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Art, Void, Firsts

  Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) (2016). “Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works: Theology of the Liturgy”, p.90, Ignatius Press

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• In the attacks on the old ways of doing things on word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch." Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it musn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.

  Roger Scruton

  Artist, Way, Firsts

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• Art daunts us with its cold exacting dullness, kitsch gratifies us (with cosy democratic largesse).

  Mike Curran

  Art, Cold, Cosy

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• Kitsch lends itself to a definition in terms of a systematic attempt to fly from daily reality: in time and in space.

  Matei Calinescu

  Reality, Space, Definitions

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• Must one become seventy years old to recognize that one's greatest strength lies in creating musical kitsch?

  Richard Strauss

  Lying, Years, Creating

  Richard Strauss, Stefan Zweig (1977). “A Confidential Matter: The Letters of Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig, 1931-1935”, p.39, Univ of California Press

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• Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch.

  Denis Dutton

  Irony, Absence, Solemnity

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• The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

  Theodor Adorno

  Lying, Elements, Realization

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

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• Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch.

  Roger Scruton

  Art, Desire, Modern

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• The work of an artist who attempts lovingly to embrace reality, will ring false, will degenerate into kitsch.

  Karsten Harries

  Artist, Reality, Degenerates

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• Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Beautiful, Art, Writing

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• Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.

  Frank Wedekind

  Gothic, Form, Rococo

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• While a forgery illegally exploits the elitist taste for rarity, a kitsch object insists on its anti elitist availability. The deceptive character of kitsch does not lie in whatever it may have in common with actual forgery but in its claim to supply its consumers with essentially the same kinds and qualities of beauty as those embodied in unique or rare and inaccessible originals.

  Matei Calinescu

  Lying, Character, Unique

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• Romanticism is the mother of kitsch and that there are moments when the child becomes so like its mother that one cannot differentiate between them

  Hermann Broch

  Mother, Children, Moments

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• Art is a car, kitsch is a horse.

  Odd Nerdrum

  Horse, Art, Car

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• ...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.

  Steve Toltz

  Rainbow, Ifs

  Steve Toltz (2008). “A fraction of the whole”

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• Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths.

  Saul Friedlander

  World, Myth, Aesthetic

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• There is a kitsch of death. For example, death transformed into sweet sleep: The 'good night, sweet prince' of the last scene of Hamlet.

  Saul Friedlander

  Good Night, Sweet, Sleep

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• In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.

  Charles Jencks

  Understanding, Ornaments, Lost

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• Kitsch generates pseudonovelty with no new insight into reality, or else does not concern itself at all with the new and produces its effects with more or less academic eclecticism.

  Hermann Broch

  Reality, Doe, Academic

  Hermann Broch, Michael P. Steinberg (1984). “Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and His Time: The European Imagination, 1860-1920”, p.170, University of Chicago Press

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• Her kitsch was the image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father. It was an image that took shape in her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled the sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family's house shone out into the dying day.

  Milan Kundera

  Wise, Mother, Dream

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• Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.

  Walter Benjamin

  Distance, Emotional, Effort

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• Most of the time, the songs have jokes in them, little sarcastic things, or purposely kitsch or something. So that's going along with a story, like I do in life, just talking to myself and making fun of stuff and laughing at stuff that's serious. And sometimes it's a good idea to put the laughing into the songs. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's all right just to be serious. But most of the songs have some kind of joke in them.

  Paul Simon

  Sarcastic, Song, Fun

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• People talk about Bollywood being very kitsch, and just songs and dances, and over the top and colorful.

  Shahrukh Khan

  Song, People, Bollywood

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